Tempest-tossed
page: 0 (TitlePage) [View Page 0 (TitlePage) ] TEMPEST-TOSSED. BY THEODORE TILTON. SHELDON & COMPANY. NEW YORK. I874, page: 0[View Page 0] Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by THEODORE TILTON In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. Electrotyped by SMTH & HcDovGAL, 82 Beekmlm St., N. Y. %5 TO FRANCIS D. MOULTON, WHO HAS ILLUSTRATED IN LIVING REALITY, , BELTTER THAN THS FICTION CAN DO BY A SHADOWY IMAGE, 'HE HGH FAITH AND FAIR GRACES OF A FRIENDSHP TENDER, BRAVE, AND TRUE, BY HS EARLY CLASS-MATE AND LIFE-LONG FRIEND, THEODORE TILTON. page: 0 (Table of Contents) [View Page 0 (Table of Contents) ] CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE PROLOGUE ...................... .... .... .. ......... 7 I.--THF, TRIAL TRIP ............... ..................... 9 II.-FIGHTING AGAINST FATE .................. 26 "I.-BREAKING THE NEWS .................... .......... 4 IV.-T CLOSER THAN A BROTHER ..................... .... . 57 V.-THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK .................... 70 VI.-IN THREE PARTS OF THE WORLD..................... 92 VII.-ADRIFT .....o......................................I07 VIII.-DR. VAIL'S JOURNAL.... .....................Z..129 IX.-MARY VAIL'S JOURNAL .............. ..... ...... 141 X.-THE CAGED BIRD .................................. .53 XI.-A GLIMPSE THROUGH A SPY-GLASS.. .................. 175 XII. GOLGOTHA ..............................................20 XIII.-FOUNDED ON A ROCK ................... .........224 XIV.-GREEN PASTURES AND STILL WATERS.. ...............243 XV.-THE UNDER WORLD..................................266 XVI.-OUT OP THE JAWS OF DEATH .......................28I XVII.-HOPE DEFERRED. .................... ..............304 XVIII. NARCISSA. 323 XIX.-FACE TO FACE ..................................... 339 XX.--HEART TO HEART 367 X X - H A TT . . ......, ....,.,. page: vi (Table of Contents) -7[View Page vi (Table of Contents) -7] 1i CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE XXI.--INTERCHANGE ................. ........... 394 XXII.-A SAILOR'S YARN .............. ............. ...... 417 XXIII.-ANf OUTSTRETCHED HAND. .........................447 XXIV.-REVO LT . ................ .......... ...... .... .... 462 XXV.-EMBARKATION ................................. .483 XXVI.-AGA THA ... .. ....................................513 XXVI.--SuRPRISE ................................533 XXVIII.-BATTLE.......56.................. XXIX.-EX-IT AND ENTRANCE. .......... 5 80 EPILOGUE ..... -.... ... .....................603 PROLOGUE. OUT of sight of land, rolling on the sezft and glit- tering in the daybreak, lay a dismasted ship:- a burnt, charred hulk that had just escsped total de- struction by lightning and hurricane. No captain was at the helm; no sailor on deck; no boat hanging in the davits; no sign of life on board; nothing but a ganglion of fallen rigging that lay in wild heaps around three stumps of masts. The absent boats suggested a hope that, through the mercy of God, the ship's company had escaped with their lives. So had the ship herself, for she lived. Her name too lived with her, and was trying to shine in the sun, whose rays danced lamely on the half-glittering, half-begrimed gold letters of the word Coromandel, What charmed craft was this that, without mast or sail, without crew or helmsman, had survived abandonment and withstood the storm? Was it some iron-plated line-of-battle ship, having won a dear-bought victory over nature? But the black sides showed neither porthole nor gun. Was it a vagrant prison-hulk, whose mutinous convicts' had fired their dungeon and fled? But there was none of the mildew or rust of a floating jail. Was it a loathsome. or wandering hospital, cast adrift to be purged of the winds? But there were no high upper- works to indicate a quarantine. / page: 8-9[View Page 8-9] 8 PROLOGUE. The rolling hulk must have been something different from all these; perhaps a proud and stately packet; but whatever it was once, it was now a pitiful ruin. Like a fly that had dashed through a lamplight leaving its wings in the flame, the Coromandel had passed through a conflagration that had swept off her masts, her sails, her rigging, her railing,-everything that was dry and inflam- mable; and yet her hull remained , defaced, but unharmed ; nevertheless, foredoomed perhaps to a slower and surer fate; for the great water-fly now lay unwinged, bedrabbled of the waves, and forlornly awaiting a lingering death. The whole world loves to pity a few castaways ; like the Polaris wanderers, who drifted at sea for many -months on a crumbling iceberg; or like the Medusa's raft-full of suf- ferers, whose anguish Gericault painted; or like La Perouse and his missing ships and comrades, whose fate was hidden from mankind for a generation. What was the Coromandels still stranger tale? \ " ' '- CHAPTER I. THE TRIAL TRIP. THE Coromandel, a superb ship of 418 tons, was built in 1847 by three public-spirited Boston merchants who were promised the help of the Navy Department in a search for Sir John Franklin:-a project then in the full flush of that auroral splendor of hope which, not till a quarter of a century later, faded away forever. By a lattice-work composed of cross-beams, hanging knees, and two-inch planks, the ship had been made as tough as a hickory wedge to plough the ice-floe. After her launching, the government pronounced her too large for Arctic navigation; whereupon her chagrined ownere dropped her original name, which was to have been the North Star, and equipped and christened her for their fa- miliar trade with the Coromandel Coast. Owing to her staunchness of build, and -her dryness of hold, she was unexpectedly chartered to carry a select and (at that time) unusual cargo of canned meats, vegetables, and fruits to Cape Town, for the South Atlantic whaling . fleets. Changed thus in name and destination, the Coromandel, Capt. Chiswick K. Lane, sailed from Boston, August 5th, 1847, bound for the Cape of Good Hope. Her trial trip proved a trip of trials. The captain had hoped, since his ship-was new, and had her honors yet to win, to make his voyage in fifty days. "I want," said he, "to make a polite bow to my con- signees with a feather in my cap." page: 10-11[View Page 10-11] 10 TEMPEST-TOSSED. But after fifty-six days by nautical reckoning (that is, from noon to noon) he was not yet in sight of the Cape Colony Coast. At seven bells during the forenoon of Oct. 1st, which was the fifty-seventh day, Rodney Vail, M D., one of the pas- sengers, took the ship's position with a small ivory quadrant which he carried as a scientific toy. He had taken frequent observations with it during the voyage, prompted by'a shadowy distrust of the captain's figures; for Capt. Lane had. not favorably impressed Dr. Vail either for ability as a seaman or integrity as a mans / To-morrow," said the captain," we shall drop anchor in Table Bay." "That's a dangerous day," replied Dr. Vail. "Why?" "Because it is the day that never comes." Rodney Vail sometimes showed a mild imperiousness under which Lane, a, weaker man, shrank without apparent cause. Just then a, flying-fish leaped on board-the first visitor of the kind during the voyage. "My wife," said Dr. Vail, "wants to see one of these shining creatures ; I will take this down to, her in the cabin." Mrs. Mary Vail, a lovely and delicate invalid, was in her state-room, sitting by a work-basket, stitching a. little piece of cream-colored flannel. "What are you so archly- hiding?" she asked, noticing that-her husband was holding something behind his back. He had laid the flying-fish on a palh-leaf fan, and was about to produce the curiosity as a surprise. "(What, still busy?" he exclaimed gaily.. "Sewing, sew- ing, always sewing! No variation of the needle on this ship!" Mary smiled at her critic, and he at her work :-a kind: of work that usually makes sympathetic people smile. THE TRIAL TRIP. 1 A princess of needle-craft was lMaqr Vail, deft and cun- ning in her white-fingered art. A needle and thread are as necessary to some women as a cup of tea is to others. After Cowper saw industrious Mary Unwin's needle "trusting disused," he soon saw her weary self laid at rest forever; but Mary Vail plied unrusting needles with unresting hands. She had sewed for the poor, sewed for the sick, sewed for the orphans, sewed for the charity scholars, and was sewing now for-whom? For somebody who was nobody! The truth is, that within her motherly mind, Mrs. Vail had conjured up the plan of a tiny wardrobe of which no- body should sew a solitary stitch except herself :-an outfit of which the inventory ran in this wise: Twelve fairy-like shirts of linen cambric, soft as rose- leaves ; Six petticoats of flannel, borrowed from the fur of white mice; Six ditto of snowy linen, with summer icicles of edging all round; Twelve dresses of Nansook lawn, with tucks like the reefs in the Coromandel's sails; - Six pairs of Lilliput socks, of zephyr worsted, with twisted strings and dangling fuzz-balls; Finally, a wee, wee cap, with ribbons pilfered from boxes of wedding cake. This wardrobe of angelic garments, Mary Vail hoped lov- ingly to finish with her own jealous andt exclusive hands. Just as Dr. Vail stepped into the state-room, Mrs. Vail was talking to her nurse, Aunt Bel. This companion of her heart's hopes was a kindly and substantial African who had never seen Africa. Bel had nursed Mary's mother at Mary's birth, and now was sailing half way round the world to greet the unborn face of that child's child. "What you got dar?" asked Bel, as Rodney held out the fish on the leaf. page: 12-13[View Page 12-13] 132 - .TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Mary," said he, "here is the most persecuted of God's creatures. The dolphin chases him out of the water, and the frigate-bird drives him back into it. Between his two hungry enemies he has no rest either in the air or the sea. Then, as if appealing to man, he flies on board a passing ship and dies. This little fellow has just dashed himself to death in a beautiful spasm." "Poor thing!" exclaimed Mary, whose heart was tender toward all creatures that suffered, and pitiful toward all that died. "Now," said Aunt Bel, striking an attitude of preach- ment, "dat little lump o' beauty is like de human soul. Fust, it's in de rollin' waters ob earthly 'fiction; den in de flyin' clouds ob divine wrath. De poor soul keeps palpitating 'tween de two, and tinks each one is wus dan de udder, until at last it worries de life out of itsef, and gives a flop up into Aberham's bosom, whar de wicked cease from troublin' and de weary am at rest.", Aunt Bel's name had been either- Isabel'or Rosabel; she herself did not know which; but Rodney, to tease her, called her Jezebel. ' She was a large and elderly woman, compounded in equal parts of muscle and fat, and so, full of the milk of human kindness that she seemed many mothers in one. She was mother to one son of her own, and mother to multitudes of sons of other women. Her own and only son was a young man, Pete, a gunner's mate in the navy. "How far are we from the land?" asked Mary. '"Two hundred and fifty miles," replied her husband. "A foreign land!" she said, with a sigh; for Mrs. Vail had, from the beginning, disapproved of her husband's mission to Cape Town. His chief and lifelong friend was Oliver Chantilly, a young American naval officer. The tie between them was sacred. Chantilly early left the naval service, which was then unpromising, and went to Cape Town to construct some wharves and breakwaters after American models. These works proving large and remu. nerative, Chantilly invited Vail to join himn in the enterprise. There was promise also of building a viaduct, which Vail, who had studied civil engineering, would exclusively direct. Rodney eagerly accepted this offer, and was now on his way to fulfil it. The voyage was one to which Mrs. Vail, vowing she would ne'er consent, consented. Woman-like! "Life is a strange problem," she murmured, rethreading ,her needle. "Yes," said Rodney, "'it is a Chinese puzzle; and you and I are lucky in having to go only half way to China to solve it." "I am homesick already," she said. ".Then drink this."' Whereupon he poured out a glass of home-brewed wine, which she and he together, during their courtship in Salem, had once seen dangling -in jeweled clusters on the currant bushes of her grandfather's farm. "There are some wines," said Rodney, "that go to the head-this goes to the heart." Rodney and Mary -had long ago jointly cast into that wine a richer treasure than Cleopatra's dissolving pearl, and the little reddened glass sparkled with the indissoluble mem- ory of their betrothed hearts. Rodney Vail, whose student-life had been passed first at Harvard and afterward at Jena, had undertaken to master two scientific professions, medicine and engineering; the first for his father's sake, the second for his own. "My disposition is not for the sick-room," he once said; "my nerves are for the open air; but a knowledge of the- human frame--its aches and pains, its ills and remedies--is, a needful part of a practical man's education. Indeed, as all well-trained men are expected to read Blackstone, why not also to read Galen?-for the divine laws of the body are a better study than the human laws of the state." Animated by this double ambition, he had laboriously page: 14-15[View Page 14-15] " TEMPEST-TOSSED. equipped himself in two useful arts; to which, on coming home from Europe, he straightway added a third, the most useful of a11--the art of love. Having known Mary Pritchard from childhood; having gone to school with her, played blind man's buff with her, and hunted for birds' nests with her;- having done all this in his boyish years without feeling any mysterious sentiment toward her, or consciously falling in love with her;--never- theless when, on his- return from a long absence, he saw her no longer -a school-girl, but the school-teacher; no longer a child but a woman; her face and character both of pure, loveliness; her manner, sweet and grave; her friends rever- ing her as a mild and superior being with a halo on her head;-Rodney Vail marveled at his former stupidity in not having discovered all this in Mary Pritchard several years before it existed to be seen; but he saw it vividly now, and bowed down before it, and worshipped it ;--just as some young Greek, after long playing with Psyche as a com- panion, yet without suspecting her a goddess, might at last stand abashed at discovering her divinity. "Our love was not at first sight," said he, "but all phil- osophers admit that second-sight is what shows to the soul its chief visions and high delights;-which was the way I came to see mine."' This husband and wife had been married about a year, and their honeymoon had not waned but waxed. Standing in the state-roomj discussing the winged fish, Rodney Vail presented a manly figure, a trifle above the ordinary height; a frame not stalwart but strong; a head that took a large hat; hair fine and light, tinged with a slight shade of auburn; a countenance older than most men show at twenty-six; eyes deep-set, steel blue, and, when fired, as bright as diamonds; a hawk's nose, with game- blooded nostrils; and a slight beard and moustache, neither of which had ever beent cut. Moreover he- had a hand so full of life in, its touch andL motion as to seem an intelligent creature- of itself; and his THE TRIAL TRIP.. 15 graceful gestures, in explaining the curves of bridges, or the spanning of arches, or the, rounding of domes, led Mary once to say: "Rodney, to lose one of your hands would be to hush one of your tongues." Sitting in her rocking chair, Mrs. Vail's, dark hazel eyes, which were turned away from the light, appeared- deep black, and her hair added its jet to match. A woman's hair is one of the supreme beauties of the world. The beauty of Mary's was in its color and curls. She wore it in ringlets at the side of her head, and knotted with a tortoise-sheri comb at the back. The white line of parting that ran through, the black masses curved exquisitely over her rounded head. Her hus. / band,. who stood over her, gently traced this curve with his forefinger, and might have quoted of it Mrs. Browning's metaphor (had it then been written), "One moonbeam from the forehead to the crown." Mrs. Vail, who felt the gentle witchcraft of her husband's touch, said, "Rodney, you have a magician's hand, but are going to put it to a stone-mason's tasks." "The greatest magicians of the world," said he, "have been stone-masons: for instance; the builder of St. Peter's at Rome. Besides, if my hand grows hard I will hold yours in it to soften it." It was evident that Mary Vail, though a Puritan of the good old Christian stock, was- given tol idolatry, and that her idol was her husband. "Mary," said he, pointing to the little silvery creature on the yellow fan, c" these lustrous wings have ended their flight fin this life; but Plato says that the swan at death sings her sweet song because she divines her immortality. Who knows, then, but this little siren of the sea will be flying to- meet us on our voyage into the next world?" "Crazy stuff!" exclaimned Bel, who was the Biblical au- thority for the family. "W-hat's de-good book say? Dere shall be no more sea. How den can dere be any fish?" page: 16-17[View Page 16-17] 16 . - TEMPEST-TOSSED. Jezebel, at Rodney's order, then opened the brass-rimmed window of the state-room, and threw overboard the flying- fish; which done, she stood fitting her big, serene face into the small frame, watching the weather w "What are you looking for, Jezebel?" "Massa Vail, I'm -lookin' for de lan'." "Why, no, you are looking up into the clouds." "I'm lookin' for de lan'." a"Well, you will not see it in that quarter." "Yes, I see it now." "See what?" "I see de lan'." "What land?" "I see de promise lan'-de hebbenly lan'--de lan' flowin' wid milk and honey-de lan' what de good book says 'Sweet fields beyond de swellin' flood Stan' dressed in livin' green.'" "Ah," said Rodney, with mock gravity, "you may look at it, but you can never enter it, for no Jezebel can enter the kingdom of heaven." "My dear Rodney," sighed Mary, " the nearer we get to Cape Town, the less- I like the prospect. All day long my mind has been shadowed with a presentiment of evil." "Nonsense!" he exclaimed. "-Premonitions belong to the limbo of ghosts, wraiths, stigmata, and the like; that is, to the Utopia of the imagination." "But, Rodney, would you call Bel a person of vivid im- agination?-for I should say just the contrary--and yet she is always seeing visions and dreaming dreams." "Jezebel," he asked, "what new phantom have you been worrying Mary with? Is it some of your marriage-suppers with Jacob and Esau?-with Enoch and Elijah? What's, the last new revelation? Come." Rodney stood building with his waving hands a sort of Jacob's ladder on which Bel's heavenly visitants might come down to earth., THE TRIAL TRIP. 17 Nothing pleased Aunt Bel better than to recite her noe- turnal interchanges with the heavenly shades. "Massa Vail," said she, "my boy Pete, he come to me. Now he ain't dead; so he didn't come in white; he come in his own skin, and dat's black enough ; but de Lord made it for Pete, and if Pete's only white enough for de Lord, den he's white enough for me. Well, dis yer boy Pete, he's a man grown, and he come to me, and he says, Mammy, you shall go tru de fiery furnace--de sev n-fold blazin' furnace. So shall de Missis. So shall de Massa. .You mus all go tru de seven times heated furnace. And when de fire is a crackin' and crackin', and de flame is a curlin' and curlin', and' de heat is a meltin' and meltin', and when it is a tryin' to consume de hem of your garments, den shall Nebchan- ezzar say, Did we not cast tree into de midst of de fired True, O king. Den Nebchanezzar shall'say, Lo I see four, loose, walkin' in de midst of de fire, and dey have no hurt, ) and de form of de fourth is like de Son of God." Jezebel uttered these words with such fervor that Dr. Vail, in looking at her, was unaware for a moment that hWi' wife, sitting behind him, was lapsing into a fainting fit. The pallid lady was instantly assisted to her bed. "Why, what's de matter, honey '?" - A physician's glance showed Rodney that Mary's trial had come. It was premature, but was-at hand. Dr. Vail understood its ominous meaning. If there is a sacred spectacle on earth, it is a woman in the hour of the most majestic of human anguish. Rodney, in now gazing at its approach, borrowed from it a dread that filled and shook his own soul. ' What if this woman," thought he, "1 the pearl, the crown of my life, the one image of my heart's worship--what if she should die-!-to be buried in the sea!-or in the foreign land that lies just before us, turning its Good Hope into despair!" Dr. Vail's loud watch, as he looked at it in the silence, Ox page: 18-19[View Page 18-19] 18 TEMPEST-TOSSED. seemed to be uttering a death-tick-seemed to be beating a funeral march. Flocking into his breast came a raven brood of self- reproachful thoughts. "Why did I bring Mary on this sea-voyage, exposing her precious frailty to storm and wave? Why, was I not more tender of hear scruples, more obedient to her wish? Heaven save her in this peril!" In the room opposite to Mrs. Vail's was Madame D'Arblay, a rich and showy French grandmother, who was travelling with her daughter, and her daughter's infant son. These ladies, and the others on board, had they dreamed of the emergency, would have rushed forward with offeps of sym- pathetic service; but not one of them had a suspicion of the event. '"Dear lamb," said old Bel, " dis is a strange world. De women have all de hardest work to do, all de heaviest bur- dens to bear, while de men jist stand and wait for de salva- tion ob de Lord. But never mind, honey. De men is shet off from de 'ceedin' great and precious promises. What's de good book say? ' What is man dat Dou art mindful ob him?' -Now, it says noffin like dat ob de woman. Why ain't de Lord mindful ob de man? Cause de Lord wants to give his whole mind to de woman." Mary smiled and wept. "Hoity toity!" exclaimed Jezebel, "None o' dem tricklin' tears! Can't have none o' dem runaway drops a chasin' down my dear lamb's face! What's de good book say? 'He shall wipe away all tears from deir eyes.' O what a big handkerchief de Lord has got! Wipe 'em away! -wipe 'em away!" said she, suiting the gentle action to the kindly word. "Rodney," murmured Mary, 'make me a promise. If you see that I must die, tell me of it. Promise me." Whereupon Rodney, strangling his heart in his throat, and crushing down his mounting fears, promised in a voice of such good cheer that he seemed to say, SThis is, a pledge that will not need to be fulfilled." THE TRIAL TRIP. 19 "Rodney, what - is this faintness?" she asked, with a broken voice. "Taste this," he replied. But the wine did not revive her, and she sank into a lethargy. The daylight was now so far spent, and the twilight had so far deepened, that Dr. Vail, on taking out his watch, could not see the hands across the gold face. Suddenly vivid lightning and immediate thunder started him to his feet. The ship shook from stem to stern; a tumbler of water on the stand beside him spilt on his hand. Then came another flash and peal. Between the flashes the darkness was appalling. Preoccupied with his patient, he had not noticed the gathering storm till it had burst. Mary's features were strangely illumined by the fiery beams, and showed her to be without consciousness, and apparently without life. Rodney gazed in amazement as her stiff and rigid body passed alternately out of light into darkness--out of dark- ness into light. Bel rose to her feet, her eyes gleaming, and her form swaying as if under a sudden inspiration. "O!" she exclaimed, " it's a comin' true. De spirit of de Lord is on me, and I know it's a comin' true." "What is coming true," asked Dr. Vail. Just then a flash of horrible brightness pierced the small !k window, and shot like; an arrow into his blinded eyes. A simultaneous thunder-clap, like a hammer-stroke, smote his "i ears as if it would crush the sense of hearing g He tottered back, staggered like a drunken man, struck his head violently against the wall, cried out, "I am lkilled!" and fell to the floor. Within his md, ind, in the act of falling, picture after picture rose before him-scene after scene from his past life :--his father's house, and the meadow in front of it; the harbor of Salemr with its: ships and fishing-smacks; the. corpses on the page: 20-21[View Page 20-21] TEMPEST-TOSSED, dissecting table, and the keen scalpels; the clinking mugs in the German bier-gardens; Mary Pritchard going home from school through Newberry lane, carrying a handful of pinks; Oliver Chantilly's letter from Cape Town, lying in its blue envelope; Mary Vail with a pale face, dead and not buried; a wild-looking man crouching down in a corner by her side; a blazing light, like the end of the world :- all this passed through Rodney Vail's mind like an electric message through the wires; and, though the process was but momentary, yet it seemed to him to cover the quarter- century of his remembered life. At length he rose to his feet. What had happened to him, he knew not. But he heard a cry of " Fire!" ringing through the air. He heard many voices shrieking in terror. He heard tramping feet overhead that were jarring the'ship. He saw the state-room filled with light, not from fitful flashes, but steady flames. The horrible truth broke upon him that the ship was on fire! Jezebel stood gazing toward the round window that now appeared a red orb of glowing heat, and her face in the strange glare glistened with a supernatural look. Dr. Vail hurriedly opened the state-room door, and, with- out emerging, caught a glimpse of the confusion- in the sa- loon. The scene was heart-rending. Most of the men had already rushed to the deck to learn the situation, but the women were huddled iq the cabin, listening to orders from John Blaisdell, the first mate. "Lightning," said he, "has - struck the ship-not with a thunderbolt, tearing us to pieces-but with fire-balls, tipping the masts and yards. The rigging is ablaze in a hundred places. The boats are lowering, to get clear of the fire. There's no time to save anything-hardly to save your- selves. The women and children must be taken first. Come this way-no crowding--one at a time-quick." The mate 'stood by the stairway, and bravely helped them forward to their escape. In escaping, one frightened fugitive caught a garment; er THE TRIAL TRIP. 21 another, a box; and, generally, each seized some unimportant article, the first that came to hand. The Rev. Mr. Atwill, a clergyman returning to his missionary. tation, ran back to his state-room for his Ecclesiastical Almanac; Madame D'Arblay, who had many valuables to lose, bethought her- self of saving only a worthless pin-cushion; her daughter, Mrs. Fountain, carefully wrapped a thin red-shawl about her shoulders; Mr. and Mrs. Gansevoort, an elderly couple, each took firm hold of the same sea-biscuit, and carried it away between them; but Mr. Jansen, who had been shipwrecked once before, said to himself calmly, "I will leave everything else, and take my pea-jacket and life-pre- server." Only one of the women fainted; all the others showed* something of the quiet, mute courage characteristic of the sex when in peril of death. Dr. Vail saw, heard, and understood all this commotion while standing by his wife's bedside, holding her right wrist in his two hands, and searching in agony for a pulse which his sensitive touch could no longer detect, and which his skilled judgment told him had ceased to beat. Right over him on deck he heard the somewhat tremulous voice of Capt. Lane, who exclaimed to the bewildered pas- sengers, "Quick! The boats will be burned if we stay here. Hasten for your lives." Then, with Blaisdell's powerful assistance (for the mate out-captained the captain), the terrified women and children were put into the boats, and the men followed. Just then rain began to fall, and the big drops fiercely be- spattered the sea. Up to this moment, Rodney Vail had never once thought of himself, nor of Bel, but only of Mary. Blaisdell stood ready, with a rope in his hand, to lower himself the last man into the last boat,-the captain having previously begun to clamber down into another. Rodney then heard the mate say, page: 22-23[View Page 22-23] 22 TPEMPEST-TOSSED. "Vail is missing. Where is Vail? Where is Vail's wife? They are not in the boats." Lane, who was sliding by a rope down the ship's side, happened to be directly in front of Rodney's window, and looked in. "Vail!" cried he. "Why do you stay here? Great God, if you don't want to burn to death, make haste Where is your wife? Throw her overboard, and let us pick her up." Happening then to observe her lifeless body, the captain exclaimed, "If she's past saving, leap overboard yourself. That's your only hope. Quick I Otherwise the boats will catch "fire from the cinders. Vail, I say I are you mad?" And .when Rodney Vail neither stirred, nor turned his head, nor made reply, the captain shouted, "Boys! push off. Get out of the way of these sparks! Blaisdell, east southeast!" In went the oars, off went the boats, and up went the flames, crimsoning the sky. Dr. Vail had a calm, vivid, and awful sense of the scene; he fully realized by what danger he was surrounded, and by what fate he was approached. Stumbling against the nurse, who sat with patient, folded hands, quiet as the dead, he exclaimed, "O Heaven! Bel, are you here? I thought you had escaped. I looked for you, and thanked God that you had gone. Run! Flee for your life! It is not too late. Quick! i I'll call the captain back,!" Rodney leaped to the window, and cried, "Lane! Lane!" but the rolling thunder drowned his voice. "Boat ahoy I Lane! Lane!" but no ear heard save the crier's own. - "Help! I say! Lane! Lane!" but the cry was all for naught. No time was left now for anything but death, nor time to meet this with the dignity that was its due. THE TRIAL TRIP. 28 "Bel, said Rodney, with a horrible serenity in his man. ner, c"Mary is dead, apd we too must die." Jezebel sat like one eaf and dumb, and neither answered, nor stirred, nor heard. Rodney then undertook to speak to her a second time, but the falling topmasts and yards, the rattling thunder, and the down-rushing rain, all made it impossible for him then to hear even his own voice, As a last act, he knelt at his wife's bedside, took her hands in his, held them fast, murmured her name, and kissed her lips. He shed no' tear, shook no muscle, and moved no nerve. It is given unto all men once to die; and this man, being no coward, resolved to meet his fate without fear. Speaking half angrily, and as if answering some question which his soul had propounded to itself, "No," said he, "I am not ready, but I am not afraid. Thy will, O God, be done!" He sat holding a thin hand that had lost its power to return his pressure. "O Heaven!" he suddenly exclaimed, clenching his other : hand like an iron vise upon itself, "Is this death? Must I face it? Then I choose to face it in my wife's face. Death itself shall not look dead. I shall defy it, and die alive " In a few moments the bright light that hitherto had illumined Mary's face grew dim, leaving it covered with a shadow, and then grew dark, leaving it clothed witl a pall. The rain was a torrent--a deluge. It was quenching the conflagration. The fire was fleeing before it. Gloom was spreading through the state-room. Darkness rolled in, like a wave, and filled it. Condemned to die, Rodney Vail still sat clasping the hand of the dead, as if both he and she were already in their graves. Then came a new thought:-would the ship, which was -no longer on fire, sinl or foat? Rodney was just asking himself this question when he page: 24-25[View Page 24-25] 24 TEMPEST-TOSSED. heard-was it Bel's voice?-uttering a low prayer, as if whispering her soul's final secret into God's ear. He had never known her to speak so softly. Her changed manner awed and melted him. Something weird and spir- itual trembled in her tone. It seemed as if she had borrowed the tongue of her mistress, now that her mistress was no more. He listened spell-bound., His own name was softly spoken. The words were a prayer for his sake; "O Heaven!" he cried, suddenly awaking to the mystery. "Mary! Mary!-my wife! my wife!" His wife's sown voice it was that he heard!-her own pulse that he felt!-her own living self that his arms clasped! -her own re-warmed lips that he kissed! She had revived. Then, as if a new soul had been created within him, as if a new earth had been unrolled around him, as if a np/ heaven had descended upon him, Rodney Vail uttered one exclamation of praise and thanks, and, trembling like a reed, wept like a child. A It was pitch dark. f "Bel," he exclaimed, "light the lamp." "My dear husband," asked a sick voice, "what is the matter? Is it night? Have I been asleep? Has anything I gone wrong?" "No, nothing!" he cried, in a frenzy of joy. "Nothing. is wrong in all the world-God has set all things right!" Bel quietly rose and lighted the lamp. As its light illumined her face, Rodney saw in her expres- sion nothing but her habitual half-stolidness and content- ment; showing that she had either not comprehended the danger, or had not feared it. He bowed his head over his wife, and kissed her again and again, till his tears fell on her cheeks; and she noticed in his look a mad passion of delight such as she had never before seen burning in his eyes. At a glance Rodney discovered that Mary knew nothing of the great disaster, and he resolved to conceal it from her for the present. THE TRIAL TRIP. I5 This was easy, for her thoughts were not of the ship, and her critical hour now summoned her to its supreme moment. Beside her stood a man whose soul rose within him as- if empowered to forbid death and to command birth. With proud care he ministered mercy. There is a dew distilled from Lethe's stream to conquer pain. He gave it -her, and she quaffed it. As the sweet oblivion overcame her, sudden peace stole through her weary and beautiful frame; unconscious smiles played over her gentle face; her white hands involuntarily moved as if keeping time-to music; and her lips broke audibly forth into a Gregorian chant that she had often sung in church. Then in sweet unconsciousness, an hour after midnight, herself the first bird of the morning, heralding to others her happiness before her own heart awoke to it, the sleeping amother brought her babe into this stormy world. "Jezebel," exclaimed Rodney, " this boy is a girl." "Hoity toity!" answered Bel. "Why, it's de dear lamb's lambkin! Come into my arms! Dar, so! Cryin' eh! Dats a good sign. Chillen dat ain't born a cryin' will never live to laugh." "Ah, Oliver Chantilly," said Rodney, "when I show you at Cape Tow'n this new sight, you will cease your boast. Have you a child? So have I. Have you a son? I have a daughter. You and I may now compare Heaven's gifts. Which is the fairer? God's first piece of humanity was man-his second was woman. Which of the two is more i like the Maker? No, we will not dispute. Thank Heaven, O my friend, Paradise exists for both of us on earth!" "I declar," said Bel, "what a headstrong little pieoe -showin' her temper a'ready! Lawks amassy, chillen be- gins to be folks as soon as dey are born. Dar, now, be a good chile. What's de good book say? 'HiiHush, my babe, lie still and slumber.' Jist look! Dis ain't no lulluby baby on de tree top; dis chile has all de rollin' ship for a rockin' eradle! I declar!" 2 page: 26-27[View Page 26-27] CH APTER II, FIGHTING AGAINST FATE. -AFTER the shipwreck, what was the next day's history of the fire-scourged Coromandel? Itwas a log kept, t not by. Capt. Lane, but Capt. Vail. The vessel had passed A: into fresh commission, under a new admiralty. X The day began, for Rodney, before the night ended. His immediate ministrations to Iary being over, he stepped softly from her sick-chamber into the dark cabin. "The mother and her babe," said he, " sweetly sleep, but in Mary's door, shot across the darkness. "What shall I do for the ship?" asked its solitary master. E The first act of a man when profoundly perplexed is some unconscious trflee; so Dr. Vail wound his watch. Putting the time-piece absent-mindedly into his pocket, he suddenly took it out again' and, holding it up into the faint beam- whispered, "Three o'clock, and all's well!" X The recent-scenes through which he had passed had wrought him into such a nervous ecstasy that he could not then have regarded anything as ill. The ship gave a lurch that made him stagger. "How she rolls!" he exclaimed. "She is in the trough of the sea. I must get her head to. But how vain to attempt it in the night and- alone " He groped'his way to the deck to observe the situation. FIGHTING AGAINST FATE. 27 "The fire," thought he, c' was put out before Lane was far Trom the ship. He and his boats will try to return. The best I can do is to help them find the Coromandel in the lark." .. So he hunted about for a couple of lanterns, which he ound and lighted. Crawling then across the deck on his hands and knees, ometimes slipping and sliding, and fearful that the bul- rarks were burnt off, which would expose him to the risk of ailing overboard, he finally succeeded in lashing one of the ights on the larboard side to an unburnt stancheon, and the ther on the starboard to an iron-rod of the main shrouds. The rain and wind were still brisk, but apparently moder- mng; and the moon, which was in her last quarter, pcasionally strained a faint whiteness through a thin loud. . "I have never seen," said he, "such a ragged sky; it was ipped to pieces by the storm, and is slow in mending." The dim moonlight, together with the lanterns, which did ot bum well, enabled him to notice that not a mast was ft standing, but that a heap of tangled spars and rigging ty athwart the ship, dipping their tips into the water, first n one side, then on the other. "Everything aloft," said he, "has come down, even the ttle cherub that sits there in the song. But the best of ie cherubs is now lying wrapped in a babe's blanket in the ibin. So the ship's good genius is still on board." Having swung his lanterns, he retraced his steps, and had irtly descended the stairs, when suddenly he was bumped gainst by some rounded object like a tumbling bag or sack, !avy but not hard. The blow knocked him down. "What is this?" he- cried, leaping to his feet only to be ruck again. Struggling to catch and keep his foothold that seemed ice more slipping from under him, he recognized with ateful relief the welcome bark of Capt. Lane's dog. page: 28-29[View Page 28-29] e i 28 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Beaver, you foolish pup," he exclaimed, "I took you for a pirate." - This bouncing water-spaniel, brown and big-eared, was a gift to the captain from a fisherman of Marblehead. Early during the royage, Dr. Vail, who was fond of animals, had made the acquaintance of this frisky dog; and the grateful amphibian, having probably been half-scared out of his wits by the fire and tempest, now joyfully leaped into the bosom of his friend, and inadvertently knocked him down. Re-entering the cabin, Beaver following him, Rodney lighted a lamp in Room No. 1, opposite Mary's quarters. It was a double-room, exactly like hers, and had been occupied t by Madame D'Arblay, her daughter, and daughter's child. Discovering a-. wine-flask in the rack, and a few biscuits i tucked behind it like panes of glass in a glazier's box, he broke a biscuit, tossed part of it down to Beaver, crunched i the remainder with a Jack Tar's appetite, drank a glass of wine, flung himself-jacket, boots, and all-at full length on the lounge, and, fromn the profound fatigue and reaction that follow nervous excitement, fell asleep. Not so with Bel. Having no nerves to be unstrung, she did not lie down to re-string them. She gave neither sleep to her eyes nor slumber to her eyelids. On ordinary occa-. sions she dozed like a bat, but was now wakeful as an owl. Sitting with the babe on her lap, she watched it as some swarthy Madonna of the old-time engravings watched the i Christ-child. - "De Lord," said she, " hab come!"What's de good book say? Whoso receiveth dis little chile in my name, receiveth Me ' So not only de babe is here, but de Lord too. Dey are both in one." If ever there was a moment of supreme pride in Jezebel's life, it was at that dim hour when, between midnight and t morning, she was the only human being who kept a vigil on that wrecked ship. But she did not trouble herself about the shipwreck. That was too stupendous an affair for her limited power of i anxiety. All great things she left with God. FIGHTING AGAINST FATE. 29 "De Lord," she murmured, "de Lord is my portion on de right han', and on de lef'. De Lord must take care oh de ship, and I must take care ob de chile. I gib de ship ta de Lord, and de Lord gib de chile to me." Jezebel's imagination then lifted its sable wing, and soared back into the dim and shadowy past. Her reminiscences were not of herself, but of others. Among these others, wh o frequented the familiar chamber of her mind, sometimes came the worthless lout who had once been her husband- the good-for-nothing Bruno Bamley who, after idling away his time for years about the Salem wharves, at last one day fell overboard, and, possessing too little energy and too much liquor to scramble out, quietly took his way down stream into the deep grass of the bottom, and rose no more --not even to a coroner's inquest. Mrs. Jezebel Bamley, on being thus widowed, wasted no thoughts on her merciful bereavement and gainful loss. Bruno Bamley went from her with a good riddance, and even her memory seldom invited his return. She had never murmured at him in life, and she never mourned for him in death. So Jezebel, in thinking of the past, rarely thought of her own affairs, but usually of other people's. "Jist to tink now," she went on, with a low, lulling, by- baby voice, "jist to tink that twenty-two years ago, come September, Sophrony Vail had Baby Mary, and now Mary's got one ob her own! You peart little chick, you are lyin' in dese old arms^jist as yer mudder did, who's now asleep dar, and who don't know yit dat you have come into dis wicked world. Dear me, I wish dis ole ship wouldn't'jump about so. See how we rock, rock, rock!-toss, toss, toss H roll, roll, roll!-I trot de lambkin, and de Lord trots de ship. O what a shakin' dere is in dis stormy night! Now my little mouse, you lie down dar!" and she fixed a snuggery in the second bed, and tucked the little creature tight agailt any chance of falling out. A perplexity arose in Jezebel's mind. "What's de good book say-? 'Suffer little chillen to come o page: 30-31[View Page 30-31] 80 -- TEMPEST-TOSSED. unto Me.' Dat's de fust ting. Den de next tIng is, how about de baby clo's? Dat's what worries me. Dis yer work- basket is full o' beginnins' but no endins'. Why lawks ! a-massy, yes, sure as you're born, jist so, dar's dat Dobbly boy andlhis duds!" Bel remembered that Madame D'Arblay's grandson had a French wardrobe of sinful extravagance-an uncommon outfit of infant vanities. - "If all dem follies and fineries hab been lef behind, dey will jist come in play for my lamb's lambkin." [ Bel started for Room No. 1 on a raid of discovery. Opening thedoor she startled Rodney, who sprang out of sleep and aske, "What's the matter?" - "Matter? Why, Massa Vail-now, Beaver, you be off!" cried she, in a startled voice, to the dog, that wanted to know a why she was opening the canvas-covered trunk. ; X "Massa'Vail, I'm a-lookin' for made-up clo's for my lamb- kin. Dis Dobbly boy had too much 'stravagance for his own good. What's de good book say? ' From him dat hath not, shall be taken away even dat which he hath.' Jist look into dis trunk! O what a heap o' shirts, petticoats, and bands! It would be a sin and shame not to have dem tings used! We must use dis world as not abusin' it. Git away, Beaver, you ! troublesome dog, d don't put your snoopin' nose in here." "Aunt Bel," said Dr. Vail, "listen to me : Mary must not yet know of the shipwreck. Mind that! We have escaped a-fearful peril-escaped as by a miracle. Don't say a word about all this- to Mary. She must first get strength to bear, it. Act as though nothing -strange had taken place. Her life depends on it." * "Yes, Massa Vail, and now jist you step in, light-footed, and bring out dat baby here to me." -Rodney stole into his wife's room, blessed her in her sleep, and, bendig over the babe, lifted the little sleepy lump, blanket and all, and took the immortal burden across the cabin to Bel. (, rVU1w1TUNI AtVIIN.11 rAM. ,' There!" he exclaimed, "it's an ill-wind that blows no- body any good, and this tempest has shaken this fair fruit into our lap." Seated on Madame D'Arblay's rocking-chair, Jezebel rocked herself against the lurchings of, the ship, trying to keep a level, and proceeded to dress the babe in the style approved by loyalist French grandmothers under King Louis Philippe. The tiny head was brushed ; the velvety cheeks were pow- dered ; the downy feet were shod with felt-like King Lear's steeds ; the little neck, that could not hold up its own head, was fretted round with gossamer-laee; and, as if to make a fine mockery of misfortune, the white sleeves were gayly looped with gold-and-coral snaps. In this fine array, the young child was presented to her waking and joyful mother. "How kind of Madame D'Arblay!" exclaimed Rodney, stretching out his hands over the babe's prodigious skirt, as if in a vain attempt to measure its length. "Yes," replied Mary, " tell her so for me." "My dear lamb," remarked Jezebel, " what's de good book say? 'De Lord sees de end from de beginnin'.' Yes, dat's what de Lord saw when he looked at dat ole Dobbly woman's trunks. He said to himself, 'Put dat boy's clo's in, ole wo- man! Heap 'em up!-pack rem tight! But, not for de Dobbly boy. Oh no! Dere's anoder chile a coming into dis world by and by, who will have need o' baby clo's, and I am de Lord and must be dar to provde.' Dat's why de Lord gave 'Gaspar sich a heap o' stuff. It was all for dis yer lambkin." If there ever was a ray of sunshine in'this naughty world, it was the mild and holy light that shone in the eyes of Mary Vail while gazing into the face of her first-born that lay nestled in her bosom. Gratitude unutterable filled that mother's soul. Heaven's own peace descended into her breast, accompanied with heaven's latest angel to bear wit- ness to its divine source. page: 32-33[View Page 32-33] 32 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Mary," exclaimed the doctor, gaily, "what good news this will be to send to Grandfather Pritchard! I will write a letter as soon as we land." "Yes, dear Rodney, and writeone also to my old pupil." "Which one?" "Why, Lucy Wilmerding--that dear girl in London." "Yes," added Rodney, putting one forefinger on the other, as if counting, " and to Miss Mehitable, and to Sarah Faw- cett, and to Uncle Billings, and to the Peaseleys, and to the Danvers people, and to the Hopkintons at Marblehead." "O how proud," said Mary, "I shall be to show my babe to Rosa Chantilly! Our- children will be playmates." Before daylight came, Dr. Vail, who meant to do a day's work on deck, prepared himself for it as a wise Hercules does for a great labor; that is, with breakfast. He brewed some coffee, and broiled some ham; sharing both with Bel, and giving Beaver his portion of meat in due season. Moreover, with a skill of cookery based on science, he tortured out of a package of oatmeal its life-nourishing magic for Mary. Jezebel meanwhile resented this encroachment on he--rights of cuisine. J "Now, M assa. Vail," she said, chidingly, "man's work is one ting, woman's is anoder. Man's work is to do de out- door chores and big-liftins'; woman's is to nuss de chil- len and to fuss round de. kitchen. Beaver, you pestilent dog, keep away from dat bilin' skillit." - "Messmate," exclaimed Rodney, addressing the-disparaged dog, "let us go and take an observation." It was five o'clock in the morning by Dr. Vail's chronome- ter watch. i "What a pitiful plight!" he exclaimed, as he surveyed the ship's bereavement. "God help us! What a wreck!" The desolation, as revealed by the early daylight, chilled his soul as the morning mist chilled his flesh. The havoc seemed total. The ship's hull was almost covered out of sight by the mass of rigging which lay on itf FIGHTING AGAINST FATE. 33 "How long can this poor hulk float?" he cried, for she was already buried under her own ruins, and had the hideous look of being about to plunge to the bottom at once. Many a man in Rodney's situation would have felt hope- lessly weak, and simply put his trust in Providence; but Rodney, whose soul was strong, felt that Providence had now reposed a trust in him. "Friend," said the Arab to Mahomet at night in the desert, "loose thy camel and com- mit him to God." "Friend," replied Mahomet, "tie thy camel and commit him to God." In like manner Rodney said, "I will leave nothing to chance. Every nerve and sinew will I strain to keep this ship afloat, and to save the lives committed to my care. Heaven help me!" When the morning fully dawned, the weather was hazy; the sun was smokily visible and greatly enlarged; Rodney could look at it without winking. There was no horizon. The vessel was shut in, either by fog or mist, or by the diffused remainder of her own -smoke. "Hew far can I see into this haze?" He peered forward with straining eyes. "Great heaven!" he cried. "How will the boats ever find the ship? The eye cannot see twice the Coromandel's length!" Glancing round the deck, he noted that not a single boat had been left on board, but that all the iron-davits from which the boats had been lowered were bent outwards as if waiting for the departed crews to return. "The fire," said he, " has gone over the ship like a varnish brush, polishing everything to a charred black." Still he soon found that the flames had nowhere gnawed their way through the planking, except to destroy the weather-boarding of the bulwarks, leaving only their solid stancheons and a part of their top-rail. These stancheons stood like a row of grim Ethiops, keeping sentry. The lightning, he found, had peeled off the word Coro- mandel from one side of the figure-head, leaving it un- touched on the other. , page: 34-35[View Page 34-35] 84 TEMPEST-TOSSED. The pumps, which he hastened to try, showed no leak- which was a profound comfort. It then occurred to him to examine whether the cargo had shifted. He lifted a hatch and made his way darkly down for a tour of inquiry. He groped like a stevedore along the bulk-heads, crawled over the merchandise, peered into the crevices between the well-packed goods, and found that everywhere, even to the store-room of the orlop-debk, every- thing was firm, and nothing was banging about except him- self as he was set lurching by the sea. "How well," said he, "these cans and cases have been packed! They fit each other like stones in a wall. They would be a solid fortress against starvation. What if, from hunger, my little family of castaways should have to break into this storehouse! We have not te th enough in all our mouths to-eat to the end of this copious cupboard in a lifetime. The rats would have to help us. These meats, these vegeta- bles, these fruits-why, here are rations for a navy. They must be kept from breaking loose and rolling about. I will nail them fast." So he found a saw, and cut a number of blocks of Wood into chocks and battings, and nailed them wherever there was a chance to rivet any particular box or hogshead more firmly to its place. Returning to the deck, he stretched a rope from stancheon to stancheon round the ship for a life-line, so that if he were struck by a wave he might have something to clutch at and cling to. "I must hoist a signal of distress," said he ; and tying one of the bed-sheets to a boat-hook, he lashed the shaft to the stump of the mizzen-mast, and swung out the white emblem to the breeze. Dr. Vail's greatest labor was to get the ship out of the trough of the sea-in other words, to swing her head round to the wind. He knew this might be accomplished if he could get the debris of fallen spars overboard to serve as a 'water-drag, leaving the ship moored to this as to a buoy; FIGHTING AGAINST FATE. 85 for the ship, feeling the wind against her side, would drift to a cable's length away from the submerged drag, and would then swing round to this sluggish mass as to a semi- anchorage. "That's the plan," said he, " and if I can only execute it, I shall get the ship's nose into the teeth of the wind. But how can I move these spars? They are a whole paper-full , of Cleopatra's Needles." Taxing his ingenuity for the construction of this drag, or rather for its launching (since it had constructed itself) he cun- ninglyfixed a seriesof pullies that multiplied his strength forty- fold; and at last, after much toil and struggle, he lifted, swayed, and heaved the heavy timbers triumphantly into the sea. The ship immediately swung to, pointed like a weather- vane directly at the wind, rode steadily, and lifted her fore- foot gracefully over every wave that came. This was the best piece of work he did on the ship; and he felt in doing it that it ministered a sweet medicine to Mary, for it smoothed her pillow and gave to her tossing bed a comparative quiet. "What time o' day is it?" said he, and he took out his watch. "What! almost noon? How the hours have fled! Now for the sun!" and he got out his quadrant and nauti- cal almanac to take the ship's position. Capt. Lane, in escaping, had carried with him his portable instruments, and left only the standard compass :-which was a fixture in the deck, set like a bull's-eye in front of the steersman's wheel. The heavy glass over it was so solid that a man could stand on it as on a pavement. It had not been injured. Its animated presence seemed to say that the ship still had a soul, hopeful of life, vigilant under calamity, and tremulous to fate. The Coromandel's bearings were Lat. 30 28' S., Long. " 36' E. On hunting for a map or chart to see how far he was from Cape Town, Rodney Vail, to his dismay, could not find one on the ship. page: 36-37[View Page 36-37] 86 - . TEMPEST-TOSSED. So he knew, and yet did not know, his position. He knew it nautically, but not geographically. He was like a man who, landing from a balloon, for instance, in Lat. 42 N. and Long. 70 W., but having no map of the New England coast, could not tell whether he was at Nahant Beach or at Cape Cod. Nevertheless, from Rodney's recollection of the chart which the captain had taken away, he had reason to believe that the Coromandel was within three hundred miles of Table Bay. "Ah," said he, "without masts, or sails, or crew, that's a long stretch from land!" Moreover, he knew that two strong motive powers were carrying him every moment still further off. One was the Trade Wind which, in that quarter of the world, blows all the year round from Southeast to Northwest ; the other was the Greatr Ocean Current, which follows the Trade Wind across the South Atlantic. "But why should I pay heed," thought he, " to wind, or current, or1 position? I need simply to keep a steady look- out through the haze for the returning boats, or else for a -passing ship." Sweeping the horizon with his weather-glass to discover some other object than the waves and clouds, he heaved a sigh and exclaimed, "Nothing but nothingness! Yes, yonder goes a flock of sea-birds overhead!" and he suddenly lifted his arms towards them, and With a strange pathos of appeal, cried out, "O cranes of Ibycus, fly home and bear thither the tale of my misfortunes!" After the unheeding birds flew by, Rodney thought of putting up a jury-mast. "No, I shall not rig a sail," said he, " for the ship could go only before the wind, and this would simply carry her faster and further away from the coast." Nevertheless, he examined the rudder to see whether it was in steering order. The rudder itself was not damaged. The f FIGHTING AGAINST FATE. 37 wheel, being of hard wood and inlaid with brass, had suffered ugly disfigurement rather than actual harm. But the leather ropes of the tiller had snapped, and their broken ends were curled up like scraps of pork in a frying-pan. So, overhaul- ing the ship's stores, he selected a piece of strong rope to re- place these, and he thus put the helm in working condition even though there was no motive-power for steerage-way. Just then, the Coromandel, in mounting over a high wave, mournfully tolled her bell; and Rodney, not relishing its dismal sound, tied its hammer and stopped its requiem. This done, he sat down by the companion-way and took off his hat that the breeze might cool his brow. The dog nudged his brown, shaggy head under his master's arms, while the master occupied himself with his thoughts. '"Ah," he exclaimed, snuffing the damp smell of the quenched fire, "in prosperity, saith the proverb? no altars smoke; but I have had a calamity that has sent up its" flames to all the heavens. Nevertheless, Mary is alive--the child is born-the ship is afloat. Twelve hours ago, in ex- change for these mercies I would have given the universe. I then thanked heaven for its goodness. Shall I now take back those thanks? Shall I play the base Samian's ungrate- ful part?-vow first to the deity a golden ram, then change my intent to a silver one, then to a little one of brass, and then to none at all? No, amid this day's ruins, God be praised for this day's mercies! 'If thou seest thy house in flames, approach and warm thyself at the fire! ' That was the Catalan spirit : that shall be mine." And he spread his outstretched hands over the ship, as if gathering philosophic solace out of the quenched heats. "Better men than I, have had worse calamities-men of whom the world was not worthy! They have been stoned; they have been sawn asunder; they have been slain with the sword; they have wandered about in sheep-skins and goat-skins; they have hidden in deserts, in mountains, in dens, in caves of the earth. Who am I compared with these? Saadi the Persian wept at having no shoes, but rebuked himself at seeing a beggar page: 38-39[View Page 38-39] 38 TEMPEST-TOSSED, who had no feet. My misfortunes are nothing to what other men have borne. What have I lost? Nothing to what I have gained. Therefore, Gloria in Excelsis Deo." Patting the dog's head, he still went on talking to himself. "Mary suspects nothing," said he, " as to the disaster. She is in the bliss of ignorance. She is shipwrecked without knowing it. Hers is a novel comfort in misery-an unheard- of luxury-in misfortune." Then Rodney's grateful mind reverted lovingly to the little new-comer, swaddled in French finery down stairs. "O what a tender little thing!" said he. "That babe, amid the outer roughness of this fire-blasted ship, is like a pearl hidden in a sea-rusted shell." Whereupon the civil engineer, working with the magic enginery of his fancy, straightway built a castle in Spain for the young maid to dwell in, spanned the sky with rain- bows for her to gaze at, paved the world with flowers for her to walk on, and erected a golden gate for her to pass -through into a paradise on earth. Suddenly a great clump of drift-weed floated up appa- rently from under the ship, as if the wind had blown her first on to it, and then over it. For a moment Dr. Vail deceived himself with the halluci- nation that it was a boat of rescue; but he quickly saw his mistake, and, with a sigh of disappointment, exclaimed, "What has, become of Lane? What fate has overtaken the boats? Even if that cold-hearted man did not hear me when I called three times, still, when the ship was no longer on fire, he ought to have returned to her. Would I have abandoned him so? Never! Will he reach Cape Town? If he does--if he there presents himself without his ship, without me, and without excuse-Oliver Chantilly will lift upon the dog a lion's paw and claw him down!" Then another thought came over Rodney Vail's mind, at which he inwardly quaked. "What if I too," he exclaimed, "had left the ship!--left Mary like a dead woman, and saved my own miserable life FIGHTING AGAINST FATE. 39 in the boats!-left her to waken alone, in the fire, in the storm, in her agony!-left her to bring forth her babe in darkness and despairS--left her to cry out in her weakness, and get no answer but the tempest!--left her to famish and die, and her child to perish with her!--left her to moulder in this charnel-house, and her ashes to drift about the sea in this floating urn! O God!" he exclaimed,-look- ing heavenward, "Strip me as bare as this hulk!--beat and buffet me with every storm!--toss me on every wave!- cast me on every desolate shore round the whole earth!- but leave, O, leave me Mary and this child!" The strong man bent his head upon his hands and wept. Beaver barked reprovingly, as if such behavior in the captain ought to be rebuked by the mate. Rodney Vail then went down stairs softly; passed on tip- toe the room through whose door, ajar, he heard the babe's delicious fretting; entered into the D'Arblay citadel; slipped off his pea-jacket; cleansed his hands from the taint of tar; put on a white-flannel summer-coat; sprinkled a fresh handkerchief with the French lady's cologne; stole in upon Mrs. Vail, who was awake, and glancing at the babe, who was asleep, said peremptorily, "Mary, this child was born anonymous, and needs naming." "Born what?" exclaimed Jezebel, "dere aint noffin de matter wid dis yer lambkin's bornin!" "A name, Jezebel, a name, what shall be the baby's name?" "Law, Massa," replied that elder sister of the church, "gib her a good Scriptur name." "Well, what?" o "Massa, gib her a beautiful name out ob de good book!" '"What shall it be?" "Well," said Jezebel, pondering the matter, " call her- no, not dat--call her-no, dat aint right yit-call her, well, call her Deuteronomy. Dat sounds lubly. My boy Pete, when he was little, had a peart white chicken o' dat name. It was a fat little ting." page: 40-41[View Page 40-41] 40 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Jezebel's suggestion not meeting the approval of the critical parents, Rodney said, "Well, Mary, proud mother, name your daughter." "Rodney," replied his wife, who had already thought much on the difficult family problem of naming the first child, "since our dear little girl has had her birth so far from her own country-and since she is to live an exile in a foreign land-I want to call her Barbara." "So be it," exclaimed Rodney, pleased with the thought. ' Be Barbara her namne. Barbara Vail! Let all the world ring its bells for Barbara! Tell it to the earth and the heavens-Barbara! Barbara Vail!" The mother kissed fher babe on the forehead, as if to set the name there as a sacred seal. "Mary," said her husband, "I now believe in love at first sight, for I fell in love with Barbara Vail the first time I set my eyes upon her." "Tut," said Jezebel, "you am not de only man who will be a sayin' dat by and by." r CHAPTER III. BREAKING THE NEWS. AFTER the Coromandel had set sail from Boston for the Cape of Good Hope, not only did many friends in America follow her with gentle wishes, outward bound, but in England a young maid's heart went dancing with the ship along her voyage, and in Cape Town a little family of joyful expectants found their pulses beating faster than usual whenever they looked toward the coming vessel, laden with her precious freight of beloved hearts. The young girl in England was Lucy Wilmerding, who, while at her American home in Salem, had been Miss Mary Pritchard's favorite pupil, and whob was now sojourning at a hotel in London with her father, on their way through a course of extensive travels in Europe. Dressed with elegant simplicity, and wearing the modest ornament of a cross of quaint workmanship, this beautiful young brunette was sitting with her bonnet on, in her hotel room, waiting for a carriage in which she was to ride about London for a day's sight-seeing, when she suddenly be- thought herself of beguiling the time by writing a letter. The inkstand on the marble-top table was as-dry as dew in the afternoon-as is generally the case with ink in hotel-rooms. So Lucy Wilmerding pulled the bell-rope; and John Thomas, a solemn-faced functionary in white stockings, came at the call, and re-filled for the young writer her tiny cistern of thought-her miniature "well of English undefiled." page: 42-43[View Page 42-43] 9^ t TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Thank you, " said Lucy, with a sweet smile that ought to have rewarded him more than a shilling could have done. Mr. Lawrence Wilmerding, a middle-aged gentleman, who had been reading a guide-book, called backsthe retiring John Thomas, and supplemented the lady-like smile with a gentleman-like shilling; so that the saturnine servant went rway enriched both in spirit and estate. "Lucy, my dear, to whom are you writing?" "Papa, I am writing to Miss Pritchard-I mean to Mrs. Vail-but I keep calling her by her old nam'e, just as-the girls did at school. The letter will reach Cape Town as soon as she does herself, and will be a pleasant surprise to her. I have plenty of time to write it before the carriage comes." The fair writer, taking off her gloves, andi dipping her pen, moved her hand painstakingly across a sheet of gilt- edged paper,--her right forefinger glittering with a small ruby that flashed like a metaphor over her page. Mr. Wilmerding was an American gentleman of fortune who, having lost his wife, had taken his only daughter to Europe, and was spending time and money in promoting her education, and showing her the world. This sweet maiden then wrote the following school-girlish letter to her former teacher: August 16, 1847. London. Queen's Hotel, St. Martin's-le-Grand, City. MY DEAR MRS. VAIL, (But I have hardly become accustomed to calling you by that name.) It was only an hour ago that your letter reached me, announcing your expected change of residence to Cape Town; and my Papa, who is now hunting through the Guide Book for places to visit to-day, looks up and says you must be, powerfully hankering after a new Cape, to be willing to go for it from Cape Cod to the Cape of Good Hope. Poor, dear Papa! Ever since Mother died, he has tried to hide from me his loneliness by smiles and jests. He buys me everything he can think of, whether I ask him to or not. I have such loads of things! It is three months since I wrote you last, and it would now take BREAKING THE NEWS. 43 many pages of these little sheets-(please notice the lovely monogram: I had it cut in Geneva)-to describe all the famous places we have since visited, and all the gay and brilliant entertainments we have at- tended-particularly in Paris. We dined at Mr. Rush's. He. is the American minister, and the next day he introduced us to his Majesty Louis Philippe. His Majesty was very polite and affable, and asked me how to pronounce the word "Yankee." He said our Plenipo's neice had laughed at him for calling it "Yangkay." Papa, who is opposed to all kings, thinks that King Louis Philippe's monarchy will not last a year, and ought not to last a day. Papa, you know, is a fierce Republican. But he says even a Republic cannot last long in France. He declares in his eccentric way that all France does not contain arsenic enough to keep itself clear of two kinds of vermin-rats and kings! The ladies of Paris dress with charming taste-so neat and simple. The street-dress now worn is a rich basque over a plain skirt. This does away with the old-fashioned dragging flounces that used to sweep up and down Tremont and Washington streets. The most fashionable dressmaker in Paris-think of it!-is a man. What will such an old-fashioned and industrious little woman as you are, say to that? This new flouncer is Monsieur Worth. And it makes Papa laugh, and he says this is right: " worth makes the man, and Worth should make the woman also!" We went twice to. see Rachel, the great tragedienne. Papa wanted me to go again, but this great actress made me so wretched with her griefs, she was so real and horrible, that I could see her afterward in my dreams, creeping toward me with her dagger, and waking me in a shiver of fear. I should not dare to act so well as she does, even if I could. Perhaps I did not mention in my last that while we were in Berlin (where we lived for seven months) a young American gentleman was very attentive to Papa and me. This person has come here to see us again, and will remain for a few weeks. He comes every day, and Papa (who is very, very fond of him) says he has an old head on young shoulders-also a "faculty" for business and will one day make his fortune. Papa has no respect, you know, for a young man who cannot make his way in the world as he did himself. Our young visitor is going to enter as a naval student at Annapolis, the same place where your South African friend Mr. Chantilly was brought up. My Papa's young friend is to be first a midshipman, and by and by an admiral. He is tall and splendid, and his name is Anthony Cammeyer. page: 44-45[View Page 44-45] " TEMPEST-TOSSED. How oud that name sound for a lady? I don't mean now. O dear no-a long way off in the future. (Please keep this a great secret.) To-day is my sixteenth birthday, and Papa declared that if I searched I would find gray hairs; but when I glanced at the glass he replied, not in my head, but his. Is the Capt. Lane you speak of, Capt. C. K. Lane? If so, Papa says a the ship will be the better sailor of the two. This Capt. Lane once sailed one of Papa's ships, and proved treacherous to his trust. Papa would never have anything to do with him afterward. My letter, I hope, will reach your new home before you do yourself; and I wish it might be awaiting your arrival, to show you that I never forget my former teacher-or at least, that if I forget her in- structions, I remember her kindness. The English violet that I enclose is one from a beautiful bunch which Anthony brought me this morning for my birthday. I hope it will not altogether fade. It is now the exact emblem of your own quiet sweetness. Papa sends his remembrances to you and your husband; and Isend ! the same old multitude of kisses, one for every day in the year, and one for every hour in the day. Your former and ever grateful pupil, Lucy WTLMERDING. XX P. S.--I am going to send you, next winter, a big album of vignette g portraits of distinguished Europeans; and Papa is sure you will re- spond by sending us some representative pictures of Bushmen, Hot- tentots, and great Antarctic Seals. I Just as Lucy Wilmerding finished writing this letter, John Thomas knocked at the door, and presented on a silver salver a card for Mr. Wilmerding. X "s Who is your visitor, papa?" "My dear, he is a business friend of mine, Mr. James X Scarborough--a fine specimen of a solid and elderly English- man. I shall ask him to drive with us. He will point out objects of interest to you, and at the same time talk of busi- ness to me," Miss Lucy, putting on her gloves (for the carriage had now arrived) sweetly smiled once again on the melancholy John Thomas, and asked, "Would he be kind enough to see that her letter went into the mail box?"-to which he replied that " e would be 'appy to do so, Miss." * . D 11 BREAKING THE NIWS. ti) Indeed, everybody was like John Thomas in one respect -that is, happy to do anything for Lucy Wilmerding. Lucy's letter straightway started by ocean steamer for Cape Town, and, when within thirty-six hours of Table Bay, passed at midnight, in a thick mist, within hailing distance of the dismasted Coromandel that lay drifting helplessly in the darkness on the second night after the wreck. Could Jte letter have cried out with a living voice, as the agonized soul of the writer must have done, had she been in such near proximity to the imperiled object of her affection, a timely alarm might then have been followed by an easy searc and a happy rescue. But the opportunity passed, perhaps never to return. The history of life shows that many a golden chance dawns suddenly, lingers during one shining moment, and vanishes then into sudden gloom, leaving its brief beauty to fulfill the fate that Landor ascribes to modesty, "Which, when it goes, Is gone forever." After the mail steamer passed the Coromandel in the night, Rodney Vail, keeping vigil in the early morning, leaned pensively against the capstan, and, surveying the water-drag, said half aloud, "I certainly saw a vessel's lights last night. This shows that the Coromandel has not yet drifted out of the highway of commerce. Probably another ship will go by to-day-- and in the open daylight. I must prepare Mary for a transfer to some other cabin. The dear woman does not yet suspect the disaster." - Going down stairs to break the news to her, he asked carelessly, ( Mary, what is Lucy Wilmerding's address in London?" ( Why," said she, "let me think : it is--yes, care of Mr. James Scarborough, office of the Melbourne Company." "Mary, do you wish any other message put into my letter to Lucy, except simply Barbara's birth?" page: 46-47[View Page 46-47] " TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Yes, say that I thought of naming my baby Lucy, but that as I was brought up under the Puritan custom of' recognizing Providence in the naming of children, I thought the finger of God, in pointing us to a foreign land, pointed us also to an exile's name, and so I chose Barbara." "Mary, I wish you were walking in green fields to-day, instead of tossing in this weary ship." "Rodney, I am almost sorry to be so near Cape Town, for when the Coromandel gets there, I shall not be able to land. It will be so tedious staying on board at the wharf amid the noise of discharging the cargo. I have been told that sickness on shipboard is far more depressing in harbor than at sea." "Would you like the voyage delayed?-prolonged?" "Yes, I would, except that the other passengers are eager to reach their destination." "C No, they are not." "Why not?" "Because they have reached it already." "How so?" "They have already gone ashore." "But you did not tell me that the Coromandel had arrived?" "N4, she has not arrived." "And yet you say the passengers have gone ashore?" "Yes, they landed in the night : I did not waken you." "How strange, Rodney, that I did not hear the noise, for I woke at every whimper that Barbara made." "Ah, Mary, a mother will sleep through the rattling of thunder, and yet wake at the sigh of her child. Her ears are in her heart." "How soundly I must have slept!" ' You slept like one dead." "What, last night too?" "Mary, you did not awake during all the. time the pas sengers were leaving the ship." "Do any still remain on board?" DJ[ &AiA LT It J1L Nl sD TV "I "No, nobody but you, and Bel, and Barbara, and Beaver, and me :- but that's enough for pleasant company, is it not?" "How long must we stay here?" "Till your physician says you may land." " Is the ship moored to the wharf?" "Npt yet." "Is she anchored far out in the bay?" "No." "i Has Oliver Chantilly been on board?" ' I have not seen him." "Have you heard from him?" "Not a word." "Then, Rodney, I will tell you what to do. Land imme- diately. Go to Oliver's house, and see Rosa. Tell her that I am anchored here like the ship. Ask the dear woman to bring her sweet name and sweeter self at once to the Coromandel for my good cheer. Beg her also to bring little Philip with her, to see darling Barbara. Rosa's pet is seven years old, and mine is not yet seven days; but assure her that little girls are more cunning than bouncing boys ; and if she will not believe it, bid her come and see. The two- mothers must immediately compare their wonderful children. This is the natural etiquette of motherhood. Now, Rodney, go at once." Turning then to Bel, Mrs. Vail continued, "What shall we do without Madame ID'Arblay? I suppose she has gathered up all Gaspar's clothes and taken them away with her. How shall we dress our little tot to receive company? Poor thing, I was making for her such a grand wardrobe, and yet she must go naked after all!- Sweet darling, daisy, dimple!" Whereupon the cruel mother, with her taper white fore- finger, drilled a small hole into Barbara's left pink cheek, another into her right, and then in swift succession other punctures from left to right, and from right to left, making a series of small chasms in the delicate flesh. page: 48-49[View Page 48-49] 48 TEMPEST-TOSSED. No permanent injury resulted from these flesh wounds, which not only quickly healed, but immediately lost all traces of themselves:--like many other early impressions which fond parents seek in vain to leave on their children. "Dat Dobbly woman," said Jezebel, " took French leave, but lef de brat's duds behind. I truss de Lord she'll never come back for 'emn What's de good book say? 'Wanity ob wanity, all is wanity.'" "Why did Madame D'Arblay leave Gaspar's clothes?" asked Mary. "Cause, Missis, I 'spose sich like fineries would be out o' fashion where she's agwine to --among dem Hottentots.. Why, dey' don't wear no clothes at all, dem folks. De Dobbly boy don't want no sich duds among dat tribe! What's de good book say? 'Let not him dat putteth on de harness boast like him dat putteth it off.'" "Mary," said her hupband, gravely, "intelligence has reached the ship that a strange shipwreck has lately occurred in these waters. Three nights ago, during a hurricane, a vessel bound to the Cape of Good Hope was struck by lightning. Tlis was while you were lying pros- trate and unconscious. The ill-fated craft was suddenly set all ablaze from stem to stern. 'Not a moment was to be lost. Danger pressed. The captain ordered everybody into the boats. It was a babel of bewilderment. The ship's company had no time to save anything, hardly their lives. One man refused to go. He had a sick wife who could not be moved-supposed at one time to be dead. He stood by' her, resolved to die with her. } The boats pushed off, leaving this man and woman to perish with the ship. Suddenly the fountains of the rain were ,loosed--Heaven's floods were poured out to quench Hell. The conflagration was drenched -drowned. The ship was injured, but saved; the passen- gers were shipwrecked, but survived. That ship still drifts at sea with her little remnant of people on board. But they are safe-yes, safe and sound; and their rescue is only a question of time-just a mere question of time." BREAKING THE NEWS. 49 "How did you learn these strange facts? ' "Do they distress you?" "No, they delight me ; I mean, the safety of the ship and her passengers. It was through Heaqven's pity that they did not perish. But where is that vessel now?" "She has passed under my command." "What, and you not on board of her?" "Yes, Mary, I am on board of her now." "And that ship is the ? ' "Yes, it is the Coromandel." The whole truth flashed at last on Mary's mind, Then the delicate woman, trembling with a sudden ex. citement which was born not of fear but of love, sent forth through her eyes a look that conveyed her whole heart's homage to the man who had stood by her through her double peril. Rousing herself to the occasion, she met it with a strange courage; and yet not strange; for the frailest bodies some- times have the strongest souls. "I will shake off my sickness, my weakness," said she. "I will be brave and fear not. Rodney, you thought me dead. But I shall live! --live for your sake, and for Bar- bara's! The breath of life has been breathed anew into my soul. I feel it blowing through me like a summer wind-yes, like a whiff from the wild roses of Newhury Lane. I will arise from this bed, and work with you on deck. I will make myself a sailor, and go before the mast." "No, my darling," said her proud husband. "You can- not go before the mast, for every mast is gone already." This pleasantry showed to Mrs. Vail, better than any argument could have done, that her husband was not dis- heartened at the situation. O Rodney," said she, " what a great, what a horrible anxiety this'will be to Oliver and Rosa Chantilly! Poor Rosa! She will imagine that we have gone to the bottom of the sea! I feel more for her than for myself." "I believe," replied Rodney, "that after Capt. Lane 3 page: 50-51[View Page 50-51] 50 TEMPEST-TOSSED. reaches Table Bay, Oliver Chantilly will send that runaway back again to find his lost ship."' "O Rodney, my husband, how your soul must have agonized! What a burden of woe you bore! And yet I knew nothing of it! I was shut-out from it!-denied my just right to share it with you! This is terrible for me to think of! O let me never again be robbed of my precious opportunity to suffer with you in every hour of all your trials I And you, dear Bel, how good you have been!-- how heroic! - how kind! Do you feel troubled now?" "Troubled?" inquired Jezebel. "Law, my dear lamb, no; troubles am sich troublesome tings dat I dunno how to take care ob 'em myself, and so I gib 'em all right up straight into de Lord's hands. What's de good book say? ' Cast all your care upon Him, for he careth for you."' "Aunt Bel," asked Mary, "how long do you think we shall be drifting about before we are picked up?" "How long?" inquired Bel. "Why, what's de good book say? It says ' How long, O God, how long?' Dat's how long it will be." "Dear Bel," asked Mary, " what do you mean?" for Bel now assumed the weird manner that sometimes took such strange possession of her. "Are you speaking in riddles? Have you something to say and yet fear to say it? Speak; I can bear anything-everything ; keep nothing back; let me know all." Bel had a spiritual freight on her mind, of which she wished to disburden herself, yet felt a solicitude against depressing the tender invalid; but Rodney, whose approving glance the old sybil sought before uttering her oracles, seemed to invite the fullest confession; whereupon Jezebel spoke in the following singular strain: "Missis," said she, "my boy Pete, he come to me, and 4ays, ' Mammy, obey de spirit ob de Lord.' Now, Massa Vail, what's de good book say? 'Arise, and take de young chile and flee into Egyp.' But how are we agwine to flee-into Egyp? Dere aint no Egyp in dis place to flee into. What BREAKING THE NEWS. 51 nex does de good book say? ' Go lead de chillen ob Israel into de Desert.' But how are we agwine to git into de desert? Dere aint no desert hereabouts for to git into. Now, Massa Vail, if dere aint no Egyp, and if dere aint no desert, how den are we agwine to obey de good book? Well, my boy Pete, he says, 'Mammy, de spirit ob de Lord, de same spirit what led de young chile into Egyp, and what led de chillen ob Israel into de desert-dat same spirit is agwine to lead dis young lambkin roun' de sea-yes, roun' and roun' de great deep. Dat's de Egyp, dat's de desert, which de spirit ob de Lord is agwine to lead de young chile into. De great Shepherd ob de flock is agwine to lead de little white lambkin tru de green pastures ob de big sea-tru de still waters ob de great deep.' Massa Vail, what blows dis yer ship about? It is de Lord's breff--it is de spirit ob His mouth. But why does de Lord blow dis great ship roun' and roun' over de waves and tru de storms? Well, Pete, he says, 'Mammy, dat's for to keep de young chile unspotted ob de world.' Don't you see, Massa Vail? Why can't dis ship go straight to de green and beautiful lan'? Because de young chile can't go into de world, and keep clear ob de spots. So den to keep dis yer little one white and pure, de spirit ob de Lord blows like a mighty wind on dis yer ship, and totes de lambkin into de midst ob de sea, far away from de shore, so as to keep dis little one safe from de world, where de moth and rust corrupt. Dat's it, Massa Vail. It's to keep de young chile pure and white! What's de good book say?-pure as de upright in heart, and white as dat light which de Twelve 'Ciples saw in de Mount of Trans- migration." "Well, Jezebel," inquired Rodney, with smiling incre- ? dulity, "how many days does Pete condemn us to wander over these waves?" "Pete?" replied Jezebel. "It aint Pete. It's de spirit ob de Lord. What's de good book say? 'Tarry till I come! Yes, Massa Vail, our times are in His hands. Tarry till I come. Folks can't never hurry de Lord!" page: 52-53[View Page 52-53] 5TEMPEST-TOSSED. At the end of this colloquy, Dr. Vail went on deck. "Sail ho!" he exclaimed, discovering with wild joy a white speck on the distant horizon. Rushing immediately down stairs, he announced the cheering intelligence to Mary. "We are saved!" said he, and his face beamed with light. - "Rescue is at hand."- Whereupon, taking his weather-glass, he went back to reconnbitre the approaching hope. "Yes," said he, adjusting the lens to his eyes, "no mis- take. Hull down. Two topsails above the horizon. $tar- board tack, and heading this way. Is that a flag? Let me look again. No, merely a passing bird's wing. A ship?-- no, only two masts: a brig. Bearing right down on us - that's plain. How late is it? A full hour yet till sunset. She will reach us before dark. I wonder if the Coromandel can be seen from the brig? Not from her deck, for that's below the horizon ; but perhaps there's some sailor at the mast-head. He could see me. O heaven, send up some man with a glass to spy out my misfortune! The brig's sails grow larger. She is coming at good speed. How beauti- fully she careens to the breeze! I will set an extra signal to catch her eye." Rodney ran to a state-room, and stripping one of -the beds of its white linen, carried the sheets to the deck, fixed them to a mop-handle, rolled an empty cask to the top of the binnacle, and, standing on the cask's head, swung his white emblem to and fro with both hands. "How small," said he, "that vessel's sails look to the naked eye! But they grow larger. She comes nearer." Fatigue soon crept into the sinews of his arms, and he occasionally dropped his flag, and rested. During his resting-spells, he noted through the glass the motions of the coming craft. "The wind," said he, "is growing lighter; she careens 'less; it will be a calm sunset." Slowly but steadily the strange brig pursued her course BI KEAKING( THE NEWS. \ 53 toward the Coromandel; and at this rate, her hull, as Rodney argued, must soon show a black line under the white sails, "I must let Mary know what to do,' said he, and he went into the cabin to prepare his wife to be moved to the rescu- ing brig. "Jezebel," he said, "collect quickly a few things needed for the mother and her child. Don't try to take too much. It will be a small boat that will board us. We can afford to lose everything else, if we thereby save our lives." "Rodney," inquired Mary, feeling more disturbed at the rescue than she had been by the shipwreck, "how can I possibly be moved?" "Why; Mary," he replied, "I shall carry you in my arms exactly as Jezebel must carry Barbara." A pallor overspread Mary's face at the prospect of being carried from the ship into a boat and thence from the boat to another ship; for, though she was courageous in great tlhings, she was cowardly in small. "Jezebel," exclaimed Rodney, eagerly, " make haste!" The obedient old servant bustled cheerfully about the state-room, and contrived a way of rigging Barbara as a papoose for safe transit. Rodney returned to the deck, taking hammer and nails, and fastened his flag-staff to the binnacle in order to keep his signal in permanent sight. He was in a fine delirium of pleasure. "It is worth suffering the agony of despair," said he, " for the sake of enjoying the luxury of hope." Lifting his glass again to his eyes to feast on the sight of the white-winged angel that was coming toward him with relief, he exclaimed with a sudden tremor in his voice, "O Heaven! the brig has tacked about, and is going off, leaving me behind." A wild emotion, compounded half of anger and half of agony, seized possession of him, and went boiling through his blood like a stream of quicksilver. page: 54-55[View Page 54-55] 54 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Ship ahoy!" he cried, not stopping to think that his voice could not reach a hundredth part of the distance to the truant craft. "Ship ahoy!" he repeated, tearing off the mop-handle from its iron fastenings, and waving violently his flag of distress. "Ship ahoy!" he screamed, and his cry pierced the deck to the cabin, and entered Mary's listening ears. "Hark! My husband's voice!" said she; "the strange ship must be now within hailing distance. Let us be ready." "Never mind, honey," said Bel, "wait till dat ship comes along. Dere's plenty o' time. No hurry." Jezebel had noticed in Mary a motion as if she were about to rise from her sick bed. "Bel," said Mrs. Vail, "please dress me. I think I am able to walk. Let me go up stairs." "No, dear lamb," replied her watchful shepherdess. "When de 'Postles was in prison, and de jailer swung open de gate, did dey git up and go out? No. Dey said, 'Let 'em come and fetch us out.' Now, missus, let 'em come and fetch us out." "Ship ahoy!" still cried Rodney on deck, and the shriek- ing voice filled the cabin with louder and hoarser sounds. "Ain't no use o' shoutin' like dat," remarked Jezebel, quietly. "What's de good book say? 'Havin' ears to hear, dey hear not.' So if dey have ears but hear not, dere ain't no use o' shoutin'." Then Rodney came tearing down stairs, bursting into the captain's state-room and out again in a monent, bearing with him a rifle and ammunition, with which he hastened back to the deck, where, loading his piece, he fired it as a signal gun. He did it once-twice-thrice. But the mimic thunder of the discharges seemed hardly louder than a sea-bird's scream. The departing brig made no answer, and went lessening . into the east, while the s tting sun went broadening into the west. "Night is coming on," exclaimed Rodney, " and the brig is going away. O what shall I do to call her back through the darkness? I must light a torch." Bolting again with hot haste into the cabin, he seized a bedquilt, carried it up stairs, rammed it like a wad into a big iron kettle, poured upon it the contents of a case of olive oil, and set it burning like a Greek lamp. "Massa Vail," exclaimed Jezebel, who made her clumsy way to the deck, to see what was the matter, " what makes I you look so wild and pale?" "Bel," he cried, with an expression of anguish on his coun- tenance, " that vessel yonder is going away from us, and here ' comes a night-fog shutting us in with thick weather, so that even this flaming light cannot be seen half a mile away. Another hope is quenched!" and he beat his breast with his right hand, as if helping his heart to break. "Lawks a-massy," said Jezebel, "I hear dat baby a cryin' in de cabin," and she immediately hastened back to her do- mestic quarters, murmuring as she went, "What's de good book say? 'A little chile shall lead dem.' So ole Bel must foller after de lambkin." Thick darkness, heavy with fog, then fell on the sea. The burning flambeau cast a flickering glare round the deck and out a little way on the waters. Dim, damp, and lurid was the illumination, just enough to make darkness visible. In the strange and weird light, Rodney Vail, whose hope had already burned out before the fire did which was to keep it bright, and who was now feeling the greatest agony which he had ever known in his life, sat on the deck with his head between his knees, and with his arms clasped in front of his throbbing forehead as if binding it against bursting. Flocks of night-birds, attracted by the light, came from far and near, and flew back and forth through the luminous space, sometimes almost dipping their wings into the fire itself. page: 56-57[View Page 56-57] 56 ' TEMPEST-TOSSED. Beaver, awe-struck at the vivid scene, and not even daring to bark at the audacious birds, crouched down in fear at his master's feet. Rodney Vail, noticing neither the light, nor the birds, nor the dog, exclaimed, "O Oliver Chantilly, my friend! my friend! are you not searching for the lost Coromandel? The wandering ship waits for you! Heaven help you to find and save my little family of castaways!" CHAPTER IV. CLOSER THAN A BROTHER. I' T receive a pleasant letter in trust for another person, and to have no right to open it, but only to suspect that it is full of kindness and affection, is to entertain an angel unawares. "For Mrs. Mary Vail, care of Mrs. Rosa Chantilly;" said the postman, lingering for a moment in the porch of Mr. Chantilly's house at Cape Town, sheltering himself from the rain that fell in torrents, and exchanging a few honorable winks with the blooming housemaid who had just opened the front door. ' cThe letther," said Bridget, receiving it, "looks as if it was from the ould counthry." "It be, Miss : it's from Lunnon." "Ah, bad luck to London," said she, " and good luck to Dublin." There was always a tiff between Bridget and the postman; for one was from Yorkshire, and the other from the Shannon. Oliver Chantilly's house in Cape Town fronted on one of the Dutch Canals, and was shaded by the oaks that bor- dered those water-courses. But on this particular morning no house in the city needed trees to shade it; the whole heavens were hung with black. Moreover a still gloomier shadow rested on Oliver Chantilly's mind. His anxiety was for Rodney Vail. The Cape Argus of that morning, which he held in his hand, contained a lamentable account of ravages by the recent hurricane. page: 58-59[View Page 58-59] 68 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Rosa," said her husband, "I am disturbed about this storm." Rosa was a sunshiny wife, with wide brows, laughing eyes, a kindly countenance, a stout heart, and a temperament of hopefulness that nerved her against all ordinary troubles, and particularly against such as her husband was now bor- rowing in advance. "It will be time enough to worry," she replied, " when you have something to worry about. .The tempest has not hurt us; perhaps it has not hurt them." "I suppose," said Oliver, "that this letter is from' the Wilmerdings; it has L. W. in the wax. What a beautiful seal! Wilmerding is a man of fine taste, and is giving his daughter all the advantages of travel and society; I hope she will be the happier for it. This London post-mark is dated eleven days after the Coromandel was to sail from Boston; and yet the Vails are still lengthening out their weary and stormy voyage." The Chantillys had not only expected the Coromandel, but were looking for her with straining eyes, just as they would have watched for some floating green fragment, some fair familiar meadow, some sweet remembered garden broken off from their native country and set drifting toward them over the sea to gladden their eyes on an alien shore. Oliver Chantilly's newspaper had irritated him with the following article: At 5 o'clock yesterday afternoon, (said The Argus,) an ominous calm set in and prevailed for three hours, during which not a leaf stirred on our city oaks, and the water-sheet of -the harbor was like glass. Table Mountain had been all day wreathed in the familiar fog that we are accustomed to style the Table Cloth; but, in the after- noon, this mist gradually disappeared, having evaporated in the rarefied atmosphere. Just as the sun went down, the clouds gathered from all quarters of the sky at once, with rumblings of thunder louder and nearer, and with wind from the Southeast which, in half an hour, blew a tornado. ----- . . The roof of the unfinished Episcopal chapel now building on St. Vincent street was wrenched off and whirled into the churchyard with a crash loud enough to wake the dead. The scaffolding used in repairing the government buildings was crumpled like a house of cards, and tumbled down into the open square in a miscellaneous heap. The suburban residence of Sir Richard Wilkinson suffered considerable damage, chiefly in the partial destruction of his costly conservatory, the glass panes of which were broken as if struck simultaneously with a hundred hammers. Two barns belonging to the baronet were overturned and shat- tered, and the hay was strewn for three-quarters of a mile over the same fields from which it had been mown. Simultaneously with the tornado came the rain. Capt. Scar- borough, our oldest hydrographer, says that for forty-seven years there has been no rainfall so great within an equal space of time. His rain-guage indicated 1a inches in an hour. Great fears are expressed for incoming ships, one of which is now overdue, namely, the Coromandel, of Boston, Capt. Lane. '"Rosa," said Oliver, throwing aside his journal, "the Coromandel must have been in this storm. Her time is up. She certainly was in the very heart and core of this tornado. What if she -" but he dismissed the distressing thought. "They who foresee calamities," suggested Rosa, "suffer them twice." Just then, dashing into the room, and holding up a cage with a squirrel in it, came Master Philip Chantilly, the sole child of his father and mother, a young monarch of a seven years' reign. "Look, mother," said the boy, "the rain has got into Juju's cage. It has wet Juju's fur. Juju looks like a drowned rat. Poor Juju!" "Well," said Philip's mother to her son, "that is because you left Juju out all night on the back piazza., How would you like to be left out all night in the rain?" "O that would be fun!" said Philip. "Mother, may I stay out to-night? Juju and I will stay out together." Philip was a black-eyed lad, looking like his father, but with softer hair and a more intellectual cast of face. He o -. page: 60-61[View Page 60-61] 60 TEMPEST-TOSSED. was sometimes called King Philip, after his favorite Amer- ican Indian ; but his chief title was Prince. "If that ship is coming," said the boy, " why don't she come?" To-childhood, all hopes are plausible, and all wishes possible. "If she don't come," he added, "I shall get Capt. Scar- borought' spy-glass and draw her here." As Philip had noticed how a, lens brought distant objects near, he thought this an admirable instrument for bringing the Coromandel into port, and his Aunt Mary to Cape Town. Mrs. Vail was not his aunt, but the boy had conferred this title upon her by courtesy. He had never seen this gracious lady, but she was to him a very real aunt, for she had sent him letters and picture-books. Oliver Chantilly caught at Philip's mention of Capt. Scarborough, and said, "Rosa, I must go and have a talk with that old salt about this storm." "Let me go, too!" petitioned King Philip, with a royal plea which was granted on the spot. Wherever the sire went, the son went also; a kind of travelinrg companionship common to almost every Paterfa- milias while he has but one boy; though the custom falls into desuetude as the case grows towards six. Mrs. Rosa Chantilly, with matronly prudence, yet with mock objection, said with a frowning smile, "It rains too hard for this delicate child to go out; his hair " (and she patted it) " will get. pelted like Juju's ; my little son will get drowned, like the cat in the well." "Father," cried he, " appealing to the nominal head of the family, "Juju got wet, and why can't I?" "Madame Fairweather," exclaimed Oliver to his wife, "all mothers act like hens, and all boys like ducks. Philip, come." So out they went into the deluge. Oliver Chantilly was a hale and hearty young man, hardly turned of thirty; with dark eyes, bushy hair, heavy mous- CLOSER THAN A BROTHER. 01 tache, a manly and fine-looking face; and with the figure and air of one born to command. Associated in some business enterprises with Sir Richard Wilkinson, who made the contracts for the public works, ! the young American had prospered in his fortunes, formed a I large circle of acquaintances, and become a general favorite. The two rain-pelted travelers, after trudging quarter of a mile (Prince Philip choosing the wettest parts of the street) entered an antique shop that bore this sign over the door- way: \ ( APT. Jo IN SCARBOROUGH. Charts and Nautical Instruments. "Captain," said Oliver Chantilly, "you know I expect the Coromandel. The question is, Has she been struck by this tiger's-paw? What think you?" "Think?" replied Scarborough. "I've got through thinkin'; I've made hup my mind." "Well, what is it?" "You see," said Scarborough, '" first, the ship's new. Then the captain hain't Hay One. Now the captain of a bran new ship always wants to make his first trip at a flyin' and kitin' rate. He wants to cut five days chock off from hevery other ship's time. Lane wants his spick-and-span wessel to shine in the newspapers. But the men who most want to shine sometimes most git the burnish rubbed off. There was halways a crook in that Lane--somethin' not quite straight, not haltogether square, not wicious but weak. Some ships 'ave to be their own captains. Lane? Why he's a silk-'at sailor; give me the reg'lar tarpaulin kind--brought hup from the foc's'l." The old hydrographer was variously called Scarborough, Scawherry, and Scaw. He was an eccentric, opinionated, kindly curmudgeon, past three-score years, possessing a gigantic physique which time had not shaken, a comely white head full of experience and egotism, and a tongue in whose tip dwelt a scorpion. It was his chronic habit to swing a rod of criticism over page: 62-63[View Page 62-63] 62 TEMPEST-TOSSED. sea-faring men who made mistakes in their art; and he would snap at an English admiral with the same biting teeth with which he would grip a stupid stevedore. The old salts in Cape Town used to say that when the instrument-vender kept a civil tongue, he was Scarborough; when he fell away a point or two from decorous speech, he was Scawherry; and when the wind of his wrath was high enough to set the damnations flying, he was Scaw. The hydrographer's variable name was thus a moral barometer to show the weather-gauge of his temper. Oliver Chantilly mentioned to him that there had been a change of wind since the first south-easter, and that a steady gale was now blowing from the west, making a dangerous surf along the shore., He doubted whether the Tantalus, a British man-of-war then at anchor in Table Bay, could get a boat to the beach that morning. It now looked, he thought, as if there might be a suspension of all communication between the anchored ships and the shore. If, therefore, the Coromandel should now arrive, she could not land her boats, but must anchor off somewhere near the Tantalus, and wait for the surf to die down. To all which Capt. Scarborough made no reply, but turned his time-honored mind toward King Philip, who had been putting his mischievous fingers into a glue-pot, and was other- wise showing a meddlesomeness which the grandfatherly captain egged on and enjoyed. "May I look at this sexton?" asked Philip, who gave a too ecclesiastical name to a sextant. "Yes, my young hadmiral," replied old Nautilus, "there never was a boy but what liked a wessel, nor hever a clever lad but what wanted to be a sailor. Folks said to me when I was young, boys will be boys; but I say to folks now, boys will be men. And this boy will be hevery hinch a man -eh, Prince?" Philip was thereupon caught up in the old gentleman's tremendous hands, tossed into the air, and waved about, not like a prince, but like a prince's feather. CLOSER THAN A BROTHER. 63 Capt. Scaw then mysteriously proposed, between two winks of his jeyes, that his tobacco pipe and wallet, together with half a crown of silver money, should be given for the purchase of Master Philip Chantilly in fee simple, and that the purchased boy should thereupon be transferred from his father to be the property of John Scarborough, his heirs and assigns-albeit the aforesaid old gentleman had no heirs and few assigns. "No," replied Philip, addressing the two men separately, I will have you for my father, and you for my grandfather." "That decision," said old Scaw," is better than Solomon's cuttin' of the babby in two." On the following Saturday, Oliver Chantilly picked up his newspaper on his door-step, discovered in it an article which he dreaded to show to his wife, and, folding the paper and I putting it into his pocket, immediately called Philip, and took the boy and the paper over to Capt. Scarborough's shop. A distressing shipwreck, (said The Argus, which Oliver had just put into his pocket,) has occurred within two days' sail of our harbor. The American ship Coromandel, 418 tons, Capt. C. K. Lane, bound from Boston to this port, encountered on Tuesday evening last (Lat. 30 59' S., Long. 14 17' E.) the thunder-storm which then swept over this colony with such fearful violence. The vessel was struck by lightning, and in a few moments was enveloped in flames. Her burning was so rapid that the passengers had no time to secure their effects-hardly to save their lives. There is a fearful apprehension that three persons perished, namely, Dr. Rodney Vail, his wife, and her nurse-all Americans. They were left behind in the ship, and, having no boat, are supposed to have gone down with the wreck. Capt. Lane reports the strange story that Mrs. Vail, at the begin- ning'of the catastrophe, was seen by him lying dead in her berth, and that her husband, through overpowering grief, had become crazed, and refused to leave the corpse. e As to the third person, a domestic, the captain gives no clear account, and seems to have forgotten her existence. The survivors assert that this hitherto popular officer was some- what confused, and some of them hint that he showed the white feather. The torrents of cold rain that accompanied the lightning drenched , . ---1 page: 64-65[View Page 64-65] " TEMPEST-TOSSED, the escaping boats' crews and passengers, so that from their exposure, their insufficient provisions, and their anxieties, they suffered untold miseries; until at last,' after four days of tempest-tossings, they reached the Tantalus in the harbor, on board of which they received a British welcome. - There is a bare possibility that Dr. Vail, whom the passengers describe as a man of great nerve, may yet be picked up on some float- ing spar; but this is hoping against hope. Oliver Chantilly, who had read this horrifying statement, entered the instrument-vender's shop, and found the old man in a fierce rage at the intelligence. "Think o' that ship," said Scaw, "'avin' no lightnin'- conductor! Why was there no 'Arris prewentive? Crim- inal carelessness, sir. The cat-o-nine is punishment too good-too good. But there's one comfort; and that is, if any lives are lost, the losers will know who to blame for it. That Lane never was Hay One. Always pushin' himself above his betters. That silk-'at sailor! Bosh! demmit, he never was a seaman." Capt. Scaw's voice went creaking about his shop like a new shoe on a sanded floor. "Scarborough," exclaimed Chantilly, " come, to the point. What are you willing to say and stick to, about that ship? Hit the nail exactly on the head." "Well, Hojiver," replied the hydrographer, "my 'ed is white: the Table Cloth is wrappin' itself round it: it is wrappin' sixty-three years hinside; -and that's a cargo of some walue, my friend; but I'll wager it hall-yes, demmit, hair, head, neck and hall, that the Coromandel is afloat at this minnit." "Where?- show me on this chart." "Well, about there. But she's a crawlin' away from there werry fast. She's a goin' hoff afore the southeast Trade wind like a devil's moth before an 'ummin' bird. Holiver, that wessel ain't gone down: she's still a woyagin'. That man- what's his name? -Wail?- well, he will be a sendin' out bottles from that ship, and some of 'em will be CLOSER THAN A BROTHER. 65 picked hup and reported. Wager you a mug o' hold hale on it, sir, if you dare. I will write to my brother, James Scarborough, in London, for him to report the case to the Hadmiralty." Without waiting to go to his own office, Oliver Chantilly borrowed Scarborough's suggestion of writing, andj imme- diately seizing a pen, wrote two letters, one to an acquaint- ance in the Navy Department at Washington, and the other to Lawrence Wilmerding in London. These two letters were sh nearly alike in substance that one of them will serve here for both: CAPE ToWN, Oct. 15, 1847. MY DEAR WILMERDING :- I make haste to communicate the enclosed distressing intelligence, cut from The Argus of this morning. But I don't believe a lying word of the Coromandel's sinking-mark that! Lane's opinion was mere inference; and, as one man's inference is as good as another's, miners that the rain, ,not the sea, extinguished the fire. The story about Mrs. V.'s death is incredible-a fiction. Not one of the survivors had evey heard a word or, hint of her sickness, except that she was delicate, and habitually kept her room. I tell you there has been foul play-at least in the captain's desert- ing his ship instead of cruising round her to the last. The Coromandel was jaunty and snug (so Rodney wrote me)-meant for Arctic search, and made strong as an iron-pot. The Willistons of the Harmony Factory loaded her with a cargo of their hermetic meats, vegetables, and fruits, in cans and jars, for our whaling-market here. So take note of two points :-first, if the ship has not gone down, she is just the water-bucket that could go dancing about the ocean for a generation without either cracking a timber, or springing a leak; and next, that she has provender enough to feed a small family for a lifetime, or at least to keep the sea-wolf from ever howling at their cabin-door. For God's sake, Wilmerding, lay the case at once before the Admi- ralty, and ask to be informed of any news picked up by bottle or otherwise. I have written in a similar strain to the Washington office. This goes to-day- by the Plover, kindness of Capt. Bewick. page: 66-67[View Page 66-67] " TEMPEST-TOSSED. By joining the hands of the two governments, we can save a drown. ing man :-the one man of all the world who, in my opinion, is most fit to live in it. Distressingly yours, OLIVER CHANTILLY. Just as Chantilly had finished writing his two letters, in came Lane. "How are you, Scarborough?" inquired the shipwrecked mariner. "Sir," replied Scaw, '( I am not at the flat dead bottom yit, but I think you are, leastways you are werry near it." "What do you mean, sir?" ' What do I mean, sir? Well, I mean, sir, that you 'av sunk werry low, sir,-demmit, werry low. That's what I mean, sir!" Scarborough, who'had no idea that he was adding insult to injury, was polite enough to introduce Lane to Chantilly. Lane extended his hand, but Chantilly refused it. "No," said Oliver, "I decline the honor. The reason? Well, sir, on board your ship was my best friend. In his peril you deserted him. So I spurn your acquaintance--I would prefer to know your dog instead. Trained as I have been to a ship, I can inform you that the quarter-deck is no place for a coward. Give up seamanship, sir, and-raise vegetables. If Vail's life is lost, or if a hair of his head is harmed, you shall answer for it to me--to me." Having said this with a vehemence 'that equally aston- ished the two listeners, Chantilly abruptly left their presence, accompanied by Philip, who tightly grasped his father's hand. So tumultuous was the strong man's agitation that he hardly noticed this familiar act by the boy, but moved freely his other and unclasped hand in active gestures, soliloquizing as follows: "No," said he, "the ship did not go down. They were deceived: first blinded by the glare of light, then bewil- dered by the deep darkness. Consider the drenching rain. CLOSER THAN A BROTHER. 67 Consider the confusion and excitement. Consider how natural the presumption of her sinking, and how easy the inference that she sank. Then, too, the vessel did not take fire from within but from without. It was no smouldering spark, eating like a worm through the cargo. That would have melted the ship as in a furnace. But it began in the rigging. It set the whole inflammable net-work of tarred ropes into a sudden flame --all the gear being as dry as a tinder-box. Then, hardly had the passengers got into the boats before the rain began. They were not half a mile away before they were under a deluge. This they all admit. And then it never occurred to that coward-that deserter-that Lane-it never once occurred to him that as lightning could set a ship on fire, so rain could put the fire out. There was no time for the blaze to get between the decks. It had nothing to feed on except the rain. So I say the rain quenched it-not the sea. By Heaven, I will make Cape Town too hot to hold that milksop Lane longer than he can beg a shirt to go home. To think that such a dastard should pluck his own worthless self like a brand from the burning, and yet leave one of nature's noblemen like Rodney Vail to roast to death. But Rodney is not dead-he lives! O Rodney, you were my friend! Yes, to the utmost which that word means. A friend! Not every man knows what it is to have a friend-no, nor what it is to be a friend. Rodney Vail knew both. How often he and I talked of friend- ship and its obligations! How strenuously he maintained it to be a holy tie!-an unwritten oath!-an unsworn mar- riage of man with man! What a friend to his friends was Rodney Vail! He would have made any sacrifice for them --any sacrifice for me. I will be worthy of such a friend- ship, and reciprocate its obligations. Rodney Vail is count- ing at this moment on my help-he is building on it-he is looking for it-he is living in it. I will search for him round the world, if need be, till I find him--and I shall find him; yes, safe and sound. God save my friend!" Oliver Chantilly, in his absorbed mood, had now reached page: 68-69[View Page 68-69] 68 TEMPEST-TOSSED. the door-step, when his sober-minded son, who had been greatly perplexed at his father's mutterings, peremptorily inquired, "Papa, what are you talking about?" But the answer was interrupted by Mrs. Rosa Chantilly, who, on opening the door, held up her two hands with cheerful horror, and exclaimed, "Dear me, Philip, you are again all besmeared with tar I No, don't kiss me ; you will stick fast." Whereupon Philip kissed and re-kissed his mother, till their two faces did stick fast--yet not with tar. But when Mrs. Chantilly was briefly informed by her husband of the burning of the Coromandel, and of the arrival of the ship's boats without the two passengers for whose safety her heart was so full of hope, Rosa stood like a rose blighted on its stalk. The color fled from her cheeks. The brief tale which her husband told was so, stunning to her senses that she did not dare ask for the particulars. To know that others were shipwrecked was to Rosa Chantilly more dreadful than to be shipwrecked herself. "O Mary Vail!" she exclaimed, and she wrung her hands in agony, and walked up and down the room. "That dear, dear woman!" she said, sobbing. "What a heart-rending calamity!--what an excruciating death! O Oliver, let me never know whether Mary was burned in the flame or drowned in the sea! Let me be always in doubt! That sweet, lovely woman! What a tender flower to be blasted in such a storm! O my husband, is there any hope? Can it be that Mary is yet alive and saved? Has not heaven after all been merciful, and sent her some angel of help? Come here, Philip, my son,"- (and she caught him in her arms) " you shall never go on a ship in all your life--no, not even to re-visit your native land. My dear husband, why did we ever come to this foreign shore to. tempt and lure our friends to follow us!-to lead them unwittingly to such a dreadful fate! Never, never can I forgive myself for com- ing here, and for asking Rodney and Mary to follow. O CLOSER THAN A BROTHER. 69 had we not appealed to them, had we not held out tempta- tions to them, they would never have started, but would now be alive and happy at their old farm in Salem. It was I who did it all-I, I! Dear Mary, it was I who led you to your death! Oliver, it was not your fault--it was mine. ,I only am to- blame. O Mary Vail, do not die! Live! Live so come back to us, and I will kneel at your feet and ask your forgiveness." Rosa Chantilly buried her face in her hands, like a sinner confessing her guilt. "My sweet Rosa," said her husband, compassionately, his voice melting into softness at the sight of his wife's misery, "I am horror-struck as you are, but then," he added, turn- ing away, clenching his hand, stiffening every cord of his frame, and speaking with an emphasis that shook him with its strength from head to foot, " the Coromandel is not lost. No, it cannot be. In God's name I forbid it! It would be a wanton waste of precious human hearts. I will fight against destiny itself for the safety of that'ship. Fate shall for once yield to justice! The Almighty Ruler of men is witness to my agony for my friend, and must give me pity and help. Heaven cannot, dare not be brutal to a helpless man. Rodney's life shall be spared. O God, I implore, I command, nay, in Thy name I swear, that Rodney Vail shall live!" If Oliver Chantilly was half-crazed when he uttered these excited, defiant, yet not blasphemous words, it was because he had been taught from his childhood that "The kingdom of heaven is taken by violence, and the violent take it by force." page: 70-71[View Page 70-71] CHAPTER V. THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK. nO N the day after the excited interview at the instrument- maker's shop, between Lane on the one hand and Scarborough and Chantilly on the other, the two latter, con- stituting the party of the second part, addressed to a British public the following note: To the Editor of the Argus : We beg the favor of your columns to state our conviction, first, that the Coromandel did not sink, but is drifting about the sea; next, that her three deserted passengers are alive and may be saved; and, finally, that this community owes it to the sentiment of humanity to organize a search expedition at once. (Signed) JOHN SCARBOROUGH, Hydrographer. OLIVER CHANTILLY, Formerly U. S. N. The above note, signed as it was by so well-known a citizen as Capt. Scarborough, made a stir in Cape Town, and led many persons to express a wish that Admiral Gillingham, Commander pf the British frigate Tantalus, lying in the harbor, would consider it his duty to institute a search for the missing ship. The Admiral was waited on by a com- mittee with old John Scarborough at their head, who looked more like an admiral than the admiral himself. Gillingham politely received the deputation, but shook his head, and replied that while he would be only too happy to co-operate in any and every scheme having for its object the saving of human life, or the rescue of imperiled property, yet he had been sent to the Cape Colony Coast under strict orders to perform a special duty to the Coast Survey, and he could not weigh anchor to depart from the letter of his instructions. THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK. 71 "I have already consulted," he said, "Sir Richard Wilkin- son, who has great influence with the Home Government, and I find that Sir Richard corroborates my own view."! So the expedition of search ended before it began. A few weeks after this repulse, Scarborough and Chantilly addressed another joint statement to the public, which, before it is inserted here, needs a preliminary explanation. Never- theless, this explanation will not succeed in explaining the mystery to which it refers, for that mystery is the Sea Serpent. "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?" A faith in- the Sea Serpent, as in the Flying Dutchman, animates the breasts of many mariners of all nations. This faith has the authority of Holy Church to support it. Good Bishop Pontoppidan of Norway--God rest his I soul!-for he was not only a priest, but a naturalist-taught the sailors of that rough coast to believe solemnly in a mythical creature that goes gliding about in storm and fog, lifting its head, shooting forth its tongue, coiling its folds, i and dragging its swift length along from wave to wave. On other coasts, people who do not believe even in Bishops, believe in Sea Serpents. The unmistakable evidence in favor, of a serpent in Paradise has induced a popular credulity con- cerning a serpent in the sea. ; Certain it is- that the Sea Serpent, year after year, and age after age, sails its mystic rounds through every sea, harbors in every port, and glides through every sailor's dreams. : Finally, not to leave any shore unvisited, the Sea Serpent curved its swan's neck and flapped its mermaid's tail in the spacious waters of the Cape of Good Hope. A fortnight after the Coromandel's disaster, The Argus announced the arrival, in Table Bay, of the ship Tocat, Capt. Demboll, from Liverpool, who reported that, seven i days before reaching Cape Town, he discovered, through a momentary lifting of a fog, a huge Sea Serpent. This announcement (said The Argus) revives the, question, Is there a Sea Serpent? Capt. Macklin, of the British navy, a year ago reported to the X I,/ page: 72-73[View Page 72-73] 72 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Admiralty that he encountered a Sea Serpent off our Cape Colony Coast; but Prof. Owen thought from the description that the monster was the Great Antarctic Seal. Capt. Samuel Harriman, of the bark Butterfly, outward bound from this port eight months ago, discovered, about a week after sailing, what he thought to be the Sea Serpent; but when he approached it with a boat's crew, he found it to be a mass of rotten weed, slimy and unfragrant, which the discoverers did not care to put between the wind and their nobility. Both these supposed Sea Serpents were seen about seven days out from this port. It is singular that Capt. Demboll now states that when he was about the same length of time from Cape Town, namely, seven days, he saw a great creature of some sort which he supposes to have been a mam- moth marineanimal, serpentine in form. Here then we have no less than three Sea Serpents,-first, Mack- lin's; second, Harriman's; and third, Demboll's. But as Macklin's was long ago thought to be a basking seal, and as Harriman's was found to be a rotting weed, so Demboll's may now prove to be, if not one or the other of these, then a floating tree] or a stray raft, or a mass of debris of some kind. X In short, the Sea Serpent- is a twin to the Snakes of Iceland, and does not exist. On the day after the above article was published in The Argus, that journal contained the subjoined statement from Chantilly and Scarborough: To the Editor of the Argus: Without casting any reflection on the intelligence or integrity of Capt. Demboll, we nevertheless believe that the huge andlmysterious object which he saw in Lat. 29 35', Long. 11 21', was not the Sea Serpent (whatever that creature may be), but was the drifting wreck of the Coromandel. Capt. Lane abandoned this 'ship, containing on board three human beings, for whose lives (if they shall be lost) he willi be justly responsible. But not Capt. Lane alone. He will divide the responsibility with a British Admiral who, under color of strict adherence to instructions, is violating the chief duty and function of .a true sailor; which is, to change his course, to go out of his way, to strain every nerve, and to run every risk, for the rescue of a wrecked crew within his reach. This high officer of the navy admits that, in all human probability, the Coromandel was not destroyed by the fire; that her hulk may, therefore, wander an indefinite time at sea; and that she and her three passengers (one of whom, at least, would make intelligent THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK. 7 3 exertions to keep the ship from water-logging) are probably, even at this late day, in nearer neighborhood to this port than to any other point of land. We therefore appeal once more to Admiral Gillingham to institute a search for the wanderers, whose last known position we believe to lhave been correctly given by Capt. Demboll, on the mistaken suppo- sition that the wrecked ship was a Sea Serpent. (Signed) JOHN SCARBOROUGH, OLIVER CHANTILLY. As soon as the above appellants found their appeal without effect, Oliver Chantilly instituted a series of inquiries among newly-arrived shipmasters as to whether they had seen, since the storm, anything that resembled either a Sea Serpent or a wrecked ship. He also wrote letters to the governments of all the mari- time nations, stating the particulars of the catastrophe, and requesting to be informed of any messages that might be picked up from the Coromandel by American, French, English, or Danish ships. He then studied log-books, maps, and charts. He collected a library of pamphlets, reports, travels, and various memo- randa illustrating the winds and currents of the sea, and searched these and the whole history of shipwrecks for suggestions of discovery and rescue. These efforts cost him many months of anxious thought. "I have been marking down on this map," said he to I Scarborough one day, "the customary routes of ships on the South Atlantic. Look at them! Here are the traced lines of a hundred and twenty actual voyages along the beaten paths of commerce. These red lines mark the courses from the Cape of Good Hope to Europe; the blue, the return voyages. These black lines are the routes from the Cape to the United States; the yellow, the return. These occasional and wayward green lines are the whalers. Now notice what a great central basin in this South Atlantic ocean-what a wide and desolate space here-all these lines utterly slun and never approach. All ships avoid the centre page: 74-75[View Page 74-75] 74 TEMPEST-TOSSED. of that sea. Here in that spacious region lies a waste wil- derness of waters, covering an area as large as the half of Europe, into which no ship enters-unless driven a thousand miles out of her way. It is a place of calms. The winds, when there are any, are variable and fly all about the compass. Now suppose the Southeast Trade Wind and the Great Ocean Current, both acting together, should carry the Cor- omandel into this mid-desert of the South Atlantic, and should then leave her there? How would she ever get out again? Tell me why Rodney Vail's vessel might not stay there till she rots or sinks? What could she do but drift slowly hither and thither, round and round, like a leaf on a mill-pond? I tell you, Scarborough, she might float there year after year like a water-weed, and never be discovered by any ship, and never get any nearer to the shore." "Yes," said old Scaw, shaking his head in the negative while meaning the affirmative, "that is the solemn fact." Oliver Chantilly, with a strange tenacity of hope, never once permitted himself to consider the ship destroyed-only cast away on an ocean of calms. "No," said he, ': I see the Coromandel afloat in my mind's eye--rolling and drifting! And I see Rodney Vail on board of her, appealing to me for help!" Oliver Chantilly, seeing such visions, which never faded from his fancy, busied his mind with the Coromandel for weeks, for months, and for years. How long, how slow, and how inscrutable can be one man's fate against another's\finding out! Oliver continued to search, but failed to find. It was a vain quest - a heart-wearying labor, yet never without the breath of hope in it to keep it alive. Time wore away, but did not wear out his faith in the floating ship. "Rosa, what is your opinion?" said he one day to his wife.- "When I sit alone," she replied, "and think all by myself of the dreadful calamity, I always give up all hope; but as THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK. 75 soon as you begin to talk of the ship in your confident, san- guine, and downright way, you dispel all my doubts, and make me think that I shall see the Coromandel sailing the very next minute straight into our harbor." At length Philip, a sedate youth, grew old enough, not only to share his father's sorrow for the loss of the Coroman- del, but to be partaker of his day-dream of her final safety. The younger Chantilly possessed an ideal and imaginative temperament, and was just the person to 'whom the vision of the far-off, tempest-tossed ship, forever wandering over the waves without coming to land, would be full of allure- ment and fascination. The strange life and romantic adventures of the doomed company, as Philip fashioned the possible story to himself, J were to him more vivid and thrilling than any written tale. Philip not only caught his father's animating faith in the : ship's survival, but as the son could not naturally feel so i much distressing anxiety as his father did concerning those on board (since the young man had never seen one of them), :&! there was nothing but pleasure in Philip's musings over the lwind-blown and never-anchoring barque. To the father, j% the case was one of vital distress ; to the son, it was one of Ipleasing speculation. Gradually to Philip the Coromandel became a far more real ship than any solid man-of-war in the Coast Survey. I - ap THis faith amazed his fellow-students and comrades in Cape Town. "Philip!" said one of them, "what you see is the float- ing Isle of St. Brandon; it is a cheat of the mind; it does not exist in fact." Philip Chantilly, like other intellectual young men, did not like to hear one of his long-cherished beliefs thus politely derided by his friends. "Let me tell you," he replied, " that one of the most vivid reminiscences of my childhood is my father's desperate eagerness of faith and hope in the Coromandel's ultimate rescue. That idea has grown with my growth and strength- page: 76-77[View Page 76-77] 76 TEMPEST-TOSSED. encd with my strength. It may be a delusion both to my father and to me, but I share it with him. I believe in it as I believe in heaven. You know that my father would never give up one of his friends. And he don't give up Rodney Vail. Neither do I. The picture of that wrecked ship-that wandering argosy of souls-floats continually in my fancy. The Coromandel is, to me, a Holy Grael to be sought and found. The idea of seeking for her has determined me to follow my father at the Naval Academy, so that I may spend my life on the sea, in the expectation of discovering that wreck. The ocean has haunted me from childhood, because the Coromandel floats on it." "Nonsense, Philip!" replied his companion. "If you, and your father, and old Scaw continue to talk in this wild way about a hope that ought long ago to have been buried, since it is certainly dead, people will put you down as fanatics and monomaniacs." Philip's young comrades were right concerning this public opinion, and had helped to make it. There gradually grew up a strong feeling in Cape Town that Oliver Chantilly and John Scarborough had taken an unwise advantage of Philip's youth and sensitiveness, in order to inspire him with a chivalrous but impossible mission to find the long-lost Coromandel. "As to that ship," they all said, " she long ago went to the bottom of the sea." Years came and passed, yet without tidings of the wan- dering craft. "It seems to me," remarked Sir Richard Wilkinson one day to Oliver Chantilly, "that you ought now to discharge your mind of this useless burden--this phantom barque that sails about only in your brain. Your friends grieve to see you looking so careworn about it. Even if the Coromandel was not wholly destroyed by fire, yet American ships are not strong; and this doomed craft, Built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark,' must long ago have gone like a plummet to the depths of THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK. " the sea. In due time," he added, "the whole ocean's floor will be paved with American ships." Sir Richard had a very small appreciation of anything American, except American slavery, and its product, Amer- ican cotton, from which he received annual dividends from twelve American plantations. ' My dear Sir Richard," replied Oliver, who always took pains to maintain his individuality in presence of his great associate, "I was brought up in the American navy; and in that navy we revere the dying words of a hero who said, 'Don't give up the ship ;' and I don't give up the Coromandel." "Ah," retorted the baronet, who had sat in Parliament, and who knew how to turn a reply. "That, I believe, was in the affair of the Chesapeake and the Shannon, was it not?" "Yes, Sir Richard." "Captain Lawrence, I think?" "Yes, Sir Richard." "That hero is said to have bravely exclaimed, 'Don't give up the ship?"' "Yes, Sir Richard." "And yet his ship was immediately given up, notwith- standing?--was it not?" This was unexpected by Chantilly, and it irritated him :- all the more because there had been a gradual coolness growing up between Sir Richard and himself on American questions, particularly on the question of slavery. Meanwhile, Oliver had talked several times with Rosa about a return to America-; a project which, at last, they were on the point of carrying into effect. Then, to the sudden surprise of everybody, cam5 Rosa Chantilly's death. This lady, the picture of health, had been on a sailing excursion, and was the life of the party; among whom, for spirit and vivacity, she reigned supreme'; but, on the next day, a sudden fever threw her down "On a couch of fire," and in less than a week she died. page: 78-79[View Page 78-79] 78 TEMPEST-TOSSED. To her husband and son, even the falling of the Southern Cross from the sky could hardly have been more unexpected. There are some people so blooming and healthful that they never suggest a thought of their mortality. Rosa Chantilly had always been one of these. But she suddenly withered like a flower while yet full of the morning dews of life. "O God," cried her husband, clenching his hands, " this is more than I can bear!" During the first night after her death, his hair turned from black to white. Philip, who was of a more reserved and self-contained temperament than his father, was filled with an inward, unexpressed, and unrelieved anguish. He had idealized his mother. Always to him a fountain of love, joy, and mirth ; carrying sunshine in her blood, as a grape does in its wine; happy, sparkling, and breezy in her perpetual buoyancy;- she had embodied to his fancy the most delightful type of womanhood. "O Rose of May!" was his familiar address to her, bor- rowing the words of Laertes to Ophelia. At her death, he bowed his spirit to the earth, clothed himself with sackcloth and ashes, and set his soul td watch like an angel at her bier, awaiting her burial. The Bishop of Natal conducted the funeral. After the body had been laid in the earth, the fresh mound was entirely covered with roses-sweet memorials of her name!-cast thereon by a company of orphan children in whom Mrs. Chantilly had taken a tender interest. The white-haired husband was led away from the grave- yard almost in distraction. Philip, who was even a greater sufferer than Oliver, never- theless exhibited more self-command, and proved the stouter spirit of the two. The son stood like a father to his father. During the first three dayq and nights after the burial, Oliver Chantilly neither ate nor drank; neither slept nor wept neither read the many letters of sympathy addressed THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK. 79 to him from families in Cape Town, nor admitted any person to an interview with -him save only Philip. The bereaved husband spent most of this time in his wife's deserted room. Philip, for his father's sake, had to paralyze his own tongue and make his grief speechless. Not once did he open the subject for conversation. V The most scalding of all tears are those that flow inward through the soul, not outward down the cheek. The silent young man, finding that a mist was filling his eyes, brushed his brave hand across the wet lids, and said with a kinglier spirit than Canute's, "Thus far shalt thou come and no farther ;" and the salt waves obeyed. Bearing his burden and not groaning under it, bleeding from his heart's core yet not showing the wound, Philip stood like a strong tower, and his father fled to him for refuge against his own distracted self. Oliver Chantilly was well-nigh broken under a blow which, to such a nature as his, was the greatest that he could possibly have suffered-the loss of his wife. "Philip," said he, about a fortnight afterward, " this home is in ruins ; this house is a sepulchre ; this colony has become once again a strange land. It is impossible for me, in a moment, to quit so many unfinished tasks as I have set my ambitious hands to-an ambition that now is paralyzed for- ever-but I have told Sir Richard that I shall take the first honorable opportunity to disentangle myself and return to my own country. The only anchorage that either of us can ever have here is your mother's grave. Moreover, Philip, events are tending toward a civil war in the United States." "What!" exclaimed Philip, to whom such -an idea had never occurred. "Yes," replied his father, " nor am I alone in this opinion. Here, my son, is a letter which I received two months ago from a member of the American Senate, announcing the same prophecy. His judgment, I fear, will prove prophetic. Your mother and I, you know, were on the point of taking our page: 80-81[View Page 80-81] 80 TEMPEST-TOSSED. departure to America. But she took hers to another country, and I can be henceforth nothing but an exile here-yes, nothing but an exile anywhere." The American Senator's note was in acknowledgment of some pamphlets that Oliver Chantilly had sent him, touching the British government's efforts to suppress the slave-trade onrthe coast of Africa :--pamphlets that neglected to men- tion the profitable investments which certain British baronets on that coast were at that time making in the slave planta- tions of America. - The Senator thinks," said Philip, reading the letter, " that the end must by and by come in blood. My dear father, why did you not show me this letter before?" "Because," replied his father, "I wanted to work out my plans first. So I kept all hint of them both from you and Scaw. That Englishman ought to have been an American. He don't believe in the slave-trade. And the good old man has become so nearly knit to us that he would rather cut off his right arm than permit either you or me to depart from Cape Town. But I propose, Philip, that you sail for New York in the Challenge on the 27th (that's three weeks from now), and, on arriving, go to Annapolis and be entered at the Naval Academy." The young man's eyes flashed fire at the welcome suggestion. "It will realize one of my day-dreams!" he exclaimed. 'It is the very plan I had formed in my own mind--only I had not thought of fixing so early a date of departure. But the sooner the better." Father and son struck hands and hearts at once, and the plan was settled. One day, about a week afterward, when the English mail arrived, Philip, on looking at the letters received at his father's office, discovered one addressed to his mother. "O Heaven!" he exclaimed, -'a letter for my mother in her grave! Who is it that writes to her, not knowing she is dead? My father must not see this. It would harrow his heart's core," ' \ 1 T-n IN IGJL2 ISN ;ll-l! 1A Y-' LAl. 01 Fw ' \ Philip opened and read the following letter from Lucy Wilmerding : SALTZBURGH, IN THE TYROL. April 3, 1858. MRS. ROSA CHANTILLY, MADAME :-You will not expect this letter-from a stranger, and a trange place. My father and I have been sojourning a few months in this quaint town, and are just packing up to go to Vienna. I brought from America three photographs of our dear lost friend Mrs. Vail. Two of these I still possess. To-day, in putting them back into my portmanteau, I happened to think that possibly you tkeg might not have any record of her face--that lovely face!-and so I take the liberty to divide my treasures with you. I'- In several of Mrs. Vail's letters to me (O how long ago they were written!) she spoke of you most lovingly; and I am sure, if you loved her only half so well as I did, this picture of her will bring tears to your eyes. [t- She was only seventeen when this was taken. How young she looks, and how beautiful! She had such long; black hair, such perfect features, and such a lovely white skin! This place at which we are stopping is a strange old town--centu. tries old. Paracelsus lies here in the churchyard, and the poor people go to his grave to pray-in order to keep off fever and. plague. I like their simple religious faith, and have become almost a Catholic myself. Mozart lived here. His little old piano is still kept as a curiosity. I have tinkled it with my own fingers. It made me think of dear Miss Pritchard and her magical touch. You must have heard her play. She seemed to add another music to the music. My heart to-day has been full of memories of her,-all day long. The brilliant scenes through which I have been passing in these old countries, and the daily pleasures I enjoy through my father's kind- ness ;-all these sometimes take a gloomy shade when I think of that dear woman and her dreadful fate. Shall we ever again behold her on earth? What sufferings she must have undergone!--what wasting of her frail body!-what famine and disease!-what agony and anguish of soul! Her wan white face-comes to me at night, and I see her holding out her thin, pale hands imploring me for help. Alas! I cannot give it to her! Sometimes I think of her as a distracted maniac-l-dwelling on i page: 82-83[View Page 82-83] 82 TEMPEST-TOSSED. some wild rock, alone with beast and bird I At other times I have felt that by somerstrange Providence--by the kind hand of Him who doeth all things well--she would yet be restored to us in the flesh. But, for the most part, I have reasoned with myself that she must long ago have been borne away an angel to Heaven. Whatever be her fate, I know you will prize the picture for the sake of the original, whom we both equally mourn. Yours, in this common grief, LuJC WIIMTRDING. Philip, after reading this letter, fell to a perusal of the pictured face. "What a classic and lovely head!" he exclaimed. "It is fine enough for a cameo. Just think of the sea attempting to drown such a divine creature! The face is like one of Raphael's Madonnas." Philip was quite enraptured with his prize. It was a small vignette--just a head. Over and over again he looked at it, and being a lover of art and beauty, admired it as it deserved. "This young woman," he said to himself, "was my mother's friend. They were school-girls together. One of them is now in her grave, and perhaps the other dies daily a living death." Whereupon, actuated by a fancy which, had he undertaken to explain it, he would have called loyalty to his moher's memory, he went to a jeweler's, and had the vignette set in a small locket, which he hung like a charm to his watch- chain. The whole proceeding pleased him greatly; pleased him, he hardly knew why; pleased him so mysteriously that, in order to maintain this charming sense of mystery, he kept the letter and locket a secret from his father and Scaw. The next mail from England brought a letter to John Scarborough from his twin brother James. It enclosed a communication sufficiently exciting to rouse old Scaw to a high pitch of feeling, and to set his white hair wild with electricity. He sought out the Chantillys--to whom, with a voice more raspish than ever--its, harsh music guided by the bat6n of his clenched right hand--he made the following harangue: "Demmit," said he--which was the whole extent of the captain's profanity --" demmit, gentlemen, hold men for counsel, young men for haction. I know, as the play says, an 'awk from an 'ernshaw. Now, except for its bein' con- trary to the law, I would string up Hadmiral Gillingham and Capt. Lane. Read that, sir; demmit, read that, sir." q7 Oliver Chantilly took the letter from Scarborough's hand, and began to unfold it. Philip meanwhile thought that Lane, who had frequently shown rudeness to Scarborough, had perhaps done so once again, and in a more pronounced manner than hitherto. Although a calm young man, and averse to strife, yet Philip was full of the latent heat which abides in dark eyes, black hair, and silk beard, and was just the model of a stroke oar in a regatta, or of a leading bat in cricket. Moreover, in view of these personal credentials, since nature does not confer powers which are never to be used, Philip Chantilly would have felt both physically and mor- ally commissioned to measure at full length on British earth the corporeal inches either of Capt, Lane or of any other man who should offer an insult to old John Scarborough. "Has that Lane," asked Philip, quietly, but with a des- perate purpose-"has that Lane been flinging any more epithets at you?" There was a slight scowl on Philip's brow, but no other trace of his inward heat. "No," said Scaw. "But I don't know what to do with the scoundrel-can't say whether he should be 'ung, or shot, or pitched hoverboard, or roasted at a fire, or put in jail, or kicked hout of town ; can't say what. I've got him on my 'ands, and can't get rid of him. Demmit, sir, what's to be done?" The old captain took a seat in a Chinese chair, unbuttoned page: 84-85[View Page 84-85] 84 TEMPEST-TOSSED. his collar, picked up a palm-leaf, and fanned himself into a steady heat. "O great God in Heaven!" exclaimed Oliver Chantilly, who had meanwhile been reading the letter, and was shaken with terrible agitation by it. "Philip, my son, read that- read it aloud--let my ears sit in judgment on my eyes whether or not I have read it aright." Philip then read aloud the following letter from James Scarborough to his brother John: GROSVENOR SQUARE, LONDON, { . Aug. 31, 1858. MY DEAR BROTHER : I am in hourly expectation of ;a crash that will ruin me, and will bring shame to the name I ber. But whatever ill tidings I report to you concerning myself, I have a piece of glad news for you. When you told me, in your last letter, what would be the greatest joy that you could experience in your old age, I little thought that I who am about to retire into darkness would be the means of shedding on you the very sunbeam for which you have so long waited-and waited not in vain. The enclosed paper will make you a happy man. Alas I you will soon hear that nothing in this world can ever again bring happiness to Your wretched brother, JAMES SCARBOROUGH. "I do not understand this," replied Philip, sedately, to Capt. Scarborough. "You have never informed me of our brother's troubles." Capt. Scarborough, with quivering lip, simply remarked, "No, Philip; my brother never told me of them himself. I do not hunderstand them. It's hall a puzzle. But read the bother part." "Yes, Philip," said Oliver, " read the other part-the British consul's statement." Turning to the enclosure, Philip read as follows: I annex a copy of a letter from the British consul at Bordeaux to the Admiralty in London. It was obtained by me to-day through the THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK. 85 politeness of Sir Thomas Poinsett. It will appear in The Times to, morrow. J. S. (C(OPY.) f j % OFFICE OF THE BRITISH CONSULATE AT BORDEAUX, August 27, 1858. TO THE ADMRALTY. tidings of missing ships and crews, I have the hohor to announce that a square glass jar, with a small neck, hermetically sealed, painted with vermilion stripes, evidently to attract attention in the water, and covered with the moss of a long voyage, was picked up yesterday on this coast near the fishing hamlet of Drosante. The sealed jar had been opened before I saw it, and opened without carie. The writing inside was illegible in parts, and could not be fully deciphered till brought out by chemical helps. The following words and letters were then made distinctly visible: Lat. 27 41' S.; Long. 1...... 1851 Sunday May 6 Ship Corom . ... I, a18 tons,Capt. L .... burnt off Cape Colony Coast Oct.... 1847 abando. ... d by Capt. and Crew, leaving on board Rodney Vail, Mary Vail, his wife, and R. . . Bamley, nurse, all of 8.... [here a break] . . . extinguished by rain. Hull not destro ... Ship still afloat. Cargo of preserved meats, fruits, and vege ..... in good order. Barbara Vail, born on board, now aged three years. All well, andc waiting in hope. Signed, Rodney Vail, M D., aged 29. In transmitting the above intelligence to the Admiralty, it gives me great pleasure to reflect that it is not the customary tale of a ship about to sink and a crew about to perish. Signed, C. M. CHOLMONDELY, Consul. The human mind is a strange instrument. One might suppose that the receipt of this information by Capt. Scar- borough would' have realized to him the joy which he said the discovery of the Coromandel would give his aged soul. But, on the contrary, he was now filled with a half comical rage, through his over-fulness of indignation against Lane. "Not to be 'un?" he cried. "Then what's the use o' cross-beams and last prayers? No tweak o' the nose? Then let no poltroon hever again feel the pinch o' thumb and finger! Demmit, gentlemen, he should be tarred and feathered!" page: 86-87[View Page 86-87] 86 TEMPEST-TOSSED. But the welcome news had no such angry effect on the Chantillys. They were overjoyed. Their rosy hopes came to them with an auroral glory as of day-break and morning. Their minds were exalted into an ecstasy. Their happy blood beat in their pulses with such a tumult of emotion that they embraced each other with tears. "This is the first impulse of life which I have 'had since your mother died," said Oliver to Philip. "Come with me," cried Scaw; "let us go at once to Sir Richard's office. I want to flaunt this letter in his face. I want to taunt him to his very teeth." The three went-the Chantillys against their will; but they were drawn forcibly by the irresistible energy of Scaw. Sir Richard was closeted in his counting-room with Capt. Lane and Admiral Gillingham. "How," asked Oliver of Scaw, just beforp entering, " how is it that Lane has become so familiar with Sir Richard-?" "There's some plantation business between them," answered Scaw. A coldness had previously existed among certain members of this accidental company, so that an air of formality hung over the interview. That is, except on the part of Scaw. He was too warm a man by nature to be cold if he tried. Some people freeze their victims; others burn them. Scaw employed the fire process. The news contained in the letter had not yet been di- vulged. Capt. Scaw went as maliciously after Lane as a cat after a mouse. "Lane, you are wanted houtside," said he. "Who wants me?" "An old man," said Scaw. "Who is he?" "His name is John Scarborough." "You?" "Yes.'" "What do you want?" "I want to settle my score with you to-day, hafore you sail to-morrow." I "John Scarborough!" retorted Lane angrily, "is there never to be an end to the feud between us?" "Yes, Lane, hend it now, if you dare." "L "What will end it?" "Give me your 'andwritin' that you saw the Coromandel sink." Sir Richard's face lighted up at this suggestion, and he inquired of Scarborough, "Will such a statement satisfy you? If so, I hope it may be given. Write it, Capt. Lane." Sir Richard wanted this writing for his own particular use. Such a piece of testimony by Capt. Lane, certifying as an eye-witness to the sinking of his own ship, would be a perpetual reply to all further appeals to Sir Richard's pocket for assistance in searching for the Coromandel. So the baronet seized the golden opportunity of getting such a statement, accompanied (as it was to be) with Scar- borough's verbal pledge to be satisfied with it. It was immediately written and signed by Lane. "Give me that hinstrument," said Scaw, taking it from Lane. "I will keep it hunder lock and key." He took the brief document and put it into his pocket. "Now, Philip, my lad, my bonny lad, read the consul's letter, and let us see what these gentlemen will say now." Then Philip, to the surprise of Sir Richard, to the bewil- derment of Admiral Gillingham, and to the consternation of Capt. Lane, read the British consul's communication announcing the Coromandel's safety. Sir Richard, whose eyes kindled with angry light at having been caught, and whose vexation was the keener because he had been taken in his own snare, asked of Scarborough, "What was the object, sir, of your inducing Capt. Lane to sign a statement which you knew to be false?" "I'll tell you what's the hobject, sir," replied Scaw, turn- ing from Sir Richard and speaking directly to Lane. "The page: 88-89[View Page 88-89] 88 TEMPEST-TOSSED. hobject is this, sir. If you hever come back to this port again, sir, I will publish this written statement, sir, and show you to be a self-confessed liar, sir, hunder your own 'and and seal, sir, and that's the hobject, sir! Gentlemen, good-day, demmit, good-day." Scarborough, taking the two Chantillys each by the arm, marshalled them with friendly violence instantly out of the counting-room. On getting into the street, old Scaw, puffing like a porpoise, remarked, "Well, this is a hantique town ; it has warious breeds o' wermin in it; but it has one crawlin' reptile to-day that will never be seen on these streets hafter to-morrow; and that's Lane; he'll never wenture back to this port-no, not once --no, never--demmit, no." It was only after Capt. Scaw had thus gratified his whim of vengeance that he found any room in his mind for pleasant thoughts of the Coromandel; but, having successfully rid himself of his spleen, he conducted his two friends to his shop, which he entered out of breath ; and there, without stopping to rest his aged limbs, he immediately proceeded to dance a laborious and rheumatic jig on the sanded floor. This done, a long talk ensued about the Coromandel-her burning, her safety, her passengers, her wanderings, her past history, and her possible fate. After a while, this talk was confined chiefly to the two elder men, Philip -sitting silent. "Why," asked Philip's father, " do you bend your head down on your hands? What are you musing over? A penny for your thoughts." "I was thinking of Barbara," said Philip, quietly, " the child that was born on the ship." "Yes," said Oliver. "Poor little thing! Born at sea; without a home; without a country; without a playmate! And they have named the little exile Barbara. It is pitiful." "No," replied Philip ; "it is beautiful." The thought bewitched Philip, and -he stood harping on THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK. 89 the daughter-until he actually harped her name like sweet music into his soul. i What's her hage," asked Scaw. "Three years," replied Oliver, "that is, three years when the paper was written; but it was written eight years ago; that would make her eleven now." "Dear me," observed Scaw, who was a bachelor, "how children do grow up around us! It's but t'other day when Philip here was a boy. Yet now he's taller than his father --and I 'ope will be a better man." "I shall never be half so good a man," replied Philip, modestly. Oliver's hand, in which he held the letter of welcome news, trembled under the weight of the paper that con- tained it. "What a consolation that daughter must be to Rodney Vail!" said he. "And yet, at the same titme, what-agony too the child must cause her parents! Think of a babe, born to a family in such a situation! Think of their fears for her safety, for her education, for her happiness! Think of the life they must all live on that tempest-tossed ship! Think of Rodney Vail wasting his fine genius on board that drift- ing wreck! Great Heaven, is there no such thing as Prov- idence, that it can thus permit one of God's great souls to be the sport of fate and chance, while thousands of common men walk forward on the solid earth, by green and pleasant paths, to peace, comfort, honor, and old age? What a spirit that solitary sailor must keep nerved and chorded to action! What a battle he has to fight, not only with the elements, but with himself! How incessantly he has to plan and toil in order to outwit the storm and keep the sea at a dry distance under his feet! How that lion has to put his conquering paw on nature's forces, and make them crouch to him in obedience! By Heaven, Philip, if that man's life ever comes to be known to the world--if he is saved at last and can report himself to mankind-it will be found that on his little stage of action--on his narrow deck page: 90-91[View Page 90-91] 90 TEMPEST-TOSSED. --in a lonely sea--unhelped except by himself-- he has played the part of one of the world's -heroes! I would give the richest drop of my heart's blood to grasp him by the hand to-day! Philip, you and I must find and save that man-otherwise we live in vain." The astonishing energy with which Oliver Chantilly ut- tered these words revealed to Philip the cheering fact that his father's native (but latterly dormant) spirit was now re- kindling its wonted fire. "My father's face," said Philip to himself, " shows the first ray of light which I have seen on it since my mother's death." "What's the chick's name?" asked the absent-minded Scaw. "I mean that little water-witch." "Barbara," replied Philip, uttering the name once more, and finding a harsh but pleasant music in the sound. - "Well, well," said the old man, " in my day, folks did not give such names; but times 'av changed. Barbara-! No. I think I've never known a ship o' that name. Now good names for gerrils are good names for ships. In my early days, when a gerril turned out well, a ship was named hafter her." "I wonder," thought Philip, "what the child looks like," and he dangled his locket containing her mother's portrait. Philip, who had small chance of ever seeing Barbara in this world, was nevertheless curious about her face. Even blind men, when they talk of maids, inquire concerning their looks. "Per aps," said Philip, willing to think well of the young creatufe, " perhaps she is like her mother. If so, then she must be a perfect beauty." "As you say," remarked Scaw to Oliver, "it's a strange place for the bringin' hup of a young gerril." "If that child," said Oliver, " is like either of her parents, and especially if she is like both, she is the finest pearl the sea ever held." Philip once again bent down his head and mused. "She is Neptune's daughter," said Oliver, classically. THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK. 91 "Per'aps she is a Wenus," observed Scaw, unclassically. Philip whispered to himself, - "She is a water-nymph-a nereid-a mermaid. No, she is her simple self. She is Barbara." He kept dangling the secret portrait of the girl's mother, waiting for an opportunity to be alone that he might open it, gaze at it, and imagine from it the unknown face of the tempest-tossed waif Barbara. "I think I see her," mused the young man, who was a dreamer, "I think I see her Standing in her childish beauty on the ship's deck, her head crowned with sea-grass, her hair blown about in the wind, and her feet sprinkled with the ocean spray." Philip kept incessantly dangling the locket, as if asking it for confirmation of the image which he had conjured up within his mind. And yet why should a young maiden, whom Philip never saw, and whom he might never meet in his mortal life-why should she have so suddenly become an object, not only of interest,- but of reverential homage to Philip Chantilly? The truth is, that Philip was like many another young man who has in the same way been suddenly captivated by some imaginary angel that he has beckoned into his heart; for as the most beautiful faces are those that are never seen, but only dreamed of, or sighed for, so the young heroine of the Coromandel, dwelling at a blue and purple distance from the common sphere of mortals, became suddenly to the young seeker after that ship what an ideal virgin in heaven becomes to an adoring aspirant on earth;- in other words, Barbara suddenly appeared to Philip the sweetest image of a young maid's face that ever was hallowed in a young man's soul. page: 92-93[View Page 92-93] CHAPT R VI. IN THREE PARTS OF THE WORLD. T HE message thrown overboard in a glass jar from the Coromandel, and picked up at Drosante, was chronicled in the London journals of September 1, 1858.' "It is as strange a story as Sinbad the Sailor," said Law- rence Wilmerding to his daughter Lucy. "O," said Lucy to herself, a dozen times during the day, on reading the news over and over again, "this happiness is almost too great to bear! Dear, dear Mary! So you did not go down in the stormi! Not death, but birth!, You have a daughter-a little ocean-bird for your motherly wings to brood over in your wandering nest! O how strange a tale 1 And yet my leaping heart knows it tobe true, for so pure a joy cannot, cannot be false and a cheat!" On the evening of that day, at a social company in that city, this interesting intelligence was a theme of animated talk. The company consisted of a few ladies and gentlemen who had met at the invitation of Mr. Wilmerding and his daughter --most of them having ridden for this purpose into the city from their summer retreats (for London was then out of "season ")--t to exchange congratulations on the laying of the Atlantic Telegraph Cable. It was the wire of 1858. Mr. Wilmeding, a stockholder in that costly enterprise had ascertainecr that a public celebration of the event would be held in New York on the night of September 1st, and he determined to re-echo this festivity by a soiree on the same night in London. lb Lucy Wilmerding's evening company was sure to be a success. Her father's wealth, her personal attractions, and, in addition, two noticeable incidents in her career;-all taken together combined to give her an uncommon prestige. These ,tWo incidents were :-first, she had co-operated, three years before, with a few eminent Englishwomen, in founding a children's hospital in Surrey; and second, on the breaking out of the Crimean war, she had gone on a mission of mercy to the wounded at Scutari; both which facts, occurring in a young American woman's life, could not but win for her the love of her English friends. Lucy Wilmerding had thus become endeared to a wide circle of people in London, some of whom ranked high in literature, politics, and society. It was of these friends that her evening gathering of September 1st, 1858, at Grosvenor Square, was brilliantly composed, in honor of the Atlantic Telegraph. "And so my dear Miss Wilmerding," said Sir Thomas Poinsett of the Admiralty, " you have heard from the miss- ing ship." . "Yes, Sir Thomas, and grateful am I to aven for so much good cheer." "Does this rekindle your faith that the Coromandel will at last be rescued, and all well?" "Yes, Sir Thomas; is it not reasonable to expect it?" "It seems," he replied, shaking his half-doubtful head, "it seems like hoping against hope; and yet if the Coromandel has stood out already so long against destruction, why not a little longer?" "You will admit," said Lucy, " that the ship's safety, even though marvelous, is not so great a marvel as the event we celebrate to-night." "True," replied the courtly baronet, "the Greeks, you know, enumerated seven wonders of the world; but there are now seventy times seven thousand, and they are multi- plying every hour ;-the last, which we are now commemo- rating, being the greatest of all." "Sir Thomas," said Lucy, addressing him with appealing page: 94-95[View Page 94-95] " TEMPEST-TOSSED. earstntness, "the'Admiralty must put this great wonder to a wonderful use. Now that you have the ocean-telegraph, I want you to send by it to America the joyful news from the Coromandel.". X "That news," said he, " was despatched to Newfoundland early this morning, before daybreak." "And will it certainly reach America?" asked Lucy. "Yes, why not?" he replied. "It was the 312th message. 311 had already gone before it-all safe and sound. Why not this one?" "And in a single moment?" asked Lucy, with the incre- dulity that pervaded all minds, in those days, concerning the strange submarine tell-tale wire. "Yes," replied Sir Thomas, "in less than any time at ' Aall! Our messages westward outspeed the sun. They go before they are sent ; they get there before they start. For instance, the news of the Coromandel, which was despatched this morning, will reach -there yesterday!" Just then, the venerable Mr. James Scarborough, looking unusually ill apt careworn, addressed Lucy in a noticeably absent-minded manner, but said politely, "Miss Wilmerding, I hardly know whether to congratulate you most because the Cable is safe beneath the sea, or the Coromandel is safe above it." "I am best pleased," said Lucy, "with the news from the long-lost ship; but the two events are a double blessing, especially as the one has already informed the world of the other." When Mr. Scarborough turned away from Lucy, she was struck still more with something sorrowful in his face and air. "Papa," she asked, snatching a moment to speak to him, "what is the matter with your friend Mr. Scarborough yonder? He seems ill at ease." "My child, he has little spirit to rejoice to-night either over the Cable or the Coromandel, for he has had some heavy pecuniary losses, and is threatened with more. The Ajax IN THREE PARTS OF THE WORLD. 95 Steel Wire Works have suspended payment, and this is but the -beginning of other snappings and breakings.' Go and comfort him with a pleasant word, Lucy." "My dear Mr. Scarborough," said Lucy, fulfilling her mission immediately, "is it not delightful,-most delightful -to hear once again from the Coromandel?" "Oh, ah, yes," replied the venerable financier, abstractedly, speaking like one who had just been jarred from a reverie- or like an old man roused from a mid-day doze. c"That ship," he added, "will quite likely float after some of us have suank." Lucy did not understand his allusion ; and she was too busy with her multitude of guests to ask an explanation at that time. Mr. Buckminister, an English capitalist, was talking at the opposite end of the room with Mr. Wilmerding:-the topic being neither the ship nor the wire, but Mr. Scar- borough and his losses. "Is it going hard with him?" asked Buckminister. "I fear so," replied Wilmerding, "for he has been telling me that, in addition to other doubtful speculations, he is deep in gold mines. Deep, do I say? No, not very deep. At least, not so deep as the gold is, for he has not gone deep enough to find that. James Scarborough means well, but lacks balance. His twin-brother in Cape Town, I hear, has a steadier head. When my present entanglements are over, I shall not involve myself with James Scarborough again. He knows how to lose money faster than I to make it." "But," interposed Buckminister, -inquiringly, "he is Honest?" "Yes," rejoined Wilmerding, " so are most men. Nearly every man will pay his debts if he has -the money. 'The trouble is, many a man, who prefers to be honest, neverthe- less, when he is pressed to the wall, bethinks himself of escaping through it by swinging open the brass doors of some bank-vault or trust-company. Now Scarborough has been borrowing from every institution that would lend; he page: 96-97[View Page 96-97] 96 TEMPEST-TOSSED. has been sweeping up every guinea that he could gather- trust-funds and all; and I fear that you and I will suffer through his folly." "Look at these faces!" said Lucy, stepping up to Mr. Buckminister and handing him two small photographs,-one of a man, the other of a woman. Lucy had been showing these little pictures to her guests. They were portraits of Dr. Vail and his wife. "Well," said liMr. Buckminister, turning to Capt. Gillespie of the British navy, with whom he had just joined in a scrutiny of the pictured countenances, "it needs no great gift of discerning human nature to detect at a glance that one of these persons is sweet and lovely, and the other strong and heroic. Let me ask," said he, turning to Lawrence Wilmerding, "what kind of man was Dr. Vail when you knew him?" "That was in my early days," replied Wilmerding. "He was the ringleader of us all-the chief master of all sports and toils. And yet he was a leader who never sought to head a party; he was too individual to be the head even of a clique. Then, too, though a desperate student, he was far from bookish ; he had the elegant air of some ideal, scientific mechanic; he was always drawing maps of bridges, piers, monuments, and various colossal works; and in abstract moods he would lay out miles of railway with his thumb and forefinger on his knee. He could play chess blindfold --he had a trained eye and wrist for billiards--and he could throw a fly at a salmon to please a Highlander. His chief passion was love of science. He was always confronting nature as one confronts the sphinx, demanding its secrets. He ate of all the trees of knowledge, defying the prohibi- tions. He took the sunbeam in one hand, the thunderbolt in the other, and cast them both into the crucible for analysis. That is, he was a man of genius - a philosopher ; which, to a practical business man like myself, is perhaps another way of saying that he was a little crazy." Capt. Gillespie, turning to Lucy, said, IN THREE PARTS OF THE WORLD. 97 "This photograph, I am told, represents the lady while she was a teacher of yours?" "Yes," replied Lucy; " we called her the Little Puritan. She was not directly descended from the Mayflower, but had all the fragrance of that word in her character. If: there are saints on earth, she is one of them ; but, ah, I fear she has been long in heaven. She was such a fragile creature, how could she have lived till this time through shipwreck and storm? Captain, what is your opinion about the Coro- mandel? Capt. Gillespie replied, "The probabilities are easily summed' up. If the people on board died from starvation, then the ship, with no one to work the pumps, gradually became water-logged, and long ago went to the bottom. But if the provisions have held. out, and if Rodney Vail has preserved his bodily vigor and his reasoning faculties, he has easily kept the ship afloat. The cargo was known to be canned provisions. Such arti- cles were at first an experiment, but they have since proved a success. On the assumption that the provisions have held out, and that the lives of the wanderers have been preserved -and both these are reasonable probabilities- I believe we shall hear of the ship's ultimate rescue." Lucy caught the captain's hand and thanked him warmly for his cheering argument. The two photographs, after passing the round of all the company, were handed back to Lucy. "There is one picture," said she, "that I would rather P possess than any of Raphael's cherubs." ("What is that?" asked Capt. Gillespie. "It is a picture," said Lucy, " which no artist has had a chance to paint. I mean the face of Mary Vail's daughter, born on board that ill-fated ship-the face of Baby Barbara, Child Barbara, Maiden Barbara! O how I long to see her! Perhaps, on this very day, somewhere out on the great sea, the sun has looked at her sunny face, outshining the sun's own self; for I know she is a sunbeam. She is 5 page: 98-99[View Page 98-99] 9S TEMPEST-TOSSED. the child of her mother, of Nature, and of God; she is therefore of no common parentage; she must possess no ordinary beauty." Late in the evening came Mr. Elbridge Saunderson, who had given many weeks of personal attention to the manu- facture of the self-acting brakes which had just been suc- cessfully applied in reeling off the great Cable into the sea. ( You have a personal share," said Lucy, " in this noble triumph." He acknowledged the compliment, spoke a few polite words to Lucy, and then immediately sought her father, whom he led aside into a corner of the room, and addressed in a low voice. "My friend," said he to Mr. Wilmerding, " the news is bad." "Why, what has happened.?" s The Atlantic Cable is dead!" "No, it is :not possible!" "Yes, the vital spark has left it. This disheartening report has just come to the Admiralty. Even Sir Thomas Poinsett has not yet heard of it himself. How strange that the wire, after conveying 400 signals, more or less perfectly from shore to shore, and working moderately well for twenty or thirty days, should at last give up its life just now, on the very day of the public commemoration in New York!" A shadow passed over Lawrence Wilmerding's face. "The Atlantic Cable dead!" he exclaimed, in a hollow tone, as if this death had struck him with something of its own chill. It had indeed struck him where a capitalist keenly feels a blow--in his pocket. "Ah," said he to himself, "the steel works, the mining- stocks, the railroads, the ocean Cable - all coming together -all,.like Macduff's chickens, at one fell swoop!-how many more such blows can I stand, and not be a beggar?" Mr. Sewall, one of the secretaries of the Telegraph Com- IN THREE PARTS OF THE WORLD. 99 pany, who had just visited the electrician's office in the hope of receiving from the New York celebrants a congratulatory message to the London soir6e, now entered, and remarked, "Ah, Miss Wilmerding, our rejoicing is turned into gloom." "Why?" she asked, filled with alarm. "Because," he replied, I have just learned that the object of our congratulations is destroyed." "What, the Coromandel?" cried Lucy, shivering and turning pale. "No, the Atlantic Cable," said he. The young lady, with one great sigh of relief, long drawn, and sounding like a sudden escape from imminent heart- break, exclaimed, e"O, is that all? Thank heaven it is not the ship! How you frightened me!" Lucy Wilmerding- whose mind, like any other true woman's, took its supreme judgments from her heart-con- sidered the loss of the Atlantic Cable a trifling calamity compared with the loss of the Coromandel.- She thought that science, commerce, civilization, the whole world's pro- gress--all taken together, were not for a moment to be weighed in the scale with the fate of Mary Vail. During a few tumultuous moments she appeared strangely indifferent to the destruction of the Atlantic Telegraph. When a woman's heart rises into her throat and chokes it with emotion, as Lucy's did; and when, after this danger is passed, the same heart sinks back sweetly to its proper hiding-place in a tranquil breast,-it then often happens that the returning color, which suffuses such a woman's cheeks, renders her well nigh as beautiful as an angel of heaven. At least such has been the opinion of men on earth. Anthony Cammeyer, the young lover who, years before, had carried violets to this maiden on her sixteenth birthday, ought to have been in that drawing-room in Grosvenor Square and to have seen that face -more lovely now in its page: 100-101[View Page 100-101] 100 TEMPEST-TOSSED, womanly ripeness than ever it had been in its girlish bloom. But did Lucy now any longer think of Anthony Cam- meyer? Of course she did, fer women remember, though men forget. Not long after this costly failure of the Atlantic Cable, came the gloomy forecast of Civil War in the United States, Americans in foreign lands turned their thoughts toward their own country. Among these homeward-yearning exiles was Oliver Chantilly. He announced to his friends in Cape Town his intention to return to the United States, and they gave him a notable farewell. Last evening, (said The Cape Argus of December 12, 1861,) Corin- thian Hall was the scene of a complimentary banquet given to Mr. Oliver Chantilly by a srdall number of Cape Colonists, who sym- gathize with the North. Mr. Chantilly, the constructor of some of ir public works, was originally trained for the American navy. And having received his education at his country's expense, he now feels honorably bound to offer his services to his country's government. This is regarded as creditable to him even by those of his Colonial friends whose good wishes go with the Southrons. His energy in his public toils, particularly in fulfilling the plans of his lamented associate Dr. Rodney Vail, who was wrecked four- teen years ago, in the Coromandel, will ensure to Mr. Chantilly for years to come, the kindly recollections of the citizens of Cape Town. Capt. John Scarborough presided at the festive board, and made a bluff and hearty speech in his well-known eccentric style. He suc- ceeded by his uncommon quaintness (which is quite unreportable) in setting the table in a roar-particularly at his grotesque references to Mr. Chantilly and himself as being popularly considered daft and crack-brained concerning the Coromandel and her safety. Sir Richard Wilkinson, the financial director of the works which Mr. Chantilly has so successfully carried on, sent to the convivialists- a hearty note, in which he paid a fine tribute to the personal character of his American associate; but the baronet preferred not to sit at the banquet lest his presence should be misconstrued into showing sym- pathy for the Northern cause, whereas his hopes are for the triumph of the Southern republic. IN THREE PARTS OF THE WORLD. 101 Mr. Chantilly, who, on rising to speak, was received with cheers, made the following remarks : i'My friends! For all your kindness, many thanks. I do not know how to navigate myself through a public speech. But I know how to steer a ship-I know how to fire gs gun. And these are the two things that I am going home to do. [Cheers.] "The honored chairman hopes that I can say, in bidding you good- bye, that my long sojourn among you has been a pleasant one to my- self. Yes, I can say so with my whole heart. [Hear, hear!] And I can say also that in whatever part of the world I may, in future years, draw my breath, yet always the spirit of my real life-or what remains of it-will hover here;--for here I shall ever have what your great laureate calls, 'Two handfuls of white dust, Shut in an urn of brass.' Pardon me, gentlemen, if I have flung a shadow on your feast. "And now, as to your chairman's merry remark that I am themost Quixotic man in the Colony except himself [Laughter]-well, I con- fess that I have been called Quixotic, first, as to the Breakwater; but I believe that this structure now beats off all criticisms as it does all storms. [Hear, hear!] Then I was called Quixotic about the Via. duct; but-I believe that this stream of water will be to every man in Cape Town something which even his own 'true love' has never been; for its course will 'run smooth.' [Laughter.] Then I was called Quixotic on account of the Coromandel; as if I were a crack- brain/for supposing that one of the toughest ships ever built had not gone to pieces in one of the mildest oceans in the world; and here let me remind you, gentlemen, that when you all suddenly heard from the ship three years after the shipwreck, you met me in the streets, and protested, every one of you, that you always expected to see the Coromandel turn up alive and well. [Laughter. Once again I am called Quixotic because I propose to go home to fulfill an obli- gation to my country's flag. [Hear, hear!] Sir Richard Wilkinson, whose letter you have heard read, fears to be considered a friend of the North;' he may live to regret that he ever was her enemy. [Voices, ' Good!'] If it be true, as the rumor runs, that Sir Richard's gratitude to Southern institutions has led him to invest his money in Confederate bonds, [Hear, hear!]-let me say that if, by happy acci- dent, I should command, as I hope to do, a Federal gunboat, and if I should meet any of Sir Richard's Confederate bonds afloat on the high seas in the shape of a well-equipped Confederate privateer, preying on American commerce-why, gentlemen, I should feel compelled to page: 102-103[View Page 102-103] 102 TEMPEST-TOSSED. take Sir Richard's property without stopping to give him a receipt. [Laughter.] "Well, my friends, in going away, I simply ask to be kindly re- membered after I am gone. [Hear, hear!] When any of you take a Sunday stroll on the Breakwater, remember me. [Hear, hear!] When, fromn the Viaduct, you drink a cup of cold water-if any of you should ever recur to that practice [Laughter]-remember me. When the Coromandel shall be finally found, as I believe she will be [Hear; hear!]-remember me. And when the English government shall settle its bill for millions of pounds sterling due to the United States for Sir Richard's and other Englishmen's damages to American commerce [Voices, 'O! O!'--then gentlemen, please remember me." [Great cheering, durng which Mr. Chantilly took his seat.] On the day after this banquet, Oliver Chantilly sailed for New York in the Clipper ship Pathfinder. During his voyage he daily searched the sea with his weather-glass, in hope to detect the Coromandel drifting somewhere on the actual waves as she was ever drifting in his visions and dreams. But the Pathfinder did not find the path of the Coromandel, nor come within two hundred and fifty leagues of the wandering and solitary wreck. Meanwhile, events in the United States grew ominous. i) In any nation, a civil war, even before it begins, has already begun. A popular revolution, which has long been a slow fever in the blood, quickly breaks into fiery and open flush on men's angry faces. Early in 1861, the two sections were already in a temper for war. During a few months longer, hopes of peace, like caged doves, still fluttered in many fra- ternal breasts, North and South. But at last, one April day, a rebel gun, pointing at Fort Sumter, " fired a shot heard round the world." That reverberation brought down the gathered avalanche of the North. From that flashihg and sulphurous moment, a new era began in American history. Midshipman Philip Chantilly, U. S. N., paced the deck of the gun-boat Fleetwing, as she lay in Hampton Roads by moonlight. "Why are men born to slay each other.?" said he, speak- IN THREE PARTS OF THE WORLD. 103 ing to himself. "What is heaven's use and function for human life on earth? ' and he stood leaning against a twelve- inch Parrott-gun, whose iron band showed a silver ridge under the moon's rays. "God gives life to men," said he, "4 and men rob each other of the precious gift. Am I, too, one of these robbers of life?--these spillers of blood? Yes, war is now my trade. But do I hate any of my fellow- beings so bitterly that I seek to aim this deadly engine at their breasts? No. I do not enter into this war through hatred even of my country's enemies, but through love of my country's liberty ; for which (if need be) a million hearts are not too many to bleed and break." He patted the great gun affectionately, as if it were a comrade and friend; "Chantilly," said Midshipman Forsyth, who th en joined him, " have you heard the news?" "From where?-from what?" -asked Philip. ; "Why, from the flag-ship'yonder! You must have seen Lieut. Blagden's boat return?" "Yes, but did she bring any special orders from the Commodore?" "Heigho, yes, indeed; we are to sail to Savannah," said Forsyth. "Good!" cried Philip. Why do you call it good? " "Because, my dear Forsyth, that means work." "Well, Chantilly, do you object to be idle?-particularly in such moonshiny and love-sick weather as this?" "Comrade," answered Philip, "this'Parrott," (pointing to the gun) "was meant to scream; I want to hear the big bird's voice." "Now be honest, Philip Chantilly; do you think you will enjoy the smell of gunpowder?" "Yes," replied Philip ; "I expect to find it as sweet as a rose." "Tell me," inquired Forsyth; "when is your father to arrive?" page: 104-105[View Page 104-105] 104 TEMPEST-TOSSED. ' He will be due the middle of next month." "Will he re-enter the service?" "Yes ; nothing could keep him out of it, except a failure to get a commission ; but he has already been appointed to a gun-boat in advance of his arrival, and does not yet know of his good fortune." "What is the vessel?" "It is one of the new fleet now in preparation according to act of the last Congress ; none of these new vessels are yet ready; not even named." "Philip, will you go on your father's ship?." "Yes, if the government so orders." "And as midshipman?" "I hope," replied Philip, "to win my way to something better; but I shall not ask it as a favor." Midshipman Forsyth then sauntered off, and left Philip leaning against the gun, his arms folded, and looking out on the silver-spangled waters of the Rip Raps. "To Savannah," said Philip, half-aloud. "That is, to battle,-to opportunity,--perhaps to distinction,-possibly to death. The path of glory leads but to the grave. 'All's well that ends well.' And if the end is a quiet hillock of green grass, perhaps that is the best of all." Philip Chantilly, like all idealists, had a sombre side to his mind; he was fond, in pensive moments, of courting some gentle sorrow; he had a habit, in solitude, of feeding on the pleasure of imaginary pain. But there was one thought that always roused him. This was the Coromandel. "Yonder," said he, surveying the war-fleet in the road- stead, "are seven ships safely at anchor. Strong chains hold them; stout hearts man them; a tranquil harbor engirdles them; no tempest has shattered them. There they lie!-in peaceful beauty. They are all moored to the living world-not one of them is beyond a half-hour's reach, of it. But where, where is that other ship?-that lone, lost wanderer in the Southern sea? Where is the Coromandel's moss-grown hulk to-night? What waters, rough or smooth, bear her up at this charmed hour into this silvery mist? Which of the faces on board of her 'are now upturned towards this mocking moon? O what pitiful and wan , creatures must they have become, with long looking in vain from their imprisoning deck only to find themselves captive forever in a little dungeon on a boundless sea! If I were czar, or king, or ruler of a nation, or admiral of a navy, or master of this fleet,-I would scatter my ships over all seas, and say,' Go search and find tht Coromandel, and bring the dear and weary castaways home!' There is but one ocean round the whole world, and the Coromandel is on it. That ship and this gun-boat are afloat on the self-same sheet of water. Who knows but that the very wave now lapping the side of the Fleetwing here, has once, in other seas, kissed the floating cradle of Barbara Vail? O Barbara,- sweet spirit--dear, holyfmaiden!--fair Unseen idol of my soul's worship!--I have never looked at your mortal face; ikiow not that you live on this earthly globe; but hence- forth, whether you be a creature of flesh and blood, or only a phantom of my mind, never shall any other maidenly image take your place in my heart of hearts! Go, O pure, cold moon! and put a halo of white light around the sacred brow of Barbara Vail! Yes," continued Philip, talking aloud to himself, " the moon, that loves all maids, and tracks them to their haunts and hiding-places, knows where to find Barbara to-night ; for if' she be on earth, she is looking up at it; or if she be in heaven, she is looking down with it; and so, wherever she is, the lovely--" But Philip was suddenly interrupted in his rhapsody by the return of Forsyth, who exclaimed, "Well, Chantilly, which of the poets were you just quot- ing in that fine way? Come. Speak those verses again. You would make a good Hamlet. Let us have another touch of your declamation. Repeat." "Well," said Philip, adroitly covering his retreat. 'do you mean the verses I was just reciting?" "Yes." page: 106-107[View Page 106-107] 106 TEMPEST-TOSSED. ( Listen, then, while I repeat a very ancient strain: 'By absence this good means I gain, .... That I can catch her Where none can watch her- In some close corner of my brain: There I embrace and isse her, And so I both enjoy and miss her."' "Who wrote that song?" asked Forsyth. '(I don't know," replied Philip. "I only know that it is older than Shakespeare, and sweeter than life." Philip Chantilly's expressions were frequently extravagant, particularly when his thoughts were of Barbara Vail. CHAPTER VII. ADRIFT. IF an empty water-cask, sealed tight, had been thrown overboard from the Coromandel at the time and place of Rodney Vail's shipwreck off Cape Town, in 1847, it would immediately have become the sport of the Trade Wind and the Ocean Current. Under the double spell of these two forces, it would have drifted westward till they had exha ted their joint energies upon it, leaving it lodged somewhee in the middle of the South Atlantic, under the Calms of Capricorn. Here, dancing up and down, but not wandering far around, it might have remained for years, perhaps even to this day, growing green with fungus and bearded with grass. The Coromandel's own dingy hulk was only a statelier water-cask, set adrift on the same sea, obeying the same law, and creeping to the same fate. Oliver Chantilly was right in his conjecture that the wan- dering bark, once entering this mid-ocean of quietude, where few storms ever blow, and where no ships ever sail, might there float becalmed for a generation without hope of escape, nor come within a thousand imiles of either continental shore. This central region of the lower Atlantic has a gentle climate, amiable winds, and halcyon waves. Its sunny breast nourishes a perpetual summer. No part of any other ocean in the world is so calm. It is the true Pacific; the other is misnamed. Sometimes it happens that, during twenty voyages in + page: 108-109[View Page 108-109] 108 TEMPEST-TOSSED. succession between the Equator and the Cape of Good Hope, the shipmaster hears no wind loud enough to whistle in his rigging; at least, none between the Equator and the 29th parallel. The extreme tranquillity of the frequented part of this sea is still further chastened and subdued in the unfrequented region where the Coromandel lay adrift. This wide wilderness, of which Rodney Vail and his little family were probably the only human inhabitants, has its geographical centre at the crossing of longitude 14 ES with latitude 27 S. Round this center, and within a circum- ference large enough' to include France and Spain, the Coromandel drifted for years - a solitary voyager on an ocean shadowed by no ship's canvas save her own tattered rags in the summer sun. Here the tough wreck wandered in tedious safety, at a perpetual distance of hundreds of leagues from the highways of commerce, and from the eyes of men. "The ship," said Rodney Vail to himself, in a mood of bitter reflection, "is in a fool's paradise. Once within these Calms -of Capricorn, and having no sails, nor engines, nor galley-oars to conquer our way- to an escape, the Coromandel may tarry here, imprisoned in her wide liberty, until our bones bleach, and the hulk rots." Dr. Vail, having cast this horoscope of isolation, soon discovered that the- dismal prophecy was making a slow march to a dread fulfilment. "Our doomed craft," he exclaimed, one afternoon while 'sitting on deck under an awning, in the wilting weather, sheltered from the sun, " is like a pilgrim crossing a desert, who, in the midst of it, when farthest away from either edgq, is overcome with languor, and either walks drowsily hither and yon, or sits down to rest, or falls asleep and dreams, and so never comes to his journey's end." Rodney Vail's ship, that could not obey her master's helm, nevertheless faithfully followed his chart:-the shadowy chart on which he had thus darkly outlined her fate. Long and lone were her wanderings over her blue ADRIFT. 109 and solitary domain. Monotonous and unending was her aimless yet unperilous voyage. Blind, groping, and stag- gering, like a bewildered sleep-walker risen in the night, the Coromandel pursued her idle, drowsy way-round and round, in and out, up and down, through and across '"The dead waste and middle" of the most lonely ocean that rolls within habitable zones. "Ah!" exclaimed Dr. Vail, one starlit evening, while pacing the deck alone, "What tale or history has ever chronicled a fate like ours! Think of this ship- an un- wrecked wreck- weather-beaten by perpetual calms- fast anchored over soundless depths--stranded a thousand leagues from shore! Think of this fair, dismal sea- this magical mirror that jostles our fortunate stars forever out of their courses, and shivers them to glittering fragments -this heaving, swelling, billowy main to whose rolling back I am forever buckled down under this soft belt of Capricorn, like Mazeppa strapped to his more furious steed! Think of these summer winds soft, tender, and treacherous--that caress and betray us with a perpetual kiss! Whither, O whither, does mocking fate mislead the ship, and waft her evermore astray? Into what beautiful but most abandoned spot of God's universe have we blindly come, to be cast away for life? What enchanted region is this wherein we so idly yet wearily sojourn? Is this the Lotos-Eater's Land? But, behold, it is landless. Are these the Waters of Oblivion? Nay, they are rather the meeting floods of all memories,-from whose depths each wave is ever casting up afresh some long past thoughts into the unforgetful soul. O that the great dome above me might open, and let me in! Here do I waste my heart, my hope, my life! Here, stand- ing amid this boundlessness, captive without a yoke, fettered without a chain, I am become a bond-slave to liberty itself. Alas! this honey of ease is the gall of life. Why, why am I exiled from the busy wofd! O for the stormy rocks to- night, where some companionable lighthouse shines! O for page: 110-111[View Page 110-111] "O TEMPEST-TOSSED. the perils of the fisherman's bleak yet inhabited coast! O for shipwreck indeed, if only it would discover'to us a sight of land, and cast us where men dwell!" Meanwhile, had not the Coromandel's cargo/een com- posed of provisions, and had not these been skiAfully adapted' for permanent preservation, the hapless little company must soon have starved. But, richer than gold or gems, the treasure with which their argosy was laden was food to eat: --food originally designed to stock a whaling fleet for three years, and therefore enough to last a little family for a lifetime. Rodney Vail frequently reasoned with himself as to the probable fate of his little flock. "In weighing our chances," said he, "the chief problem is our larder, and how long it will last. My anxiety is not as to its quantity, for we have a superabundance-enough and to spare ;- indeed, we could give liberally to the poor, if they could only come to our door to beg;-but the question is, are our provisions so well packed and sealedtas to fortify. them in their cans against the increeping of mildew and mold? They are sufficient against the teeth of hunger, but are they proof against the tooth of time?" Dr. Vail had long before-indeed,- shortly after the ship- wreck-compiled from the blls of lading a catalogue of the ship's cargo of provisions :-showing at a glance his store of preserved meats, poultry, game, vegetables, fish, oysters, essences of soup, natural fruits in syrup, catsups, sauces, et cetera: --amounting altogether to sixty-five tons of choice, compact, and permanent provisions--sealed in cans, jars, glass vases, and Petal boxes of various sizes and forms. The daily allowance of food which Nature dictates to a healthy and active man is two and a-half or three. pounds of solids and three pints of liquids. Counting the Coromandel's company, including the dog, as four men, and giving to each the largest allowance, namely, three pounds of solid food per day, this would show the following rate of consumption: One person, one day .......... ..... 3 pounds. Four persons,- s s " ....... ............ * 2 " One person one year ....................1095 " Four persons" " ....... ..............4380 " Estimating in round numbers that the four hungry mouths which were to be fed on the Coromandel required five thousand pounds of solid food a year, then, as the ship's. cargo contained a hundred and thirty thousand pounds, there would be a liberal supply for twenty-six years.* * The following is an exact copy of Dr. Vail's complete schedule: SUMMARY OF CARGO OF PROVISIONS Shippedfrom Harmony Factory by WILISTON BROTHERS Per Coromandel to Cape Town. Meats. Beef .............................250 dozen 21 pound cans, total 7,500 pounds. ........................... 140 t" 1 " " " 2,520 " " ............................500 " 1 " " " 6,000 " Beef a la mode ..................100 2 "I " 2,400 " Mutton .... ........ .............. 85 " I 1,530 " Assorted .......................125 " 1 " *L " 1,500 " Total ....................21,450 Poultry and Game. Chicken ................. . ....... 100 dozen,2 pound cans, total 2,400 pounds. Duck ..... .......................... 75 "4 2 4 " 2,250 (L Goose ........................... 50. " 2 " " " 1,200 ." Turkey ...................... ....85 " 2i " " 2,550 " Grouse ..... ..................... 25 " 1 " " u " 300 " Total. .......... ..... 8,700 " Vegetables. Asparagus. .............150 dozen 3 pound cans, total 5,400 pounds. Green Corn...................... 300 " 2 Beans, String ....................100 " 2 " L 2,400 " "- Lima .....................100 2 " " 2,400 "2 " Refugee ..................100 ' 2 " " 4 2,400 'i -Green Peas, Bogert ..............100 " 19 " 6 " " 1,800 " " Nonpareil .......... 100 " 1 " L" 1,800 " Potatoes ....................2.....50 " 2 " " 7,500 " Turnips ................... ......100 " 1 " " 1,200 Carrots ........................ ..100 L 1 L " 1,200 teets ........................... 100 " 1 I I 1,200 itco Succotash .................. 200 3 7200 Total .................... 4, 700 " page: 112-113[View Page 112-113] "9 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Sixty five tons of canned provisions!" exclaimed Rodney Vail, with a grim humor. "This is stock and store for a longer voyage than I hope we have undertaken!" Fish. \ Salmon ........ .............. 70 dozen 21 pound cans, total 2,100 pounds. Spiced Salmon .................. 140 " 2 i ;" " 3,360 " Mackerel ........................ 250 " 2 " " " 6,000 " Total ................... 11,460 " Shell Fish. Lobster ......................... 150 dozen 2 Round cans, total 3,600 pounds. Little Neck Clams ...............100 . 'i o2 ' " " 3,000 Oysters ..........................300 " 2 " " " 7,200 C "o'clock spiced Oysters ........ 10 " 2-1 " " " 300 " Pickled Oysters .................. 50 " quart " " Total ....... .............14,100 " Soups. Beef Soup .......... .............100- dozen 2 pound cans, total 3,000 pounds. Julien Soup ... .. ..............100 " 2 " !" 4 2,400 " Tomato Soup ...................250 " 1 " " L 3,000 4" Vegetable Soup .................200 " 2 " " " 4,800 " Oxtail Soup . ................ 5 " 2 " " " 600 " Ato . Total ....................13,800 " Natural Fruits in Syrup. Bartlett Pears ................... 50 dozen 2 pound jars, total 1,200 pounds. Apples, Spitzenberg ............. 140 " 12 " "i " 2,520 Peaches, White Heath ...........0 " 1* " " " 1,260 " !" Lady Gallican .......... 7 O " 1 " "!" 1,260 " Plums, Green Gages ............ 25 " 1 " " " 300 " !"Damson ................. 25 L 1 " " 300 " Cherries, Ox Hearts.......... .. 75 " 2 " " " 1,800 " Quinces ......................... 15 1 t " " " 180 Cranberries ...................... 125 2" " 3,750 " Pine Apple, Nassau ............ 40 " 1 " " 480 " Raspberries .....................150 " 2 " " 3,600 " Blackberries ..................... 50 " " " " 600 "L Strawherries ................... ..100 " 2 " " " 2,400 " Total ....................19,650 " Pickles. ? Gherkins, mixed ....................................3 dozen half-gallon jars. l" plain ...................................... 3 " " I "H Chow-chow .................................. 2 " pint " Hlorse-radish.......... .. ......... .. . ..... ..........1 L Picallilly ................... ...... .......... ....1 " Extracts. Nutmeg ............................................. ........ . dozen bottlek Cinnamon ................................ .................... " " Alm ond .................... ................................. " " Vanilla..................... ...... ........ .............1 " " ADRIFT. I 1 Furthermore, as an important addition to the food which formed the cargo, Dr. Vail, by skilful handicraft, frequently caught birds and fish-sometimes in great abundance, and occasionally of most wholesome and palatable kinds. So he had no lack of food. Then as to drink, or the human body's thirsty demand for three pints of liquid per day, this was abundantly satisfied from the bountiful clouds, H oney . ................................................ ......... 1 dozen bottles. Lem on .. ...................................... .............. Sundries. Olives, French....................................... ......... 5 dozen jars. "Spanish................................................. .. 3 " 4 M Sardines, Quarter Boxes . ................................10 boxes. 9"Half " . .... .................... 5 "t Capers...................... ................................ 3 " jars. Brandy Fruits. Peaches .......................................... ....... 5 dozen jars. Cherries, French ... . "............. 5 " Syrups. Ginger........................ ... 25 dozen bottles. True Lemon ....................... 50 Gorham ..................." 35 " " Lime Juice ........................100 " " Total, 2,520 bottles. Catsups and Sauces. Tomato Catsup ....................20 dozen pints. Mushroom"L ................... 10 " 'Red Pepper Sauce ................5 " " Green " " ................. 5 " Worcestershire" ..... ........... 2 " i l India Curry ............... ........1 " Total, 189 quarts. Recapitulation of the above. Meats, in Cans ..................................... 21,450 pounds. Poultry and game " ............... .................... 8,700 Vegetables, .................................... 41T,700 Fish, . . " ....................................11,460 " Shell Fish, " .....................................14,100 Soups, " .............................. ... ..13,800 N atural Fruits, jars .......... ................................ 19,650 " Together with other articles named in the Schedule, and not estimated by weight. ' Total, 130,860 " - Cost. Total cost of the above stock of provisions, as shown by bills of lading ........... ....................... . ..... $31,450 00 page: 114-115[View Page 114-115] - -; "4 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "But what," said Rodney, surveying his horn of plenty, "what if mold or mildew should invade this precious store, like the moth and rust that corrupt other treasures!" Dr. Vail had the best scientific reason to believe that any particular can of his meats, if set aside for the experiment, would remain sound and wholesome for a thousand years, or as long as the can itself could be kept from the canker of rust. "Yes," said he, reassuring himself against a gloomy fore- boding of scarcity, "so long as I protect my cans, I preserve their contents." Rodney Vail was right in this reasoning; for, by the hermetic process, the whole art of preserving food for years, possibly for centuries, is simply the art of protecting the cans; that is, so long as these metal or glass coverings can be kept from corrosion, their nutritious contents can be kept from decay. Profound would have been the solace to Rodney Vail could he have known that during the very period while the Coromandel was drifting about the sea, the Coromandel's successors in the Arctic regions carried thither bountiful supplies of canned food, only a part of which was con- sumed, and the surplus was brought back in perfect condition. This surplus, consisting of hundreds of cans, was distributed among some American ships in the China trade, and was eaten on board during successive voyages over the very ocean on which Dr. Vail was now adrift; and whenever these little packages were opened, even a dozen years after their original sealing, their content were still as nutritious and wholesome as at first. JIt need hardly be added, at this late day, that ship-masters now rely as confidently on the continuous soundness of a can of meat, as on the unwavering faithfulness of a standard compass. But this perennial preservation of food, though now one of the simplest of arts, had not thoroughly demonstrated its practicability in 1847 (when Dr. Vail quitted the known world), and consequently he was never free from painful - * . " - ' i ADRIFT. 115 anxiety concerning his stores and their possible corrosion and decay. \ Nevertheless, as time wore on, and as each successive can which he opened proved as fresh and welcome as the first, he found that, amid all his calamities, he still had the supreme good fortune to be the perpetual consignee of an unfailing cargo of provisions, many of which were as delicious and wholesome as could have been procured in any market of the world. ,4 " At first," said he, "I prayed that our food would last as long as our voyage, but now I pray that our voyage may not last so long as our food." The Coromandel's shipwrecked company clothed them- selves with the comfortable apparel which they found in the trunks and portmanteaus of the departed passengers, and in the chests which the crew had abandoned in the forecastleS- These garments were of every stuff and fibre, from water- proof oil-skins, pea-jackets, tarpaulins, flannels, felts, and all the shaggy wardrobe of sea-faring men, to silks, satins, velvets, linens, laces ribbons, and all the gay plumage of man's companion bird of paradise. Nor was there wanting, amid all the barren dreariness of the situation, a strange and almost barbaric sense of luxury; for the abandoned jewels of many families had become the accumulated ornaments of one. The Coromandel's cabin- which, when she left Boston harbor, was a picture of cosiness and even elegance- hai suffered no great sea-change. Built for a warm refuge against Arctic snows, the solid woodwork was a cool citadel against the summer sun. The floor was inlaid with alternate strips of light and dark wood, configured into a graceful variety of geometric designs. It was not covered with a carpet, but strewn here and there with brilliant Turkish mats-purple, scarlet and orange. Opening into this general saloon, were eight state-rooms on each side, with heavy and durable doors, paneled with bird's-eye maple-rich, bright, and lustrous-shining almost page: 116-117[View Page 116-117] "6 TEMPEST-TOSSED. like satin-wood. The ceiling, which was heavily cross-barred with deck-beams, was slightly frescoed in the interstices, on a general ground of blue enamel; and the cornices were deco- rated with gilt moldings, narrow and neat. The mizzen-mast slanted down through the cabin and constituted the most pretentious feature of the ship's inward splendor; for it was carved and colored into a representation of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Around its base was a sumptuous velvet lounge. In the after end of the cabin were two small windows, piercing the stern of the ship, and looking out through thick plate-glass upon the water. Between these windows was a ram's-head bracket of black-walnut, solidly carven; on which stood, bound with fastenings, a heavy brown terra-cotta flower-pot, with a large geranium-the only bit of vegetation that the ship contained. Lengthwise through the cabin stood a long mahogany table ; long, that is, at first ; though it had afterward been taken apart and shortened so as to give more space for walking about. Across the forward end of this tablHd and just under a sky-light in the deck, stood a piano-a small upright instrument of the old-fashioned Erard type, with slender Corinthian pillars, and with brass candlesticks. From the forward end of the cabin, or near the main- mast, a stair-way led up to the deck, the steps of which were plated with brass. On the underside of this stair-way was a retreating triangular closet, which, broadening at the base like a pyramid, constituted a misshapen book-case, containing the forty or fifty volumes of the ship's library. Connected with this closet was a writing-desk at which Rodney Vail habitually wrote his log and journal. On either side of this staircase was a small horizontal panel, in one of which had been painted, with some attempt at fine finish (at least of fine polish), a highly colored representation of the May-Flower anchored at Plymouth, and in the other, as a companion piece, Washington's tomb at Mount Vernon. Over the whole interior of this cabin, including the carv- ings, the light and dark woods, the glass plates at the stern ADRIFT. - 117 and in the ceiling, the mats on the floor, the mahogany table, the plush-covered chairs, the frescoes and gilt mouldings- over all these objects there was a dim and faded hue, which, instead of injuring, only cheered the general effect, for it suggested familiar use, and seemed picturesque with reminis- cences of a family and home. In strange contrast with the beauty of the cabin was the grimness of the deck. The ship's whole exterior everywhere showed traces of fire and wreck;-here a patch of positive charcoal-there a strip of scorched timber, burnt not quite black; here a dinted bruise in the deck where a fallen spar had struck it-there the peeling offjof the paint, showing the grain of the wood, even through the successive coatings of fish-oil which Dr. Vail had subsequently put on it, to preserve it from the weather; here, a rickety jury-mast, with its thin anid worn sail seldom hoisted-there the fire-stained binnacle, bruised and blackened, and surmounted in calm weather by a picturesque awning, not of canvas, but of flannel sewed in alternate strips of red and blue. This was an unusual fabric for a weather-screen, but the material happened to be on board the ship; for in 1846-7 English woolens were so scarce and dear, that American- mill-owners, who manufactured similar goods, though of cheaper grades, seized their opportunity to send their wares to English markets, and particularly to English colonies in all parts of the world. Accordingly a number of bales of flannel, blue and red, were shipped on the Coromandel con- signed to a merchant in Cape Town. As Dr. Vail had no need of this material for garments, he used it for awnings, and also (in narrow strips) for fish-nets and bird-traps. Within this wandering ship, far away from land, drifting year after year at the languid caprice of idle winds and waves, dwelt a little family; remote from all human com- panionship save only the precious society which they could afford to each other; one of whose members had never seen any human beings, save only her father, her mother, her nurse, sgd her own sweet girlish face in a glass. page: 118-119[View Page 118-119] "8 TEMPEST-TOSSED. But this family, notwithstanding the safety of their floating habitation; notwithstanding their rich stores of food; notwithstanding their comfortable housing against the elements; notwithstanding the interior cheerfulness of their cabin; notwithstanding that long lapse of time which slowly reconciles the human mind even to adverse fate; notwithstanding all this,-these hermits of the sea- except one of their number-could never wholly adjust themselves to their novel surroundings, nor reconcile their restless minds to their never-varying fate. On the contrary, day after daj month after month, year after year, they experienced a con nual sense of strangeness -in the ship, in the voyage, in the climate, and in the scene. Perpetually, whether waking or sleeping, did they yearn for land, for green fields, for human society, for kindred and friends, for privileges and opportunities,-in a word, for the comforts and sweet associations of the life which they had once lived; but from which they had been excluded so long that they began to fear they should enter it nevermore. The one exception was the child Barbara, who, "Native here and to the manner born," lived in the ship as naturally as other children live in a house; running about the deck, as others about a lawn; familiar with the sea, as others with the land. Barbara's childhood, judged by the daily pleasures which she found in it, was not essentially different from what it would have been had the same little sunbeam illumined any other home, whether on sea or shore ;---a childhood full of sweetness and charm, both to herself and to the yearning hearts that daily girt her about with their little world of boundless love. Was this ever-busy, prattling, chattering child the victim of an unhappy fate? If so, the blue-eyed ihnocent herself did not know it. Was she not a thousand times better off than if she had been the state's tenant, on the banks of the Hudson, of an orphan asylum whose army of little feet ADRIFT. 119 overrun the greenest of lawns? Was not her shipboard life superior in blessings to the sad, death-struck lives of the wretched children who toil in mills and mines? Was she not in a king's palace compared with the wretched hovels in which many a fair young sunny head, golden as her own, is brought up amidst squalor and. vice? Barbara was not a child born of wretchedness, nor even nursed of misfortune. She was a gay, happy bird that daily soared to heaven out of the meadow-lark's watery haunt, never once dreaming of the lowliness of her earthly estate. "Our poor little Barbara," said Mary, one day, to her husband, " suffers an unhappy fate without knowing it." "Poor?" exclaimed Rodney. "Barbara is not poor. She is the heiress to more acres than ever fell to the am- bition of a human creature since the day when Alexander wept for more worlds to conquer." Dr. Vail's daughter, being a strong, free, merry-hearted child, who knew no other life than that which she now lived, sighed for no other; indeed, she sighed for nothing; she had a healthy slowness in learning the art even of childish sorrow; her eyes, though familiar with waters, were stran- gers to tears; and so she dwelt in her sea-gilt home like a very oriole of the hill-top, singing and swinging in her wind-dangled nest. Other hearts on the ship were often sluggish and stagnant with sadness, but Barbara's was a running mountain-brook of ever-bubbling joy. Mary," said Rodney, who felt that their daughter was the ship's animating soul, "We gave to Barbara her life, but we have received from her- our lives in return. Without that child to cheer us, we must long ago have grown pale, wan, and mad. She has been the angel of our safety." Dr. Vail did not overstate the child's unconscious influ- ence; as indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the unconscious influence of any child in any family. Dejection, ennui, and despair would have blighted the Coromandel's company, save only that there was no escaping from the page: 120-121[View Page 120-121] 120 TEMPEST-TOSSED. enlivening contagion of Barbara's happy spirits. The gay, lithesome, intense creature who ran over the ship like a kid over a rock, leaping and climbing, afraid of nothing and enjoying everything;- this nydiph of fun and mischief, outdoing the dog Beaver himself'in playful pranks, was the perpetual solace of the sad company; and their sorrow was something which the sorrowless child was never allowed to guess, and which she was thus all the more able to cheer. She grew apace, waxing in healthy vigor and juvenile bloom. "Mary," said Rodney, "grandfather Pritchard was one day working in his garden, when you and I were playing there; and the parson, coming by, remarked, ' Look at those children-they grow like weeds ;' 'No,' replied grandfather, 'they grow like flowers.' Mary, that is how our Barbara grows; she cometl up as a flower." Then, in due time, in consequence of this growth, the quondam school-mistress of Salem re-opened her school- not in a New England school-house but in an East Indian ship; wherein, cooped like a motherly hen with one chick, Barbara's teacher brooded over her solitary scholar. She gave her a daily lesson compounded of books, pens, water- colors, and piano. "Barbara sings like a wood-thrush," said her father, listening one day, while her sweet voice rang through the ship. "Yes," said Mary, "the piano grows out of tune and falls into discord, but Barbara's voice ripens into richer and sweeter tone, and she goes about warbling as if she were a lost nightingale, singing by day." Every day, after school hours, came Barbara's habitual demand for a story; which, when her mother told it, was generally a true one consisting sometimes of one of the many incidents, told over and over again, which she knew of Lucy Wilmerding, who had been her beloved pupil; or sometimes of Philip Chantilly, who was to have been lier daughter's playmate; or sometimes of Philip's squirrel Juju, ADRIFT. 121 a creature that frisked with ideal gambols in Barbara's mind, and ranked in the animal kingdom second only to Beaver himself. I think," said Rodney, "that to Barbara's childish mind, Beaver is more than the whole earth; and that Lucy, Philip, and Juju are more than the sun, moon, and stars." The years, like gentle breaths, passed over the ship, but without wafting her to the shore. Meanwhile Barbara, like all children, developed with astonishing rapidity; at least, so it seemed to her parents; for, to parents, nothing marks so impressively the flight of time as the growth of their children. "Our voyage," said Rodney, one afternoon, as he sat mending a net, "has been slow and tedious enough, heaven knows; and yet look yonder at Barbara: only yesterday, she seemed a babe new-born, and now she is carrying that great dog in her arms." One day, Jezebel, who, was always uttering her thoughts through emblems or figures, walked across the cabin, with her head down. "Are you the woman in the parable?" asked Mary, "seeking for the lost piece of money?" "No," said Jezebel, "I am lookin' for de lambkin, and can't find her. I find not a lambkin any more, but a lamb. What's de good book say? ' De lost shall be found.' We hab lost a lambkin and found a lamb." The first realization by Barbara's parents, of her maturing years, was in the midst of an affliction which had well-nigh proved fatal to them all. They were accidentally poisoned and thrown into sudden prostration-all, except Barbara; who, during this brief but fearful peril, acted the part of nurse to the sick and guardian of her guardians. The circumstances were these: A copper vessel, which was supposed to have been lost overboard, had fallen into one of the water-tanks, and had there corroded; engendering a subtle poison in the water, of which all drank one evening except Barbara. Mary was a page: 122-123[View Page 122-123] 122 TEMPEST-TOSSED. made deathly pale, and looked like one swiftly fainting out of life. J zebel passed from violent pain into a sluggish stupor and unconsciousness. Rodney, who knew too well what had happened, and who wrought himself into a fever through his care of the others, felt his brain throbbing with such a tumult that he feared he would become delirious. Under this apprehension, he called Barbara to him, and said, "My child, do you remember the story I told you of Mildred and the maniac?" "Yes," she replied, " it is about an old man who had lost his wits, and whose little grand-daughter took care of him. Whenever his fit of insanity came upon him, she took him by the hand and looked him straight in the eyes. This always conquered him, and made him gentle. In this way she kept him from destroying his life." "My dear child," said Dr. Vail, "take me by the hand and look me in the eyes- just as if I were that old grand- father and you were his little Mildred!" Barbara, wondering what this could mean, caught her father by the hand and gazed into his eyes. "Do it once again!" said he. She did so. "Once more!" She complied. Dr. Vail then lighted the swinging lamp in the cabin, to make the great space cheerful, and threw himself down on the velvet cushion at the foot of the mizzenmast, hoping to find a cure in sleep. The vigilant child went from one prostrate form to another, accompanied by the dog- doing the little that she could; filled with many fears, but not losing her presence of mind. Two hours later, her father awoke in a fever, and went staggering about the cabin; his face wearing a wild and unwonted look; for his apprehension of delirium had proved only too true. 1 ADRIFT. 123 Barbara, who instantly detected his strange appearance, sprang to his side and said, "Dearest father, you must not walk about-you are sick -do lie down again." "No," said he, motioning her off. "Let me pass. I am going to take a walk on the waves. Come, Beaver, let us ramble together." Barbara, alarmed at her father's look anid tone, instantly bethought herself of Mildred, and, catching the sick man by the hands, and giving him a penetrating look,-in a few moments, by the spell of her stout, brave will, so far sub- dued him as to lead him into his own room, where soon afterward, calling him by name and stroking his forehead, she woke fis reason to its wonted office, and he was once again master of himself. - , "Who knows," said Rodney to Mary, in afterward discussing this fearful episode in their ocean history, "who knows but that I might have walked straight overboard, in that delirious hour, except for that little watchful sentinel and heroine?" The protracted shipwreck now began to fill Mrs. Vail's mind with motherly anxiety for Barbara's education and future welfare. "I dread the time," said she to her husband, "when out daughter will cease to be satisfied with her present circum- scribed state, but will long to enter into that great realm of human activity which she now is content to see in her fancies and dreams." This thought had already stolen like a shadow across Rodney's mind, and he looked forward with similar dread to Barbara's realization of her imprisonment. One breezy morning, while the sea was sparkling with unusual lustre, Barbara was busy with some silent amuse- ment, all alone by herself at the ship's bow. "My dear husband," said the weary wife, who sat under the flannel awning (which now had many tatters), "tell me, page: 124-125[View Page 124-125] 124 TEMPEST-TOSSED. ft for our daughter's osake-I do not ask for our own-is there no hope of escape from this captivity?" '"Softly," said Dr. Vail, putting his finger on his lips, "speak lower- Barbara stands yonder, looking over tWe ship's side, throwing something overboard; she must not hear us utter any murmur or complaint." "But tell me," said Mary, sinking her voice to a mere sigh ; "do you think we are never to see the land?" This question shot a pang through Rodney's breast. "Mary," said he, "how we have drifted hither is plain enough; how we are kept here is equally plain; but how we are ever to get away from this watery desert, I know not. Day after day, month after month, year after year, this mtnting ship keeps climbing up the hill-tops of these waves, as if on the look-out for some island of rest, or some vessel of rescue, only to find none, and to sink back again into the perpetual sea." Barbara, the busy maid, lithe, fair-haired, and sun-burnt, had been occupying herself in the bow, and did not overhear this conversation, but happened just then to be whispering something to her own solitary heart. "Go, little ship of glass," said she, looking down at a small floating object that was glittering in the water, "carry your message safely, and tell the great world that I am in it, and am longing to see its beautiful people, especially Lucy and-!" "Barbara, what are you doing?" asked her mother calling to her affectionately. "O," replied the young maiden, "I have been throwing another little glass jar overboard, with a writing in it, just as my father does. I am watching to see the little thing toss about and float away." "Do you expect," asked her mother, "that it will be picked up at sea!" "O, I hope not," replied Barbara, with emphasis. "Why, my daughter?" "Because," said Barbara, with some hesitation, "I don't want anybody to see what I wrote." ADRIFT. 12 . "What did you write?" "Just something to please mysel and for nobody else to see ; so I did not seal it very tight; and I'm sure it will sink." Barbara had a habit, whenever a small fruit-jar was emptied of its treasures, to freight it with some mysterious words, in her own girlish hand-writing-some message which she allowed neither her father nor mother to see--nd then to cast the little message-bearer overboard. Possibly these enclosures were love-letters, but if they were, 'Barbara kept them to herself with young love's secrecy, which is shyer than old love's craft. "Dat's right, my little lamb," said Jezebel to Barbara- I " what's de good book say? ' Cast dy bread upon de waters, and dou shall find it after many days.' " The many days of Jezebel's prophecy then slowly and wearily passed; during which the lowly-minded sybil continued to occupy herself with forgetting Bruno and remembering Pete; with scolding Beaver and nursing Mrs. Vail; with seeing visions and growing old. Bel had, indeed, been venerable for many years past, but she was now gradually crowning her dusky head with snowy hair. "Yes," said she, cheerfully; "what's de good book say? I hab been young, and now I am old, but nebber hab I seen de righteous forsaken, nor his seed beggin' bread." "Begging bread!" thought Rodney, with a shudder. "God forbid. What if starvation should stare us in the face!" Rodney Vail's floating house, like many a more solidly- founded household, had a skeleton in it. This was a grinning death's-head, conjured up by his imagination to represent starvation. The ghlastly thought of famine fre- quently rattled its dry bones in his mind. One night, at a very late hour, after the ship had rocked all its other inmates (even the dog) to sleep, Dr. Vailsat at his writing-desk in the cabin. His lamp was poorly fed with fish-oil, which he had made page: 126-127[View Page 126-127] 126 TEMPEST-TOSSED. from a porpoise; and the smoky flame cast a dim light over his sad, haggard face. "I can hardly believe this record," said he, "nor even credit my own handwriting." He had been making his usual entry in his journal, and, after completing it, had turned the pages backward to the earlier notes of the voyage. A painful sense passed through him of his long exile, which had already lasted through weary years, and which, for aught that he could foresee, might last through still wearier years to come indeed, possibly through all tile years of man's mortal span. - "Am I to live all my life on this ship," he exclaimed, "and never again behold the shore? Is my little family never to join the fellowship of mankind? Am I to waste here to old age, and die, and be left to fall to dust in this drifting bark, till she herself moulders, drops to pieces, and goes down? Is Barbara never to see a human face except the sad countenances that confront her in this prison-house? Beaver is gray with age., Am not I, even" in my prime, more a dog than he?-fretting more at my chain?--whining more in my kennel? Are there more years and cycles and eternities yet to come, of this weariness and wasting? If so, must not Mary's face whiten to ashes, and her pulse cease to beat? How have we all kept ourselves alive?-and yet we live. How have we all maintained our reason?-and yet we are sane. When will the eld come? It will never come! The curse is on us. We are fated. There is no God!" The strong man, breaking into momentary weakness, clenched his hands, gathered his brows into a frown, heaved a loud sigh, blew out the light, and groped his way to bed. On his desk he had left open the journal which he had been reading It was a long history of hope deferred, to which he every night added a few words in expectation of bringing his record soon to an end, until now at last he seldom had the courage to read it backward to the beginning. ADRIFT. 127 This manuscript he called the Doomsday Book. But he described it unjustly, for it was written in a cheerful and sometimes hilarious strain. On many of its pages, the brave man jested with his fate- toyed with his misery. They that hunger fill their fancy with pleasing images of feasts. They that hope against hope gild the midnight with an imagined glitter of morning. Rodney Vail resorted to various devices to lure his mind from its si dismal temptation to prey upon itself. t One of these was a resolute habit to search for a sunbeam in every cloud :-and this is no coward's quest, inasmuch as a man, to make it, must be able to face storms. The man who, in prosperity, leads a serious life amid the world's vanities and trifles, is the man who, in adversity, will be best able to jest at his calamity and despair. Rodney Vail's journal bore witness to such a man. see Before throwing himself on his bed,he returned to his desk, re-lighted the lamp, and re-opened the book. "I had forgotten," said he, " why I wanted to look back at this first volume of notes; my mind is vagrant; I cannot keep it fixed to one point of thought; I remember now that I meant to turn back to the list of the ship's-stores." Rodney Yail had been seized with a stronger apprehension than usual that these stores were running low, and were threatening a scarcity. He wished to re-examine the orig- inal inventory of the cargo, to see how large a proportion of the supplies had been consumed, and how much yet re- mained. In turning over the pages of his journal, he came at last to the early record which he sought- the long schedule of provisions from the Harmony Factory. "Ah, here it is," said he, " but I have to look back through half a generation to find it! How life vanishes! How time flies! The very ink has faded and the paper grown yellow! How long this ship has been drifting since this record was made, and yet she is almost in the same place now as then! She is only two degrees of latitude, and three and a-half page: 128-129[View Page 128-129] v 128 TEMPEST-TOSSED. of longitude, from the very spot where the trad -wind first left us in the middle of the ocean. How often I have looked back to this early list of provisions, and then looked forward wondering how long they would last!" Rodney Vail thoughtfully perused the inventory which he had made so long ago, and which, as it now stood in the ship's journal, had grown time-stained like the weather- beaten hulk itself. "Ah," said he, "when I penned this catalogue in this book, little did I think that we were then predestined to gnaw our way with daily hunger through a thousand solid cans and sealed jars! Thank heaven, we have not yet come to starvation. No," said he, shutting his journal, " that fear is yet afar off! Not more than two-thirds of this stock have been consumed-the other third remains. He who hears the young ravens when they cry will not permit my dear ones to suffer hunger. I must not conjure up such groundless anxieties. In the midst of plenty, how can we want? Begone, horrible shadows of famine! Fade, unreal fears! Depart, grim dragons of torment, and let my mind have peace!" The Roman-faced hero-who had a more than Roman heart-gave one long look into the flame of the fish-oil lamp until not only his eyes grew brighter but his spirit also; after Which, like the wise physician that he was, who knew how to make the body's rest minister to the mind's health, he gave himself the gracious medicine of sleep. Meanwhile the Coromandel, like the water-cask whose fate she followed, still went drifting through a wilderness of waters-pursuing her slow voyage without haste, without rest. CHAPTER VIII. DR. VAIL'S JOURNAL. HE manuscript book in which Dr. Vail, by the light of his fish-oil lamp, had just been both reading and writing at midnight, was not his log but his journal. His log, he always wrote at noon, or just after taking his observation of the sun; his journal, he generally wrote late at night, after everybody else had gone to bed. The log contained the daily latitude, longitude, barometer, winds, and weather; the journal consisted chiefly of desul- tory memoranda of fishing, bird-catching, and ship-chan- dlering, with brief and slight references to the domestic features of the strange life which he and his fellow-hermits lived on their lonely ship, and with infrequent mention here and there, at wide intervals, of his secret thoughts and feelings-his hopes, fears, and prayers. Dr. Vail was a man of equal sensitiveness and stoicism- a sensitiveness maintained at a glowing heat by his imagi- nation, and a stoicism stiffened into an unbending heroism by his will. He suffered much, but expressed little. In writing his journal, he watchfully prevented himself from pinning his heart on his page with the point of his pen. He not only shrank from recording, he even shrank from con- templating, his misery and despair. His note-book, as it grew under his daily hand, recorded, as time advanced, fewer and fewer traces of the more dismal features of the Coromandel's history :-such as the hours of sickness, watching, and anguish; the scenes of storm, and threatened engulfment; the fear of. famine and starvation ; page: 130-131[View Page 130-131] 130 TEMPEST-TOSSED. ' the ominous wildness of mind that sometimes pervaded the whole company at once, each communicating the mad con- tagion to the other; the horrible impatience that occasionally smote them like a distemper; the will-o'-wisps that lured them often into hopeless bewilderment, and to the edge and verge of the soupl's extremest woe;--all these features of the real history were generally omitted from the written record. Even if Dr. Vail had recorded these dreadful aspects of his voyage, so that his narrative could be reproduced here, still, inasmuch as the most horrible of these experiences vere not habitual, but only occasional, any chronicle of them, if faithful to the individual facts, would necessarily, in pro- portion to this very faithfulness, falsify the general tenor of courage and patience which, on the whole, animated the ill- fated wanderers throughout their dreary cruise. To the honor of these heroic castaways, who bravely endured a fate which only true and noble natures could ever have upborne, be it. known to all the world that when each successive wave of bitterness had once rolled over the victims, they permitted the retiring flood to pass backward forever into the Stygian stream, never again to flow over their souls. "No," said Rodney Vail, bracing himself with iron will, "Iet us never remember twice the same misery, but let what is wretched in our lives be banished from our thoughts." So the unhappy facts which Dr. Vail sedulously sought to commit to the oblivious flood, retaining hardly a record of them even in his own private journal, ought not to be copiously unsealed in this present history, nor distilled even like drops of the waters of Marah into these pages, to add unnecessary bitterness to a tale of misfortune.- Dr. Vail's journal, particularly in view of the omissions which it intentionally made, gradually became a long record of unimportant things; a stupendous volume of trifles ; and yet, rightly judged, this very triviality is itself full of pathos, in view of the unending monotone of misery whiqh the sufferer sought not to record, but only to beguile. DR. VAIL'S JOURNAL. : Each day's memorandum was generally meagre and terse, -sometimes a paragraph, but usually only a line; and, indeed, the brave record, in hundreds of finstances, consisted simply of the date with an added "All's well." Herewith appended is a collection of particulars from this slight diary, chosen from hundreds and even thousands of its entries; the excerpts marking considerable intervals of time,'and stretching through half a generation of human life. 1847, Fov. 12. Flung overboard, just before sunset, another glass fruit-jar, with record of our misfortunes. This little privateer, with its letter of marque, was loath to depart on its mission, but stayed in sight all through the twilight, until at last it was lost in the same gloom that surrounds our ship, our souls, and our fate. -Dec. 13. Occasionally I haul back the water-drag, hoist my sail, and steer before the wind. But to what purpose? Why head the ship one wayratherthan another? I am hopelessly distant from land on all sides. Still, Mary's mind is sometimes comforted by seeing the black hulk whitened with our hand's-breadth of canvas; and Jezebel holds Barbara close down to the compass, which winks its eye in the deck, to the little one's delight. '48, Feb. 6. I have been successfully trying Cazneau's plan of dis- tilling fresh water from salt. May 3. Our Baby Barbara is the blessedest of blessings. June 28. Starboard lantern dashed to pieces by a gull, flying against it in the night like a midge into a lamplight. July 1 Tuned the piano, which had rusted in the wires; and Mary played Home, Sweet Home. Aug. 30. I am acting the part of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, but have no scruples against eating the broiled joint of an albatross. Oct. 15. The air full of electricity to-night-St. Elmo's fire run- ning round the ship's rail. Nov. 26. Built a boat; the frame of barrel-staves; the bottom and sides of sailcloth ;-it will serve for a dory in mild weather, in case I need to-make a fisherman's excursion a short distance from the ship. 1849, Jan. 9. Been thinking this evening of Oliver Chantily-that noble, faithful friend. Is he not searching for me? Yes; through storm and calm. How my heart is welded, riveted, and life-bound to his! That man's friendship is built on adamant, and will outlast time and the world. March 16. Opened a can of asparagus, which Mary calls as good as the freshest on-Pritchard farm. page: 132-133[View Page 132-133] 132\ TEMPEST-TOSSED. June 29. Beaver tore his forefoot against a nail in the forecastle, chasing a rat. Oct. 27. A white shark is following us, as if somebody were about to die on board. Nfov. 30. The bird-traps have snared nothing for 21 days. '50, Feb. 11. Thought I saw a ship-a small white speck in the horizon, N. N. W.; but, after it kindled my blood into a fever, it vanished; wherefore I suspect it was a cloud. June 20. Renewed my canvas boat, which was so badly worn as to be too risky to use. Frame still good, but canvas rotten. Cut out a new covering from the ship's spare flying-jib. Aug. 6. A storm!-and it rages more fiercely in my soul than on the sea. A distant ship tried to rescue us, but swamped her boat, and has since disappeared in the darkness. SO the desolation that rules the world at this midnight hour, and in this lhowling wind! Come death rather than this prolonged despair! Sept. 28. Alas I the Coromandel is now a hospital. All but myself down with fever. What if I, too, give out? Then all is gone. "O my sinews, grow not instant old But bear me stiffly up." Dee. 25. Christmas, and no Christmas tree I No green thing on board save our solitary geranium, growing in its flower-pot in the cabin! Nor any household chimney for Santa Claus to come down to Barbara's stockings! But the little thing had them hung up last night, and found in them this morning three French treasures, to wit : a Paris doll, a Noah's ark, and a Harlequin. O Madame D'Arblay, you were a foolish old chatter-box, but you have been a blessing in adversity to 'a little family whom you bored dreadfully in their better days! '51, Jan. 12. Another lantern shivered to fragments by the beaks of night-birds, April 20. Rain, rain, rain,-enough to freshen the salt sea. June 6. Planned an improvement for Fairmount Water-Works, but find a difficulty in submitting the design to the City Council. '52, Jan. 7. Barbara has folded a sheet of paper into a tiny book in imitation of the ship's log, and has made her first entry as follows: "Bevir is gods Dog." Jan. 13. Dead calm-not a ripple. O vanishing days and wasting life! Idleness- nothingness- blankness. How long till oblivion? When shall I reach Lethe's wharf, where the fat weed rots? Tiere will I moor my wandering bark forever. March 27. This morning I found my last lantern shivered into fine DR. VAIL'S JOURNAL. 133 / bits by the birds, and the ship now shows no light at night-except through the cabin windows. A May 30. O for a little frost, or a Yankee Nor'wester, to brace one's nerves 1 Dec. 13. Barbara is always begging for a new story, so I asked her yesterday for a list of those she knew already, and received to-day the following letter by ocean-mail: DEER PAPA I no All Thease. little red Ridinghud Jack the Giantkiller 40 theavs Laddins lamp gody 2 shus Buty & Beest pide PiPer Robbin sun crusow paul & viginya Filip an juju & Thats all I no BARBARA. '53, Jan. 1. Happy New Year I Heretofore the instruction which Barbara has received has been desultory. But the child's busy brain continually aslks for something to-do, and so her mother has resolved on a female seminary. As the school-house rolls a little, we call it Topsyturvy College. March 2. A sword-fish angrily stuck his stiletto into the spar of our water-drag, and broke off his fine weapon, leaving it for our cab- inet of curiosities. Nov. 20. Whittled for Barbara a Punch-and-Judy, which Mary has trimmed with red and blue flannel rags. '54, Feb. 9. Judging by an imaginary map, I am within 500 miles of Ferdinand de Norohna. March 13. Caught with hook and bait my largest albatross, meas- uring 18 feet from tip to tip of outspread wings. May 27. Our floating argosy is growing mouldy round the water's edge. July 13. I would give a gold watch for a lemon. 55, Sept. 29. Jezebel insists that an occasional ghost glides through the ship at night. '56, April 9. If Barbara dies in this sickness, I shall wrap my arms about her and sink with her in burial into the sea. May 21. Busy all day with my salt works. Aug. 14. Thought of a model for a motionless bed-cot for Mary's comfort, suggested by the self-poising of the cabin-lamp, that hangs at rest while the ship rolls. Dec. 11. Picked up to-day a broken oar, covered with long grass, and branded on the blade with the words: "Stockdove, Maker, Liv- erpool, 1805." It may have been half a century in the water! Probably it became water-logged years ago and sank. Its crop of buoyant grass then gradually lifted it again to the surface, and kept it floating in the sunshine. So man's, calamities, that first sink the soul into jark and dismal depths, at last by their own natural growth * . page: 134-135[View Page 134-135] 134 TEMPEST-TOSSED. buoy him up through the very billows that once rolled over him, and ever after keep him floating above them in the perpetual light of heaven. - '57, April 6. If this is time, what is etenity? Blot out the lying almanac which reckons a hundred years to a century! I reckon a hundred centuries to a year. May 13. Have been haunted for three days with the thought of coming in sight of the Peak of Teneriffe. Aug. 11. So calm to-day that I could see the earth's rotundity. The glassy ocean sloped visibly down around us on 'every side. The ship rested like a fly on the top of the vast and gently rounding ball. ! Nov. 4. Fancied the Coromandel had sprung a leak, but the alarm was occasioned by the bursting of water-tank No; 5, which I tighitened with a new hoop. '58, Jan. 16. With fear and quaking, Jezebel testifies to seeing the Lord Christ walking in majesty over these waves. F'eb. 21. Mary has fancifully named the various parts of the ship to remind her of home -thus, the cabin is Salem; the main-deck, Boston Common; the jury-mast, BunkLer Hill Monument; anld the bilnacle, Grandfather Pritchard's summer, house. May 26. Caught a dolphin, and shall make oil of him to keep my cans from rust. June 7. The red fog has visited us, which makes me surmise that we aretin the neighborhood of the Cape de Verde Islands. Aug. 10. I wear the ring of Gyges, and still remain invisible to mankind. '59, Jan. 13. What a piece of good luck to the present incumbent that the original officers, crew, and passengers of this ship consider- ately left their best clothes behind them! I have coats, vests, jackets, gloves, hats, everything;-except a hat-block to make the hats fit the head. Dr. Johnson liked "a good hater;"I would prefer a good hatter. Meanwhil I stretch the small sizes over the foot of the foremast. May 21. Called all my family to witness a stately column of cloud, standing like a pillar in the West,-its foot on the sea, and all heaven resting on its head. ' - July 6. Barbara has written a short and critical sketch of the life and character of Beaver as follows: "Beaver is my dog. Last night God set the sky on Fire, and Beaver barked at him for it. Rosalie my Doll thinks beaver is a brown Elphant. She rides on his Back without saying a word. beaver knows the Story of Cinderella. I told it to him. My pen is poor my ink is pale my hand it Bhaiks like beavers tail. the End. - BARBAARA. vLK. VA1LN' JUU KNAL. 16o Aug. 16. A prize! A sea-turtle. Weight, 820 lbs. Oct. -3. Oliver's son, Philip, by this time, must be pushing himself up toward's man's estate; and his father, when I meet him again, if ever do in this life, will be middle-aged - perhaps an old man! I realize that my youth has gone! Gray, gray, gray. :60, Jan. 12. The new experiment with the kelp a perfect success. April 3. This afternoon an aerolite dropped from the sky, struck our awning, went through it like a bullet, and fell on the binnacle. It is as big as a lark's egg. Query. -Did it descend frdm heaven's gate? 5 May 11. Oiled the piano wires, to keep off the sea-canker. June 20. Barbara begins to use the microscope. Every day she searches the ribbon grass for its tiny crustaceans. She wants them for their brilliant colors. Poor child, she is as fond as an Indian of rich reds, greens, and burnished gold. The gayest wardrobe in the world is worn by these unseen animalcule. Barbara's chief picture- gallery is her little museum of specimens, fixed on bits of broken glass. I remember seeing at Jena some of Goethe's water-color paintings of just such magnified nothings. The great world is not so wonderful as the little. July 25. Cut out to-day my last piece of spare canvas for re- clothing my dory. After this sheeting rots, I shall have no skiff to launch for my feathered gate. Beaver must do all the work of fetching the spoils. And he is growing old and stiff. Aug. 19. On examining my accumulated records of latitude and longitude, I find that the ship drifts round and round in the same old way, within her prescribed circumference. There seems no, proba- bility of our escaping out of this slow vortex. I feel condemned to one perpetual, aimless, hopeless voyage of circumnavigation. Oct. 17. These mid-October days, were we now at home in New England, would be the beautiful season of red and yellow leaves; but here, no springtime ever puts forth a blossom; nor, during all our summers, has any green branch shaken in the wind; but our fading, withering lives will not fail to give us the " sere, the yellow leaf." '62, Jan. 13. Fell asleep this afternoon under the awning, and dreamed of Mary Pritchard walking to church through Newhury Lane, with a sprig of sweet-fennlel in her hand. Feb. 27. Thqre is now neither spider nor fly, neither rat nor mouse, on board the ship. She aches with virtue. April 2. Barbara, whose sight is keenly trained to open-air obser- vations, has seen Jupiter's moons with the naked eye. May 3. Been reading an old letter of Oliver Chantilly's, speaking page: 136-137[View Page 136-137] 136 TEMPEST-TOSSED., ^ of his boy. How time sweeps onward. That son ought now to be his father's right arm-the prop and pillar of his house. ' May 31. Been thinking of the old wharf at Salem, and how it used to be covered with worm-eaten timbers taken out of decayed ships. The channel which the ship-worm bores (as I remember it) is big enough to poke a finger in. But I have seen no trace of any such invasion of the Coromandel. Our ship is copper-sheathed. This seems to have warded off the enemy, as a shield does an arrow. I conclude that the ship-worm, when it comes at all, comes only from without, and is not, as Barbara was, born-on board. July 28. A sudden discovery! Our log for fourteen years shows that the Coromandel never once since the fire has drifted South of 33 or North of 24; but now at last we are in 231, and still going north- ward; getting farther and farther from our old locality, and coming into new waters. What means this? Aug. 23. The ship for 26 days has been creeping northward. She is now outside the fatal basin in which we have been rolling for years. Heaven forbid that we shall be blown back again into the same dismal circle! Oct. 9. Sketched a plan of a hot-house for grapes, with a trans- parent roof of water, one fathom thick, to focus the sui's rays on the fruit. Nov. 21. -At work to-day farming my sea-grass,-Barbara and Beaver frolicking in the fragrant weed. :Dec. 13. Lat. 19 S.; Long. 20 W. The Trade Wind once more! -blowing us to the Northward/ Have not felt a breath of this wind since it first wafted us, year ago, into the ndid-ocean. Now we lhave come once more under the fanning of its brisk wings! O may it drift us toward Cape St. Roque, or in sight of some passing ship! '63, Jan. 9. To-day the sounding-board of the piano split with a loud noise,-breaking Barbara's heart with its fracture. Apqi 21. Bearings, Lat. 12 S.; Long. 29 W.", The Trade Wind and the Ocean Current are now harnessed to us, likp twin steeds to a chariot, and we are driving toward warmer climes. Thank heaven we must be edging our way into the haunts of the mercantile marine! May 13. Jezebel fell as the ship lurched, and the weight of her body, doubling her wrist, dislocated it. The poot creature groaned with pain. It was pitiful to see Beaver, looking on in sympathy. He seemed to regret that he had ever given his life-lohg critic any just ground for her censures. June 1. Barbara wrote a letter to-day, addressed to some imaginary person, whose name she would not tell, and sent it -in a plum-jar to find its destination by sea. - a DR. VAIL'S JOURNAL. 137 July 5. Detected, here and there, spots of mildew and rust on the cans, especially on the cans of corn and pears. July 28. Lat. 12 S.; Long. 60 W. The Westward current is increase ing. At this rate of progress, we must sooner or later come to the end of the sea, even though we then find ourselves at the end of I the earth. U "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." Aug. 12. Suspect that I am about to cross the Line. Hail, once more, northern hemisphere! Our progress is at the rate of 37 miles a day. This must by and by talke the old ship somewhere. "Anywhere, anywhere to the world." Sept. 4. At last our solitary geranium, which has been withering for two years, has died of old age. Barbara will not allow the dead stalk to be pulled up. This plant has been the sole garden of the ship. It has put forth, year by year, the only green leaf that Barbara ever saw. The little handful of soil in which its roots have dwelt is the only Mother Earth that she has ever touched; and every grain there- of is precious gold. The flower has faded-beyond the power of Bar bara's tears to water it back to life. Let it not be the emblem of our green hope, blighted at last. Oct. 13. Great God, the North Star beams on us! It is our first sight of it for half a generation! We are in another hemisphere I Heigho, homeward bound! '64. Jan. 1. Having no horse-shoe for good luck, I celebrated the New Year by nailing an arched fish-bone over Mary's door, in foretoken of better days to come. Feb. 19. Barbara rebels at algebra, but I insist. Feb. 17. The Doldrums! The heat! The rain! The calm! The sunshine! O the worthlessness of life! Feb. 28. Would I had a map to tell me where I am! The ship is going almost westward. She must be north of the South American coast, and making towards the West Indies. I have -hauled back the. drag, and keep a small sail hoisted,-for now wind and current unite to speed me on my course. Made 46 miles yesterday-55 to-day. March 11.. A tropical tornado has blown for 17 hours. Three waves, in swift succession, swept over the ship from stem to stern, but the trusty drag kept the bow to windward. April 1. Took a manitee. April 9. The ocean much salter here than in the southern hemi- sphere. April 15. When are these wanderings to end? Perhaps never, except with our lives. But I am ashamed to catch myself pitifully page: 138-139[View Page 138-139] 138 TEMPEST-TOSSED. and childishy murmuring at our lot. We are in the kindly care of Him who " measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out the heavens with a span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance." May 7. How do the butterflies get so far out at sea? May 11. All's well. -The foregoing excerpts from Dr. Vail's meagre diary are sufficient to show the tedious events in the strange life which the Coromandel's company lived on board their wandering ship; a history too tame and monotonous to be prolonged further, even in this dilatory tale. But in here dismissing Dr. Vail's slight and scrap-like diary, it should be stated, as a matter of curious interest, that he found an ever-increasing difficult in supplying him- self with writing materials. During the first three years, he wrote with a gold pen; but at last its diamond-point failed. He then plucked from the wing of the albatross its stately quills; but these, being soft, were so lavish of ink that he rapidly arid thoughtlessly exhausted his store of the precious fluid. He then distilled from a peculiar sea-weed a dark- green juice, which he kept from corrosion in a solution of spirits; and he fed his new ink to his page with niggardly dribblings through a slender, hollow bone from a dolphin's dorsal fin. At the end of the weary years whose sorrowful history Rodney Vail had daily noted in his scanty journal, the long- suffering man still maintained a courage equal to his fate. The will, which is the pillar of the mind, still towered within him, not only unbroken, but unbent. His hope of rescue, though no longer a feverish passion, was still an abiding conviction. The indomitable man ceaselessly strove to reach the world with messages sent forth over the sea in his little dancing shallops of glass. One of the latest of these visionary endeavors was a long letter, rolled closely together, and thrust lengthwise into a wine bottle. It was as follows: O DR. VAIL'S JOURNAL. 12; AT SEA, SHP COROMANDEL, - - May 12, 1864 Lat. 12 deg. 40 min., N. Long. 42 deg. 16 min. W. MY HONORED FATHER, If you are yet in the land of the living, receive the salutation of your son, who writes these lines on board a dismantled ship, that has drifted without sails or crew, for more than sixteen years, over a desolate sea, and still rolls and tosses perhaps hundreds of leagues from land. Our great disaster overtook us on the 1st of October, 1847, in Lat. 30 deg. 49 min. S., Long. 14 deg. 28 min. E. The ship was struck by lightning, set on fire, and hastily abandoned by the captain, crew, and passengers-all except Mary, Mrs. Bamley, and myself. A deluge of rain quenched the conflagration, just in time to save us fromfimminent death. In the midst of the tempest, Mary gave birth to a babe now called Barbara, and grown to be the fairest of her race. Since the day of our shipwreck, we have never descried the solid earth, nor met a passing vessel, nor looked into other human faces than our own. For fourteen years we cruised at a snail's pace round the centre of the Southl Atlantic, where Capricorn softens the sea into a perpetual calm. Eighteen months ago we emerged from this charmed circle, and have ever since been steadily creeping northward, till we have now sunk the Southern Cross, passed the Equator, and found the North Star. Having no map, I cannot determine our exact geographical position, but we must be verging toward the West Indies. Our provisions still hogd out, and so do our hopes of deliverance. The ship, having been staunchly built, and seldom exposed to rough weather, has never sprung a leak; her white-oak timbers are still untouched by dry-rot or the worm. Our life on board is mercifully exempt from bodily suffering or extreme hardship. We are all well, our chief illness being home- sickness; we eat, we drink, and sometimes are merry; our garments are not yet fallen to rags and tatters; we have a few books and our reasoning faculties; we suffer many privations, particularly the lamentable loss of fellowship with mankind; but we are not in despair, nor is life a burden. My daily toils consist in snaring sea-birds, catching fish, trying out oil from the dolphin or the tVorpoise, gathering rain-water into tanks, and, during the hot season, spreading the deck with meadows of sea- weed, drying it in the sun, binding it into bundles, and storing it in the forecastle as fuel for Jezebel's kitchen fire. Mary, when her fragile strength permits, plies her needle as of old, page: 140-141[View Page 140-141] "O TEMPEST-TOSSED. refitting to our use the garments bequeathed to us by our escaped fellow-voyagers years ago; moreover, she gives to Barbara a daily lesson both in books and music. Our daughter is an inch taller than her mother, an eager and faithful scholar, and a brave and loving child. Many records of our misfortunes have I written, sealed, and cast into the deep; seldom with expectation that the sad story would reach the eyes of men; but this morning I bethought me to write you on these fly-leaves, torn from the Bible my mother gave me the year before her death. The fancy seized my mind that as these leaves had once been in my father's house, and had come forth from it, haply they might find their way back to it again-as the carrier-dove, uncaged under a strange sky, fes unerringly home. If this message, therefore, should reach your aged eyes, bearing tidings to you that I am yet in life and health, I pray you send me your instant benediction; for a father's blessing may go round the world to seek and find his son. Have I been undutiful to you that heaven, which permitted even the prodigal to return, should keep me in exile forever from my father's house? Bitter and sorrowful is the fate that parts me from the duty and care I owe to your declining years. In the midst of this fathomless sea, my heart cries to you from the still deeper depths of my love and grief. But there is an end to all things, even to calamity. God keep your white hairs above the grave, till I look upon your face once more. Witness my hand and seal, In love and reverence, Your son,. To Wilbraham Vail, RODNEY VAIL. Salem, Mass. U S. A. , I . CHAPTER IX. MARY VAIL'S JOURNAL. RS. VAIL, like her husband, kept a diary, but of a different kind. It was a record of inward, not of outward life - a register of thoughts and feelings, not of wind and weather. It did not read like a journal written on shipboard -least of all like a history of shipwreck, or of personal suffering. A stranger could not have derived from it a continuous narrative of the original disaster and subse- quent privations. She wrote it not daily, but weekly-generally on Sunday mornings. Her delicate handwriting did not wear out her pen, nor exhaust her ink; and yet her inkstand finally grew dry under the double drought of summer and of time ; after which she wrote, as her husband did, from the juice of the sea-weed. Mrs. Vail's spirit was unconsciously breathed into her note-book, and ever afterward exhaled from its opened pages as sweetly as if violets had been pressed between the leaves. ' Living habitually in the inner, not the outer world, she was a mystic-a dreamer. Her tree life was in her affec- tions and meditations. Exterior things were important to her only as they ministered to these innermost and passion- less passions. Devoted to the Puritan faith, she had long ago appro- priated state-room No. 7-that number being, as she thought, mystical and hallowed-for a cloister, a chapel, a Gethse- mane; to which she habitually resorted alone, and in which. page: 142-143[View Page 142-143] "2 TEMPEST-TOSSED. after closing the door and locking it behind her, she bent her knee and with a low-murmuring voice prayed. She made a daily pilgrimage to this tear-consecrated shrine. Dwelling within herself, the warp and woof of this inward life, as she wove it into her journal, consisted of three threads-wifely love, maternal solicitude, and religious devotion. Such a diary, being chiefly occupied with setting up monuments anal landmarks of the writer's affectional and religious experiences, would be interesting mainly to mys- tical minds like her own. Accordingly, no other exhibition of its pages can judi- ciously be made here than to furnish biographical particulars concerning the personages in this tale-especially concerning the character and career of her daughter. 1848. . . I find myself running to the calendar to watch the spring's return- just as, before Barbara was born, I awaited the date of her birth; and I have settled my mind to have fine weather two weeks from to-day. . . My babe fills me with mystery and gratitude. I dare hardly speak my feelings aloud-I am so grateful. I never felt so like pon- dering, and keeping all my thoughts concerning the high calling of motherhood as now. I say little but to God. . How often I think of dear Rosa Chantilly and her family! How lovingly she looked for us at Cape Town! How agonized she must have been at our calamity! How little she now suspects, while her boy Philip stands at her knee, and asks her to tell him about Aunt Mary, that Aunt Mary is not under the ocean waves, but riding peacefully over their glassy tops! '.9. . Let me not complain of my tempest-tossed fate. For, am I bereaved of anything vital to my heart's joy? Have I not my darlings? If these cannot content a woman's life, what can? Were I dwelling in a king's palace, without these fair pillars to be its props, I would only be living in a gilded sepulchre. But having my husband and child, have I not everything? Has Heaven smitten me? It has blessed me. Let me not murmur at this tempest-tossed hulk. O my soul, be thou superior to the halcyon, and build thy nest in peace on the rolling wave! . . The sun has burned baby's face like unto papa's; and heil MARY VAIL'S JOURNAL. 143 little cheeks are peeling off into velvety flakes, like faded rose-leaves. She wants Bel to be always carrying her up and down the deck, so tliat her little bright eyes may look off at the water. What a wise look a babe has! Barbara gazes on the waves as if she had been familiar with their mysteries from the foundation of the world. Rodney came hurriedly down stairs, and asked me if I had room for two new lodgers in our floating palace. I smiled at the sad jest. He then disclosed a couple of Cape pigeons which he had just caught alive. Barbara cooed at them-more dove-like than they. '50. . Strange that I bear my body's pains better than my soul's joys. Why is it that great love, great yearning, great emotion of any pleasing and ecstatic kind--even the farthest removed from grief and distress-should make me suffer? My kisses on Barbara's cheek, my love, my prayers-these, although they are the very chiefest delights of which my sad life is composed, nevertheless all goquivering through me so as to make me suffer rather than enjoy. What is suffering but painful joy? . Among Barbara's new acquirements is her discovery of the evening star. After dark, for two or three nights past, she has stood on a chair, gazing out of the little round window of my state-room; and when at last the star appears, she is so happy, and calls us all to look. ' 51. .. My husband has been writing some strange and weird verses, which I will copy and save: THEE Two LADDERS. Benighted in my pilgrimage, alone, And footsore, for the path to heaven grew steep, I looked for Jacob's pillow of a stone, In hope of Jacob's vision in my sleep: Then in my dream, whereof I quake to tell, Not up from earth to heaven, but-0O sad sight H- The ladder was let down from earth to hell 1- Whereon, ascending from the deep abyss, - Came fiery spirits, who with dismal hiss, Made woeful clamor of their lost delight, And stung my eyelids open, till in fright, I caught my staff, and at the dead of night, I, who toward heaven and peace had halted so, Was fleet of foot to flee from hell and woe. I . . .The little chapel-room was chilly to-day from rain and damp- ness, but with my shawl wrapped round me, I knelt and received a blessing. Having so often known this rest and blessedness, why do I * so often persist in bearing a burden which I know that in one happy, heavenly moment I can lay down? '52 .. Barbara is getting along with her little lessons, and to-day, page: 144-145[View Page 144-145] "4 TEMPEST-TOSSED.' after much struggle and many questions about spelling, achieved her first letter to her father, as follows: Dir paPa I love yew erry muche I called beavir a baddog. I hope yew will 4giv me. ' barbara. * * Last night, in saying her prayers, Barbara added these words: Dear God, when Beaver jumps overboard, tell him always to remember and come back. t . I rebuked Barbara for saying, I Can't. My darling, said I, you can do anything if you only try. No, she replied, I might try till I am gray to fly, and never could do it. What shrewd replies children make, and how careful we ought to be in our speeches to them. . I was, to-day, seized with a cold, fainting turn-catching my breath. It made me think of dying. Indeed, why should I live longer? What useful work can I do, with these thin, white, feeble hands? These poor, idle, useless hands! '53. . . The dear little girl is so lovable. I feel so safe about her spiritual welfare. Already her life and character are fragrant of heaven. The responsibilities of motherhood weigh upon me like a sweet burden, when I think of my feeble attempts to educate Barbara. Not even a mother-no, none but God alone-can fitly train a child's immortal soul. . . Why is it that a man so absorbs a woman's thought and life? Hlow beautiful is Rodney's nature! How grand his resources! If he were among men he might prove his genius and power; but how could the world, even if he were in it, ever know his purity and ten- derness? These are known only to God-And to me. "My beloved is mine, and I am his." '54. . . Barbara wants to know all about the school-children whom I used to teach in Salem, particularly Lucy Wilmerding. She teases me to read to her again and again Rosa Chantilly's letter about little Philip and his squirrel Juju. These playmates-Lucy, Philip, and Juju-seem to live as vividly in Barbara's fancy as if they were real flesh and blood before," her eyes. What a charming necromancer childhood is! . The weather is fine now, and I shall be of good cheer, for it is well with him whom my soul loveth. O, for a little more bodily strength! I want to carry a smiling face before Rodney. If I live I shall teach Barbara to begin her love where mine now is. I cannot conceive of a sweeter future for Barbara than a faithful love. . . To-day a new mysterious feeling came over me which I never before detected-a kind of awe, or waiting, or listening to learn what God will do for me-and an agony of fear lest, by reason of my un- worthiness, I should fail to receive His blessing. MARY VAIL'S JOURNAL. i145 . . Taught Barbara how to cross-stitch. '55. .. How I rejoice in'my husband's love I I am kept in sweet humiliation by it. The chords of my heart are set to the harmony of love for this heroic mian. O that the flame may always burn, so that he shall never fail to see it in my cheeks, eyes, and soul! . . Alas, that Barbara has no playmates-no children to keep her company! A childless mother is to be pitied; but a childless child-a child without children for companions-a child who has never seen any other child than herself-0O this is pitiful indeed! God is a father to the fatherless; may He reveal himself once again a little child for Barbara's sake! '56. , Rodney is right when lie calls me a dreamer. To dream is to charm away care. My little chapel is my dream-land. What are good dreams but sweet prayers? What are the best prayers but the sweetest dreams? O the mystical-union of the soul with heaven! . . All Rosa Chantilly's hopes, promises, and prophecies about her little son Philip, which used to fill her letters with such a sweet extrav- agance of mother-love, are repeating themselves in my own heart over Barbara. O that I might be able to share with Rosa the delight of seeing my child brought up, as hers is, amid the advantages of a home, of schools, of churches, and of cultivated life! . . Barbara, who has been for several days diligently devoted to Beaver, under pretence of teaching him how to read, disclosed at last the object of her assiduity by entertaining us with a tableau of Una and the Lion. The dear girl is full of spirit in carrying out any- thng of this kind. She acts her parts all the better because she consults her invention, and does not imitate the poor models which used to be set for such exhibitions in sclhools. '57. . . I have been reading some of Rodney's old love-letters to me and culling out for a bouquet some of the closing words of eachf Choice and precious are they!-reminding me of the benedictions ol St. Paul's epistles. Here are some of these early blooms, still sweet- yes, sweeter than when first sent to me, one by one, in the spring-time of our courtship: * ' Yours forever and ever, amen." "Yours, wishing you grace, mercy, and peace." "Yours till time shall end, and love shall re-begin in immortality." "Yours till we walk in Paradise together, then to be yours more than ever." I love to read Rodney's letters to me over and over. Is there anything sweeter than old love-letters which, when read again in after years, find all their early prophecies fulfilled in the actual love whiche they first predicted only in fancy and hope? . . I was startled to-day. Hearing a soft footstep in the cabin, I 7 page: 146-147[View Page 146-147] "6 TEMPEST-TOSSED. looked out of my room, and thought I saw the figure of Miss Marjorie of Salem. It was the same sort of strange bonnet, cape, and cut of dress, the same kind of old veil, and the same feeble and decrepit step. This surprise was one of Barbara's tricks. She had contrived to rig herself into a counterfeit image of Miss Marjorie, whose daguerreotype is among our souvenirs. . . Barbara is developing housekeeping propensities and a keen relish for dress. She makes a lavish use of our store of lady's ward- robes. She begged her father yesterday for permission to open a trunk whose contents have heretofore been opened only for airing, not for use. Rodney gave way to her importunity. It contained Mrs. Atwill's wedding-dress-creamy-white satin. Barbara dressed herself in it, and appeared at table as a bride, though not " adorned for her husband." I wonder if Barbara will be vain of her beauty. If her sun-burn were off, she would be very, very handsome. She is looking more and more like her father, and her blue eyes and liglit hair are fit out-door mates for sky and sun. For lack of a gold chain to wear (since I will not yet permit her to use such ornaments) she sometimes arranges her golden hair in a double braid about her neck. I do not dare tell her how wild and beautiful she is. . Still, she is nothing but an overgrown child- full of animal spirits, and as restless as a leopard '58.. I have been looking over my memorials of Barbara-though she does not know it. All the little precious scraps of letters which she has written to me-all her tiny bits of love and bad spelling-all these I have kept from the beginning. Often and often, now that she pursues graver studies, and lives a more discontented life, do I shut myself up, take out these records of her happy childhood, and weep over them. O how hard it was for me to consent to her growing up at all. I always wanted her to remain a babe, just as she was at first, or never to be any older than only to answer back smile for smile. How happy she was when she first began to totter alone about the cabin, tumbling down and-getting up again! How restless, aspiring, and disappointed she is now! The dear child has learned to fret at her imprisonment. She wants to open her cage and fly out. Her soul is sometimes in an agony to see the world and its inhabitants. She is tempest-tossed and not comforted. O how shall I guide aright her beautiful, impetuous, brilliant miiid? She is outgrowing me-I cannot hold her. She is strong like hier father, but not patient. '59. . Once again I am writing in this endless journal. But what can I write? Nothing save my love-its heights and depths. It ab- sorbs me quite. It is no poetry or romance. It fills me utterly, and is the chief fact of my life. I am glad, I am proud, my heart Wings;-I sorrow, I mourn, I repent;-these states make perpetual MARY VAIL'S JOURNAL. 147 interchange within me. I am conscious of three jets to the fountain of my soul-my child, my husband, my Heavenly Father. O so much love sometimes makes- me tremble and weep-my heart breaks with a fulness which it cannot contain I . . Another change has come over Barbara's thoughts. When she was younger and more childish, she asked endless questions about Philip and his squirrel. This was her favorite story. But now she seldom-almost never--speaks Philip's name. My young maiden,like many another of her age, prefers the companionship of girls, not boys. So Barbara takes to Lucy Wilmerding, and drops Philip. The strong fellowship of girls with girls amounts sometimes to a positive repug- nance to associate with the opposite sex-as I often used to notice in my school. Tlhe last vestige of Barbara's childhood has gone, and O how am I to bring myself to think of her as a predestined woman! 'GO. . . In the midst of this gray, hazy weather, I have been recalling the bright flowers of New England. At this moment, I can see the pimpernel, with its fair vermilion; the larkspur, with its holy blue; the celandine, golden among the Salem rocks; the purple and yellow heart's-ease-whichl, even to think of, brings a little ease to my weary heart; the nmignonette, which I can smell seven thousand miles away from Pritchard farm.-Ah, shall weever again see Grandfather's dandelions in the meadow, or the hollyhocks in Newhury Lane? Shall the crickets ever again chirp a cheerful welcome to our feet in the green grass? Are the morning-glories still on the old garden-wall? Do the honeysuckles still climb the pillars of the east porch? Fade, sweet blossoms, if you must, and perish in the raw New England winds Hbut not one of your fair hues can ever wither from my mind's eye! You grow perennial in the garden of my memory! '61. . My husband wrote a bit of pleasantry to-day, which I transcribe here for preservation. I am glad that he can smile at his misfortunes in-this way: From our own Correspondent. MD-OCEAN NEWS AGENCY, Tropic of Capricorn, Aug. 12th. The chief attraction at this sea-view resort, during the watering place season, is the unique establishment of Dr. Rodney Vail. This painstaking caterer has his usual number of guests who stay with him all the year round. Bon Vivants will be glad to know that he retains at the head of his cuisine the well-known Mrs. Jezebel, whose carte du jour for to-day includes the following delicacies Sea-weed soup, Ham du Diable, Lobster a la tin can, page: 148-149[View Page 148-149] "8 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Sausage Porpoise, Green Peas, Jam de Ravpberrie, Kelp, Blubber, Equatorial Current Jelly, Note.-(The wines at this establishment were a choice stock that came into possession of Dr. Vail in 1847.) The water-prospect which the host of the Coromandel furnishes to his guests is one of the most extensive in the world, and the facilities for bathing are without limit. Among the guests registered on the books of the Coromandel are the delicate and beautiful Mrs. M-- V--, who is a pronounced brunette, and her charming daughter Miss B-- V- ,who is a blonde of a pure type, nez d la Grec, and lhair borrowing a sheen from the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Dr. Vail's prosperous establishment maintains its old position on the very top of :he wave. '63. ..!I is long since I have communed with my journal. Sorrow for our fate, and despair of seeing Rodney and our darling Barbara in their deserved sphere in life, together with anxiety for Barbara's rest- lessness and misery, have made me loath to tell my troubles save to God alone-' not even to my little book. . . How the folks at home would smile at my strange needles and thread I .. Fwe occasionally have a dramatic entertainment in which Rodney, Barbara, and I personate the characters, and Jezebel consti- tutes the audience. A curtain is hung across the after-end of the cabin, and Rodney calls the little space near tie geranium the " green room.' Sometimes Beaver is one of the actors. Our little comedies are of Barbara's invention, and Rodney jestingly says that they re- semble Shakespeare', for they are "' wild above rule or art." In my Salem days I did not approve of the drama, but I am sure it is inno- cent here. We have many little plays and masks. One is "The Maid with the Milk Pail," in which Beaver is a cow. Another is "The Gypsy of the Pyrenees," in which Barbara is a wandering Zingara, leading Beaver as a tame bear. In this play Rodney and I represent the stricken parents of a stolen child; the parents go to the Gypsy to consult her fortune-telling art about their captured darling; the Gypsy sets the bear to scratching his head, as if trying to remember something; then the animal gives a howl of recognition, rushes to meet his former master, and the Gypsy herself proves to be the long- lost child. Another performance is "The: Little Dragon," in which Barbara ie disguised as a deformed hag who goes about asking that her head may be cut off; whereupon the king, who is Rodney, draws I \ MARY VAIL'S JOURNAL. 149 his sword, strikes off her grotesque headpiece, and she stands disclosed a princess arrayed in satin and pearls, her golden hair streaming down about her like a sunlit cascade. Barbara is so intense in her acting that she sometimes utterly confounds the poor dog's brains, so that Beaver runs off the stage in fright, and breaks up the performance. . . Barbara's birthday. Sixteen years I O that fiery night, which I am grateful not to remember I How it must burn in Rodney's memory! My own mind recalls nothing but the babe. Even Fate itself (if there be an evil genius of that name) could not blot out a babe from its mother's mind. Baby Barbara! How vividly I recall the little thing in her babyhood!-fat, crooning, and brown as a berry! -sitting on the cabin floor against the velvet cushion around the mast. But to-day, Barbara, grown almost to womanhood, and mourning over her flying years and hopeless life, has been leaning against the ship's 1ail, gazing into the sea as if she meant to plunge into it. I look back to her happy face as it was when, she sat with her scissors cutting out Lt patterns of all the animals of the ark; but now her only pastime is in folding some mysterious paper, sealing it in a fruit-jar, and then ( during some pensive mood at sunset or by moonlight casting it adrift on the sea. How merrily she used to mimic all kinds of noises- such as our own voices, the bird-screams, the wind, the water-splashings, Beaver's bark, Bel's odd speeches, everything; but now she sighs and says that everything makes mockery of her, and that she is the fixed mark for the jeers of fate. How she used to deck the ship with windmills and dog-vanes I what troops of elephants she carved from the leaves of old books! what wonderful sayings she uttered to hey puppets and pets! how her happy laugh went piercing through the ship like the note of a canary in its cage! But now Barbara's spirit is clouded-she is stormy-hearted. "Mother," said she to-day," there are tempests in the sea, but none such as rage within my breast. O mother, I refuse to be satisfied. Try as I may to be patient, an inward pain consumes me, and I must cry out. I long, I yearn, I waste my sleep, I break my heart-and all because the chains of my captivity are too heavy to bear. Why do I not wear away? Look at the strings of my poor little piano, they rust quietly year by year, and are going to gentle decay; but the chords of my heart only grow stronger and- more sensitive than ever, and make within me dismal and weird reverberations and horrible discords. O mother, talk of patience to a fish in the net, to a bird in the snare, but not to me. I will not be reconciled to this fate. O why, why do I burn with so many desires for liberty, except that I am to enjoy it at last! If I could be content with this present lot, God would see no reason for giving me a better one. So I shall complain to him night and day." When Barbara page: 150-151[View Page 150-151] 150 TEMPEST-TOSSED. spoke in this wild stra'n this morning, she brought teaks to my eyes, whereupon she chid herself for troubling me with her troubles. The dear child struggles hard to control herself, but she has a nature so wild and strong that she cannot curb it. Her father never checks Her. He simply says that her storms of grief must have outward vent, or else they would mildew her heart with inward blight. But mothers are not like fathers. O that I could give my darling the wings of a dove, that she might fly to the uttermost parts of the earth and be at rest! Mrs. Vail's journal contained many other records similar to the above; records never of the ship and its perils; records seldom of storms and fears-; records hardly of sickness and watchings; but records mainly of the gentle writer's heart-yearnings for the welfare of her little family. It is noticeable that her diary, while it chronicled her constant sorrow at the pitiful exclusion of her husband and daughter from the. world and its privileges, gave no token that she bemoaned her own lack of these same blessings. She seemed to forget that she too, like the others, was fitted to shine in the society from which they all alike were ban- ished. Her thought was not for herself, but for them. Among all her earthly desires, the chief was that heaven would mercifully unchain the captive princess, Barbara Vail. Mary's allusion to the strangeness of her needles and thread, suggests a word of explanation. Always an adept at needle work, she was never without a task for her busy fingers. Her state-room was a woman's workshop. It was always strewn about with garments in process either of altering, mending, or making. She made few, altered many, and mended all. Barbara was gradually instructed in the same art, though she found plain-sewing more irksome than painting in water-colors, and would give up either at any moment to run to the piano. Mrs. Vail's needle was as industrious below the deck as Rodhey's harpoon was above it. Her habit was to sit on a low rocking-chair and sew, (' MARY VAIL'S JOURNAL. 151 while Barbara stood at her knee, reciting her lessons or reacting aloud. Fabrics were plenty, but needles and thread became scarce. These fabrics consisted of the copious wardrobes left in the ship, of which there was a great variety, running through all the scale from muslin to satin and from modesty to vanity. This stock gradually underwent many transforma- tions at the touch of Mary's cunning hand, but no square yard of material was ever wholly consumed, for even when worn threadbare, and lost to all beauty, it still remained devoted to -some use. But a needle, once broken, could not be mended an. (as every housewife knows) once lost, could seldom be found. The question, "What becomes of all the world's pms and needles?" has often excited the speculations of ingemious essayists; and the Coromandel was like a well-regulated house on land in the extraordinary facility with which the old hulk would hide away and never again discover its needles and pins. "I think, " said Barbara, "that the ship must swallow them." Certain-it was that Mrs. Tail's needles, which she valued beyond price, disappeared one by one as if they had taken to themselves the legs of cunning insects and run away in the night. "My thread," said Mary, "I can account for: I haveused it up ; not a spool of cotton, not a skein of silk, not a ball of yarn is left; and yet I know where every needleful of it has gone: but how the needles have vanished is a puzzle cannot solve."' - 'Well, said Rodney, " we must devise new needles and thread.'- That inventive genius then tried to point and eye a bit of copper wire, but the springless weapon was so lifeless in Mary's fingers that she could not endure to use it. "No," said the sensitive woman, " this needle is too dead to sew anything but a shroud." page: 152-153[View Page 152-153] 152 -TEMPEST-TOSSED. Rodney then proposed to cut one of the cords of the piano into needle-lengths, but Barbara objected to his inflicting snch a wound on her stringed instrument, and, with eloquent menace, warned off the intruder from his proposed depreda- tion on her property. He then took some slender nails from the heels of a pair of thick shoes which he found in the forecastle, and filed them into a shape that served for sew- ing coarse and common work. Afterward he picked to pieces a silver watch that Mr. Jansen left in state-room No. 5, and changed its mainspring from "tick, tick, tick," to "stitch, stitch, stitch." But, after repeated experiments, he found nothing that so satisfied Mary's delicate fingers as the slender fin-bones of the flying-fish, for these were of nature's finest horn, lively and flexible, with prickly points that grew sharper instead of duller with constant use. So Mary had strange wings given to her flying fingers. Thread was made by unraveling woven fabrics, and re-twisting the weak filaments into a strength sufficient for pulling through the cloth in sewing. Bed-sheets, table- covers, crash-towels, flannels, and silk skirts were frayed out to furnish the ship's Penelope with daily thread. "But my needlework," said Mary, smiling, " is stronger than Penelope's, for hers kept unraveling ,because her lord was absent, but mine holds so tight that my husband never gets beyond my finger's reach.'/ One day when Mary's room-door was shut, and she was busy at work inside, making an Oriental garb for Barbara, consisting of alternate red and blue flannel, patterned from a picture of a Turkish woman in one of the ship's books of travel, she heard a gentle knock at her door, and on rising to open it, discovered Rodney in the act of pinning to the maple-wood panel a placard with this inscription: MARY VAIL, SEAMSTRESS, Cuts and fits garments in the fashions of all the uncivilized natwos of the globe. CHAPTER X. THE CAGED BIRD. cT EVER again will I read this tale of misery and mockery," said Barbara, shutting a little volume, from which she had been entertaining her mother with the fable of Tantalus. J "Tantalus!" exclaimed the maiden, with energy. "'ie long ago left the earth, and I now take his place. It is I, not he, from whom the cup is perpetually snatched. It is I, and nobody else, from whom all things flee. Everybody except me-every other human being, however poor, has some little share of the common world. It is only I who am never permitted to taste a single drop of the overflowing cup. I am forever tantalized like Tantalus himself. Blot out his name from the fable, and write mine instead. But then the tale would cease to be a myth." Barbara, who grew more and more like her father, now un- consciously imitated him in thought and speech, as if the elder mind was re-echoing itself in the younger, until the younger should finally speak a more individual idiom of its own. In the Coromandel's cabin, Barbara's room was No. 13 :- a double room on the larboard side, with two round "brass- rimmed windows, looking out forever on the sea. Through the solid glass panes, Barbara often gazed by daylight, moonlight, and starlight- with perpetual longing for the shore and the world. Nevertheless, the little chamber was not so barren that her eyes instinctively fled from it to rest elsewhere. Its wooden walls were draped with showy upholstery which the page: 154-155[View Page 154-155] 154 TEMPEST-TOSSED. fair occupant had arranged with her own ingenious hands, from a set of crimson-damask curtains found among Madame D'Arblay's confiscated stock of household equipage. Against this brilliant background, a few little pictures and trinkets were hung in tasteful order. This gay apartment, with its animating, almost fiery color, once led her father to say, "Barbara, you live like a gold-bug inside a moss-rose." To this room Mrs. Vail had a habit of taking her sewing for an hour or two a day, and Barbara would there read aloud to her from the few books of the ship's library, almost every one of which she had thus read several times through, and yet she still kept on reading them, in favorite portions, again and again. "A good book," said Dr. Vail once to Barbara, and she had faithfully heeded his words, "a good book will bear perpetual devouring, and can never be gnawed quite to the bone." It was while reading from a small well-worn volume of "Ancient Myths and Fables," that she suddenly broke forth into her fretful allusion to Tantalus. "My dear daughfter," replied her mother, trying to comfort her, and trying also to comfort herself, " there is one supreme solace for all human souls." "Pray, mother, tell me what that is." "DMy child," returned her mild monitor, "have I not often, have I not always taught you that though we may lose this world, we shall gain the next?" "Do you mean Heaven?" asked Barbara, despairingly; "O mother, I want the earth first!" Barbara was like any other young and growing plant that seeks to thrust its roots into the ground before opening its flower to the sky. The maiden, after finishing her reading, laid aside her book, took an empty plum-jar in one hand, a folded letter in the other, left her mother, and went on deck. Mrs. Vail returned to her own room, where she was joined by her husband. e THE CAGED BIRD. 155 "O Rodney," she exclaimed with a sigh, "would to heaven that our daughter might once more be as happy as when she knew too little of the world to wish and weep for it!)" "Mary," replied Rodney, "we might havebefooled Barbara with the proverb, Where ignorance is bliss 'Tis folly to be wise.' Undoubtedly had we brought her up like a white mouse in a wicker-basket, feeding her as if she had only a comely body, but no mind; had we never given her a hint that beyond the horizon's rim there dwell millions of human beings, her kindred, who for centuries have occupied the earth, greening it with cultivation, spangling it with cities, glorifying it with arts, hallowing it with historic memories, bestrewing it with happy homes; had we kept Barbara in ignorance of this lore-which is every child's right, even though it is this child's misery--she might have lived like t some unwinged bird whose instinct had never been awakened toward the sky. Yes, if we could have foreseen our long captivity in this boundless dungeon of time and space, we might have led our ddaughter blindfold into a more ignorant and less restless life; we might have deadened her many capacities for knowledge in order to protect her against a few noble risks of sublime wretchedness. But we did her no such wrong. Better that she should feel her wings even though they are always to be tied to the ground. Better that she should lose all things than listlessly seek nothing. Better the knowledge that brings sorrow than the ignorance which is content with itself. -I remember, Mary, how in Bunyan's Allegory, after Christian caught a fore-glimpse of the delights of Heaven, he said quaintly, in his description, 'The which when I saw, I wished myself among them.' In the same way, after you and I have painted to Barbara the world's beauties and pleasures, she wishes herself among them. It is a natural wish; never quench such a flame; it is Barbara's vestal fire; let it burn." page: 156-157[View Page 156-157] 156 TEMPEST-TOSSED Mrs. Vail, in conducting the unique seminary styled Topsy- Turvy Collyege, not only gave to Barbara the old-time school lessons wlich she had long before given to her classes in Salem, but she carried her solitary pupil as much farther as she could from the books at her command, and from her memories of history anc literature. "The imagination," said Rodney, "is a child's chief intel- lectual faculty. It needs more food than the rest of the mind. Now, Mary, you are a Puritan's daughter; your grandfather's grandfather lived among noble but mistaken zealots who sought to crush the imagination out of human nature, and who regarded red as a too extravagant color for the rose. Forget the prejudices of your ancestors, and let Barbara's thoughts run riot among all the rich and beautiful things which she &in conjure up before her mind's eye. Give a child like Barbara a few picturesque facts that please her sense of the beautiful, and out of these slender materials she will create whole worlds-of beauty for her self-enjoy- ment. The soul out-hungers the body; the body's necessity is soon satisfied, and its appetite is then appeased; but the soul is insatiate- the more it is filled, the more it hungers and thirsts. It is not enough that Barbara's body should feed on pemmican, potpoise, and flamingo; her mind needs Shakespeare, the Apocalypse, and the Spbynx.5' Dr. Vail, acting on this theory, gave to Barbara, day by day, and year by year, an ever-increasing store of beautiful images, both from Nature, as interpreted by the discoveries of science, and from Art, 's embodied in the creations of poetry. On the one hand, he seat her to the bottom of the sea to learn how it is covered with minute white shells which keep falling from the crustacean inhabitants of the upper waves, and which in process of ages have strewn the valleys and mountains of the ocean's bed, just as the snow covers the mountains and valleys of the earth's surface. He unwove for her the picturesque woof of the rainbow, and, with a piece of broken chandelier for a prism, divided a ray THE CAGED BIRD. 157 I of light into its seven parts. He pointed out to her through a wretched little microscope (the only one he had), how the tiny red shrimp of the seaweed, though invisible to the naked eye, is nevertheless pursued by the great whale; in other words, how the smallest creature in the ocean main- tains the life of the largest. He dipped up a little sea-water, set it to evaporating in the sun, took a grain of the salt which was left, and showed her that this was of the same form as a pyramid of Egypt. He caught for her the sea- gull, to explain the machinery of its wings, and how the albatross can fly so long without stopping to rest. He put his finger on his daughter's pulse and taught her how the clock of life keeps time. On the other hand, Dr. Vail, in supplementing these scientific lessons with their poetic counterparts, gave to Barbara the pretty legends and tales which constitute the common inheritance of childhood, and ofrwhich no child can be deprived without the loss of its patrimony. He taught her winged feet to run over the race-course with Atalanta, and to stop with that maiden in order to pick up the apples of the Hesperides, always losing her own heart to the cunning lover who played the pretty trick. He set her to watching Penelope at her web, till she pitied that poor lady because her absent lord was so long in coming home. Ho led her forth on little picnics to Mount Helicon, and taught her to dip her cup in the Fount of Aganippe, slaking many an inward thirst in that innocent way. He set hei on the back of Alexander's careering horse Bucephalus, or in a statelier seat on a white elephant of the King of Pontus. He sailed voyages with her to the Island of Avilion, drawn thither by mystic attraction to its Castle of Loadstone. He bewitched her with the phoenix that could rise out of the fire, at which she marveled the more because all the birds that she had seen could rise only out of the water. He sent her to the Cave of the Forty Thieves to say "Open Sesame," and to bring away the priceless treasures for her own. He lIred her to follow the sylvan wanderings of Paul and Virginia, page: 158-159[View Page 158-159] 158 TEMPEST-TOSSED. and to love Paul more than she could Virginia. He per. mitted her to make friends with Undine the Water Nymph, and to inquire of that strange creature how so delightful a thing as marriage could bring so many troubles to the bride. All these and similar lessons which her .father taught her, whether from science or poetry (though modern science is rapidly becoming the- chief poetry of the world), all these facts and fictions Barbara received with a marvelous readi- ness of implicit belief. She found no difficulty in crediting the most impossible tales. Thus, as she had never watched the slow process of building a house stone by stone, she had all the more reason for accepting the swift and easy archi- tecture of Aladdin's Palace. With most children, it is only when they are very young that they believe in Santa Claus and his reindeers; the eclipse of faith comes early. But with Barbara, this beautiful credulity lingered long; and a happy thing it was in her case, for it gave her the magic of Midas wherewith to turn her fancies to a fine gold which not the seals rust could ever dim. One day with childish curiosity she gazed intently at the waves. "Barbara, what are you looking for?" asked her mother. "I am looking," replied the child, " for the mice and rats." "But, my daughter, why do you expect to find them there '? "Because," said the credulous maiden, "the Pied Piper led them all into the water." Barbara's childish years were full of just such instances of extreme simplicity of faith. , Growing older, and ceasing to regard these stories as Aiteral facts, she all the more revered them as veritable fancies. This second stage of belief-which was a transfer, not an obliteration, of faith-gave her a richer pleasure than the first ;-just as Santa Claus, after fulfilling the eager hopes of childish minds, ministers a still more subtle satis- faction to the gentle reflections of adult life. This method of educating a strong, bright, beautiful girl, like Barbara, produced two opposite effects on her mind; effects which her father foresaw; effects which he knew could not be avoided except by withholding from his daughter all education whatever. These effects were, first, the awakening of Barbara's mind to the sunshine of clear intelligence and aspiration, and next, the gradual beclouding of this light by a gloomy sense of her exile and imprison- ment. But something like this occurs in every cultivated person's history, and is the natural result of all true disci- pline of mind and heart. Such an education as Barbara was receiving-which was wise and rich beyond her power to estimate-would have nobly-doomed her, even amid the pleasantest of surroundings, to a gentle but perpetual dis- content with her soul's estate ; for it would inevitably have roused within her that mortal or rather that immortal rest- lesshess and impatience which all ideal natures must forever feel, not only toward fate and circumstance, but toward life itself. "O for the land!" sighed Barbara. "Shall my eyes ever behold it? Shall my feet ever walk on it? Shall my heart ever rest in it? '" The homesick family found a frequent solace in talking to each other of the land. To these castaways the grassy earth was an evergreen Vale of Cashmere-a Garden of Eden which, if they could find if would be Paradise Regained. Barbara questioned them incessantly about the land. What was it like?"Was it as wide as the sea? Was it as beauti- ful as the sky? How were its fields ploughed and sown? Did people really walk on it without falling through and sinking, as if stepping on the-water? Could it truly hold up great buildings and palaces, without breaking under their heavy weight? If it was hard and solid, how then could it be soft and moist? - What did the graves look like, that were dug in it? How could the little snow-flakes cover it all out of sight in a single night? Was it not very difficult for people to find their way among the crooked paths and , , page: 160-161[View Page 160-161] 160 TEMPEST-TOSSED, roads? How did each person know his own house when he came to it? And when would the Coromandel get to the lanild? Such questions-hundreds and thousands of them-Bar- bara, child of the sea, asked concerning the shore. She took delight in her father's portrayals of mountains, hills, forests, meadows, rivers, and green grass. Without waiting to see the solid earth, she adopted God's creative opinion of it that it was II very good." Her parents also, having been so long wearied of the sea, invested the far-off shore with an unreal enchantment, bor- rowed from their imagination. Rodney Vail, a lover of Wordsworth, often found himself quoting the lines, "To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." With what rapture the Coromandel's captain, in the midst of his long exile from his native meadows, would have hailed a sudden field of daisies blooming across his prow! Dr. Vail had traveled- in Europe, and seen Switzerland with its mountains, Scotland with its lakes, the Rhine with its ruins, English cottages with their ancient oaks, and the French vineyard-regions with their grapes. All these pictures, he painted over again to Barbara's fancy, and yet he said, "My daughter, the fairest of all lands is your own ; for, though you were born at sea, you are of New England line- age; you must always think of your mother's and your father's country as yours. The English colonist speaks of the mother-country; the German exile, of the fatherland. You must have a country. In whatever part of the earth. you happen to go ashore, remember that you are an Ameri- can, a New Englander, a Yankee. Yes," he added humor- ously, "we are part of the floating population of Massa- chusetts." Dr. Vail felt, moreover, that Barbara must have not only a country, but a home in it. The home that he chose for her was a certain New England farm within sight of the sea-coast. It was the Pritchard country-seat. During the THE CAGED BIRD. 161 summer months, the Pritchard family always deserted their city house in Salem, and took refuge from brick and stone a few miles away in this breezy retreat. Barbara so often had the place described to her, that its landmarks were vivid to her mild. She frequently visited it in fancy almost as if she had strolled through it in real presence. "Tell me once again," she would sometimes say to her father, " all about Grandfather Pritchard's house and farm." "Well, my child," Dr. Vail would answer, "I love that old house. It is a staid, plain, white cottage, such as our Yankee fathers and grandfathers built fifty years ago. It stands a little back from the road, not on a hill, but on a rolling knoll. The front is to the west facing the public road, but the real charm of the house is the spacious piazza in the rear, looking toward the east and the ocean. Up the pillars of this piazza run clambering ivies, honeysuckles, and roses, making a tangled mass of foliage that changes color with the changing seasons. Stone fences, heaved awry by many winters' frosts, give an antique air to the farm ; and I have seen many a red squirrel racing over their jagged tops. A row of Lombardy poplars, tall and slender, and some- times shivering in the East wind, can .be seen from fishing- smacks for miles and miles; and I wish they were now in sight from the Coromandel. Have I forgotten the garden? i O no. From the spring with its winds, to the autumn with its frosts, the beautifuL spot has always something new to the eye-if only we were there to see! It is a quaint old garden, which, beginning with crocuses and ending with dahas, bejewels all the months between with New Eng- land's familiar flowers. Familiar? Ah, my daughter, I for- i get that you never saw them! There are morning-glories, lilacs, heart's-ease, white lilies, unpink pinks, tongue-biting nasturtions and sweet-fennel to take to church." "Don't forget the fruit-trees," Mary would say, unwilling that any part of the sweetly remembered farm should be omitted from the tale. "No, I do not forget them. A fruit-tree is an angel from page: 162-163[View Page 162-163] 1:62 TEMPEST-TOSSED. TIf Heaven, sent back to restore Eden on earth. The fruit-trees on Pritchard farm bore no forbidden fruits. Grandfather Pritchard denied his fruits to, nobody. He even planted cherry-trees for the birds and the school-boys. His dwarf pears he plucked with his own hand, wrapped them in papers for cold weather, and his sick neighbors ate them for him all winter long. How the old man used to fret at the thievish worms that robbed him of his quinces and green- gages!" "Go on," Barbara would exclaim, always the most eager of the listeners. "Go on! that is not all." "You may tell the rest, Barbara. Let me see if you have forgotten any of it." , Barbara would then strike in, and add a few touches to , the oft-painted picture somewhat as follows: "Grapes," she would say, " grow there, which the frost mellows, and which are not pressed into wine, as in some countries, but are eaten one by one, like cherries from the Coromandel's fruit-jars. Turkeys, which are a species of domestic fowl, wander' about the clover-fields, feeding on insects called crickets and grasshoppers, in order to be fat in time for Thanksgiving-Day-a festival common in that country. Sheep, with tinkling bells-real, living sheep, not mere pictures, such as we have in our books-browse the pastures to the verge of the sea-rocks. Near the house is a well of pure, fresh water, more cool and sweet than the rain that we catch in our casks. The rim of this well is called a curb, and has green moss about it. The bucket is dipped and hoisted by a great beam that was once a chestnut-tree, growing in the woods. Some little boxes or houses for tiny birds called wrens or martins, are scattered about the lawn, set up on high masts. Pigeons, which are swift-winged land-birds that fly like our sea-gulls, live in a large family in the eaves of the barn. Horses eat corn in their own house, which is called a stable, and they crunch the hard grain with a noise such as we hear at night in the cabin when the waves splash against the ship's side. Cows, which THE CAGED BIRD. 163 are horned and harmless creatures, eat grass all day, and come home at night to empty their milk into the dairy-maid's pail" So Barbara would go on, giving item after item as in a school-girl's recitation. Barbara sees Pritchard farm," said Rodney to Mary, I just as Wordsworth saw Yarrow Unvisited; that is, it appears more vivid and tender to her imagination than the cruder reality itself could be to her actual and disenchanted eye." Dr. Vail took imaginary walks with Barbara through the farm, and through the whole region far and near, pointing out to her t;' "Old roads winding as old roads will, Here to a ferry and there to a mill;" showing her the fringed-gentians in their season ; explaining to her how every wild rose of the thickets has five pimk petals, one for each finger and thumb of the hand that plucks it; telling her when the golden-rods and asters bloom; and adding, with each new recital of the, familiar story, some point of beauty not named before. Dr. Vail's affection for Grandfather Pritchar4's country- seat was because it was Mary's birthplace. The whole farm was sacred ground in his eyes-hallowed like the graveyard on the hill near by, with its little white headstones that looked at a distance like a flock of sheep. He had trodden every acre of this farmpa in company with Mary, during the happy summer when they first took each other by the hand to walk the way of life together. Dr. Vail knew well enough that this quiet farm presented not- a magnificent, but only a charming landscape, yet he never allowed any fairer vision of any other part of the earth's surface to dispute supremacy in Barbara's mind with this beloved spot. Fly as her winged fancy might round the whole earth, her father always lured it back to this sylvan home, to build here and here only its familiar nest, Among the many . page: 164-165[View Page 164-165] 164 TEMPEST-TOSSED. scenes on various continents and lands, which he sketched to her from his memories of many travels, he taught Barbara to turn her mind's eye to these sea-kissed acres as the Mecca of her pilgrimage. Often and often on a moonlight night, the little ship- wrecked band revived their reminiscences of thilseottage and farm, and while the waves were rippling round the ship, set out on a journey up and down Grandfather Pritchard's fields-now stepping into his orchard, then into his garden; here among the pea-vines, there through the melon-patch; plucking the blackberries; calling the cattle; feeding the chickens; blowing the horn for the work-hands; roaming through every chamber of the old house; surveying its Chinese vases; sitting on its Calcutta chairs; and, above all, holding an imaginary (but not less reaD conversation with the venerable patriarch whom four generations could not remove so far from Barbara's consciousness but that she could see him as if face to face, eye to eye, and heart to heart. A thousand times over was this landscape re-painted and glorified in evening talks on shipboard-so that this far-away New-England farm went ever-floating with these wanderers like a green island in the midst of the sea. "O that I could once-if only once-see the land!" exclaimed Barbara to Jezebel. "Law, chile," replied the old woman-" want to see de lan'? Well, honey, jist shet dem blue eyes a minnit like a blind man, and look inside, kind o' deep down-dis way-so -and you can see anyting you want. Yes, my dear lamb, do you want to see de King's precious jewels? Jist shet yer eyes and look at 'em! Dey am as plain as day. Do you want to see de golden gate ob de holy temple? Jist put your hand across your eyes-dis way-so-now don't you see it? I do, honey. Do you want to see ole Salem and de farm? I can see 'em dis minnit. Try jist like me," and she shaded her eyes with her hand. "Do you want to see Bruno and Pete? Why dar dey stan'!" exclaimed Bel, looking through her closed lids, and pointing to two imaginary THE CAGED BIRD. 1D figures before her. "And so, honey, you want to see de lan'? What's de good book say? 'Havin'eyes, dey seenot.' Well deli, if folks, when deir eyes is open, can't see, dat means for 'em to shet dcir eyes and try in dat way. Lawks, my lamb, more tings is seen by shettin' de eyes, dan by openin' 'em. De kingdom of God is within you. Now folks's eyes, when dey is wide open, see only de kingdom of dis world ; but when deir eyes is shet tight, den dey see de King inl his beauty. Want to see de lan'? Law, chile, jist shet i -yer eyes and you can't help seein' it. Jist try wid me! I)ar!-now wait a minnit for de vision to come. O how i green de grass looks! O how de big trees shake deir tops in de wind! O how sweet de little birds sing! O honey, look out dar-dar is de lan'! Don't you see it? Now open yer eyes and it's all gone!" Barbara felt that she was not quite equal to Jezebel in the faculty of inner sight. "O!" said the girl, "I would willingly close my eyes to all the rest of the earth, if only I might open them once on" Granldfather Pritchard's farm." The whole world, during her childhood, contained for Barbara only two objects of greater interest than this homestead farm :-one of these was a boy with a squirrel, and the other a girl traveling in England. Barbara, in her prattling and chattering years, constantly discoursed of Philip and Juju. But afterward there came a time when, for some strange reason which her parents could not fathom, Barbara ceased to speak familiarly of Philip, and then dropped wholly even the mention of his name. Her last remark which they remembered concerning him was one accidentally overheard by her father. He had come upon her while she was talking to herself. She had just whispered with a sigh, "O! if I must always live in a cage, then I wish I might be Philip's squirrel!" Having uttered these words only for her own ears (or per- haps only for her own heart) she heard her father's creaking page: 166-167[View Page 166-167] t166 TEMPEST-TOSSED. footstep behind her, and catching sight of him, blushed a little, felt aI sort of innocent guilt at discovery, accepted his kind condolence on her captivity, was thankful that she was not asked to explain her meaning, and never again took Philip's name voluntarily on her lips. Not so with Lucy's. In proportion as Barbara was silent concerning the one, she was talkative concerning the other. Lucy Wilmerding appeared to live on the very top of Barbara's upbubbling thoughts-like a ball on a fountain. No crowned queen, either of ancient or modern history, seemed to Barbara so majestic or important as did Lucy Wilmerding- the loving pupil of the Salem school- the favorite heiress of the world's good fortune. "Rodney," said Mary, speaking from a mood of maternal anxiety, "I am jealous of Lucy Wilmerding. She is bewitching Barbara's mind. Our daughter cannot help comparing her own narrow world with the wide sphere in Which Lucy moves. You know what an inspiration Lucy has been to Barbara. - Philip seems to have faded entirely from Barbara's thoughts, and Lucy reigns supreme. Lucy is Barbara's paragon. Lucy's letters are Barbara's models of sULool-composition. Lucy's life is Barbara's beau-ideal. But Lucy's influence over Barbara, which was once for our daughter's happiness, is now for her discontent. How often Barbara would bring me her book and say, ' Mother, have I learned my lesson as well as Lucy used to do? '-'Did I play that last piece on the piano as well as Lucy did?' -- ,Can I recite my verbs as well as Lucy could?' You know, Rodney, that no commendation to Barbara could be greater than to tell her that she behaved like Lucy, sang like Lucy, or recited like Lucy. You know there was a time when I could touch Barbara's ambition to the quick by merely instituting a comparison between her crude self and Lucy's supposed faultlessness. But Lucy's career has now become Barbara's despair. Our impetuous child is no longer content to emulate Lucy's studies and manners; she covets also Lucy's opportunities and privileges. We have taught THE CAGED BIRD. 167 Barbara that she should try to be like Lucy in so many respects, that Barbara has at last taught herself to desire to be like Lucy in all other things. Alas, how hard it is to know the right from the wrong in teaching one's children! I supposed I was using Lucy to minister to Barbara's com- fort not to her torment." Mrs. Vail did not overstate the difference between the earlier and the later influence of Lucy over Barbara, for it was all the. difference between sunshine and twilight. Lucy's letters consisted of a loquacious bundle of missives that she had written from Europe to Mrs. Vail, giving : voluminous account of her travels. These letters, which Mrs. Vail had saved and brought with her, constituted (with a few others of less interest) the only correspondence that Barbara had ever seen-except the childish billet-doux that she sometimes wrote to her father and mother, or oftener to herself. Lucy's letters produced on Barbara's mind, for a long time, a cheery and delightful impression; but at last, the very same familiar pieces of handwriting filled herewith gloom and despair. This was because Barbara, as she grew older, discovered in these letters what one young woman gained by being in the world, and what another lost by being out of it. Lucy's rambling pen, like a fairy's wand, called up before Barbara's fancy the cities of London, Paris, Florence, Rome, Vienna, St. Petersburg- all the European capitals. In reading these travels over and over again, Barbara saw Lucy moving amid courtly throngs ofEuropean society; she saw her wandering through green parks and by sparkling foun- tains; she saw her sauntering - in picture galleries and deciphering the works of the old masters; she saw her visiting stately libraries and rich museums; she saw her listening to the Archbishop of Canterbury in Westminster Abbey, or attending the festival of Easter at St., Peter's in Rome; she saw her in the opera-box hanging on the notes of Mario and Grisi; she saw her in the theatre, in tears over Rachel; she saw her in the gondolas in Venice, and under page: 168-169[View Page 168-169] 168 TEMPEST-TOSSED. the lindens of Berlin; she saw her buying jewels at Geneva, getting dresses fitted in Paris, and collecting knick-knacks, perfumes, mosaics, kid-gloves, and other womanly delights; she saw her in brilliant social parties, lovely among the loveliest and good among the best; she saw her moving with superior opportunity through a career of sight-seeing, of daily pleasure, of cumulating knowledge, of magnificent privileges;-in a word, she saw her passing through an enchanted land and life, holding a talisman by which all things, at her mere wish, became her own. All this Barbara saw in Lucy. Turning from this fascinating mentor and rival, what did Barbara see in her own poor, weather-beaten self? Barbara saw in her own person and career a hapless-young maiden who had been born in a shipwrecked hulk, and had drifted all her life on the sea; she saw an exile not only from her fatherland but from the whole world; she saw an outcast from that great human family among whom even the vile, the beggarly, and the leprous enjoyed greater privileges than hers; she saw a castaway to whom not the whole green earth had ever yet afforded space enough for her bare; sunburnt feet to stand upon; she saw a waif toss- ing on an ocean whose billows, as they rolled around her, were emblems of the restlessness of her own life; she saw a maiden unsistered by her whole sex, and unbrothered of all mankind; she saw a helpless victim to a fate that daily wreaked upon her some fresh agony of impatience and hope deferred; she saw an aspirant to whom all opportunities, instead of being beneficently open, were omnipotently denied; she saw an unhappy wretch, condemned like a rat to dwell over the bilge-water of a mouldy ship, perhaps to die there, and to go on a ghastly death's dance over the waves in a water-logged charnel-house, until the hungry sea, swallowing her sepulchre, should engulph her bleached bones in the bottomless depths. "My dear husband," said Mary, who sat in tears talking to Rodney concerning Barbara's anguih of soul, "what shall *" . "'^ THE CAGED BIRD. \ 169 we do to keep the poor girl from breaking her heart-from going mad?" "Ah," sighed Rodney, "I knew it would come sooner or later-this conflict of Barbara with her fate. She does not surrender like the dove, but fights like the falcon. Never- theless, it is for the best. Her restlessness is her discipline. She must learn how to suffer and 'be strong," "I am going to try with Barbara," said Mary, "a little stratagem. Lucy's brilliant career dazzles Barbara into a blindness that makes her own condition seem black and desperate. Now in contrast with Lucy, Philip has probably had no such gold-paved pathway through life; he has had to fight his way, like most other young men ; he has had no career which Barbara need envy; he possesses nothing mag- nificent for Barbara to covet, as she covets everything pertaining to Lucy; he will not appear to Barbara as one of the earth's sovereigns, with a kingdom for an inheritance, and with a circle of glories round him to aggravate her soul by contrast with her own lowly estate. Now, we ought to turn Barbara's thoughts from perpetually dwelling on such a career as Lucy's-a career which our daughter, even were she on land, would not have the wealth to carry-out in her own case. We ought, rather, to inteAst her in the toils, hardships, and struggles that ordinarily fall to the lot of mortals-a career such as Philip has probably pursued. Barbara has a bitter trouble in thinking too absorbingly of Lucy and her brilliant life; I am sure she would be com- forted and quieted if I could draw her mind little by little toward somebody who has a less enviable lot, like Philip." Mrs. Vail's proposed plan of dealing with Barbara excited the half-satirical smile of Rodney, who simply replied "Ah, what mother ever yet was able to solve the sweet and bitter problem of her daughter's troubled heart? Nei- ther you nor I can understand Barbara's misery. Probably she does not understand it herself." As Mary and Rodney thus sat talking together in the cabin, a sudden shriek pierced their ears. 8 page: 170-171[View Page 170-171] 170 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Mercy!" exclaimed Mary, " that is Barbara's voice." Another cry arose, in the same wild tone of peril and fright, only muffled and distant. Rodney rushed out of Mary's room and bounded up to the deck, the old dog following as fast as his age would permit. "Barbara!" shouted Dr. Vail. There was no answer, and the girl was nowhere to be seen. "O horror!" exclaimed Rodney, noticing some rippling circles in the water, as if some object had just fallen over- board. "Can Barbara-" But before the fearful thought came to full utterance on Rodney's lips, Beaver had leaped into the sea, diving like a pelican, and dragging up Barbara by the sleeve of her dress. Dr. Vail's first glimpse of the submerged maiden was of her disheveled golden hair, shining like sunbeams under the waves. He seized a rope, tied one end of it round his waist and the other to a stancheon, leaped overboard, and, with a few lusty strokes, swam to Barbara's help. "Courage, my child!" he cried. "Do not struggle! Do not clutch my arm!" Barbara could not utter another cry, nor even gasp for breath, for she was well-nigh strangled by her profuse hair which had wound itself in coils about her face and neck, like sea-grass round a pearl-diver's feet; she must have suffo- cated, had not her father, with a stroke of his hand, brushed away the golden web from her mouth and nostrils, so as t6 give her the breath of life. "God help me!" was the girl's -first wild word, half a moan and half a shriek. "Throw your right arm over Beaver's back," exclaimed her father. Barbara did so, clutching the dog's shaggy brown body convulsively. "Put your left hand on my shoulder." [ BJ THE CAGED BIRD. 171 She obeyed, and was thus buoyed up between two living ' life-preservers. Two rude stairways or Jacob's-ladders, made of ropes and barrel-staves, had long before been rigged by Rodney, one on each side of the ship, for Beaver's use and his own, in landing their captured game. The swimmers struck out toward the larboard ladder. Barbara could not swim, nor had she ever before been in the water. "What is this darkness?" she exclaimed. "Are we sinking? God have pity!" Barbara's hair had suddenly fallen across her eyes, blindfolding her for a moment, and deluding her with the apprehension that she was engulfed in the black depths. "No," cried Rodney. "All's well! Here's the ladder! You are saved!" At that moment Barbara, who was still blinded by her hair, felt herself against the ship's side. She clutched the lower round of the ladder with frenzied energy, holding it so tight that the blood flew back from her fingers, giving them the whiteness of a dead woman's. Dr. Vail clambered up, got a foot-hold, laid hold of one of the higher rounds with his left hand, and, bending down, drew Barbara up with his right, until her feet were resting firmly on one of the lower rounds, like a rider's in a stirrup. Barbara, feeling something solid under her feet, rested a moment, panted, brushed from her eyes her streaming hair (which now was equally full of sunshine and rain), saw her father above her, gave him a 0look of unutterable affection, and then with her father's help, climbed up the difficult stairway, while Beaver waited at the foot of it, as if ready to catch her in case she should fall. "O Barbara, my daughter, my darling!" cried Rodney, embracing her, and then holding her off at arm's length, gazing at his recovered treasure with the look of a man who has just saved, not his life, but something dearer than life itself. "Tell me, my child, how you fell into the sea." F "My dear father!" she exclaimed, after recovering her page: 172-173[View Page 172-173] 172 TEMPEST-TOSSED. breath, and regaining her presence of mind, "I was on the bowsprit, just trying to throw a little fruit-jar out into the water as far as I could, and I lost my balance and slipped off. Beaver, whose exploit had shown'that in his ashes lived his wonted fire, now stepped up sedately to the deck, shak- ing himself into a shower of rain; whereupon Barbara, dripping like the water-dog, and looking like some beauteous mermaid just risen from the sea's floor, bent down over the shaggy old creature, clasped her arms about his neck, and kissed his wet ears. Mrs. Vail, who had watched through her window the whole proceedings, both of peril and of rescue, was so pros- trated by the spectacle, that she staggered, was Caught by Jezebel, and laid on the bed, where Barbara, on going down stairs, found her almost in a swoon. "My dear, good mother," said the maiden, after the excitement was over, and the dripping Nereid had re- arrayel her comely limbs in dry robes, "I have been justly punished. Only a little while ago I was fretfully wishing to get away from this old ship; but O how thankful, thanlkful, thankful I am to be once again in this precious cabin!-this safe, sweet, beloved home! Never hereafter Ahall anything tempt me to quit this ship-no, not even to step on the dry land. Dear mother, when I was struggling in the water, I thought there was nothing in all the earth- no, nothing even in heaven itself, that could compare in preciousness with this ship. I would have given my very s oul in exchange for my old dungeon, which I thought I hated, but which I love beyond all other things. Hereafter, lear mother, I will be content to live my life just here on the Coromandel-here with you and father-here with Bel and Beaver. I will not sigh for the great world any more --no, never any more!" Barbara's eager, tumultuous, and impassioned words were uttered with a voice that trembled like a wave whereon her eoul was blowing like a wind. Never before had her parents seen her so stirred, so strong, so beautiful. Mary looked at her with tenderness, and Rodney with pride. Barbara's sudden experience was a common pone to human nature. A great peril, safely passed, instantly sheds on all commoner hardships a strange light of comfort and peace. Barbara's sudden gratitude in view of what she had just escaped, made her willing and eager to welcome whatever she might hereafter have to endure. She was nerved not only to a passive resignation, but to a proud self-mastery, and a heroic desire to accept rather than avoid her pitiful fate. But the human will is not of adamant, and: the sternest resolution-will often suddenly melt in a tear, or dissolve in a sigh. In a few weeks after the accident, Barbara found her heart growing even more unquiet than before, swaying and heaving with still more tumultuous longings for liberty; for ever since she had tasted the deathly bitterness of the engulfing waves, she looked upon the ship as all the more a place of incarceration, from which even a single step toward escape would be certain death. Once again, therefore, Barbara was fighting against her- self, and she frequently needed to put forth all her powers , of self-magistracy to conquer the rising rebellion in her heart. "I foolishy persuaded myself for a few days," said she, that I was content with my lot; but it is not so ; I am now become not only a prisioner, but more-not only a slave, but worse ; I am what a moth would be, if forbidden to burst its chrysalis-denied that poor worm's privilege. 0 how I long to crack this narrow and mouldy crust! How I fret against this encumbering shell! Shall I chide myself to patience? My soul would not listen to its own rebuke. Am I unreasonable? Do I ask for more than God gives to others, without their asking? No; I want liberty. I want life. I want society. I want my little share of the great world. Above all else, I want Lucy. I want- No; I must not allow myself to name that name. O just and kind i page: 174-175[View Page 174-175] 174 TEMPEST-TOSSED. heaven? Am I to be forever denied my rightful heritage among my fellow-beings? Why was I born into the human race if I am to live forever apart from it, and to die having never seen it?" Barbara, in these agonies, received much pity, but little help. Her parents pitied her out of their full hearts, but could not help her. Nor could she help herself. As for heaven's help,-that helps us all,-she had it in an overwhelming abundance; but it was help that she did not realize or comprehend; it was help that she prayed against, and shuddered at; it was help that came in a divine dis- guise which is seldom, detected or welcomed by mortals-the disguise of disappointment, heart-break, and agony; it was help such as the gold gets in the crucible when it suffers the fiery heat-; it was help like that bestowed upon the tried and purified spirits of whom Jezebel's I good book " stys, "What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they? These are they which came out of great tribulation." Barbara, like many another hutan soul that passes unwil- lingly through the discipline of suffering, was constantly receiving heaven's best help, yet without knowing it. : Meanwhile, through days, weeks, months, years, the Coromandel-that strange, weird, mouldering ship, blown' of the wind and tossed of the wave-kept on rocking and swinging like a great rusty cage hung between heaven and earth, holding within it, in life-long captivity, a golden- plumaged bird that fluttered and struggled unceasingly to escape, but ever-in vain. w } , . m X CHAPTER XI. A GLIMPSE THROUGH A SPY-GLASS. ALWAYS a light sleeper, alert to the least change in wind or sea, Rodney Vail was wakened just before daybreak, May 27, 1864, by, a faint quiver through the ship. "What has happened?" he exclaimed, half-aloud, leaping to his feet; and immediately afterward, Without rousing any of his family, he stole quietly up to the deck. "Starlight?" said he. "I expected to find morning." But though the stars were still shining, his gold watch (if he could now trust that well-worn timepiece) told him that the sun must be nearing the uppermost arc of the under-world. "Dry weather still," said he, observing the sky; "fair and dry for months past; no sign yet of rain; it is high time the wet season should begin to spatter the sea with showers." Buttoning his light woolen-jacket about him with a sense of cool comfort, he found the early whiff of the premature morning refreshing to his nerves and agreeable to his mind. He had long ago learned to magnify small comforts and to seize passing pleasures. He had grown keenly sensitive to moral influences from the weather. The breezy and starlit scene was full of wholesome stimulus to his body and mind. He was lonesomely alone. "Ah," said he, sighing, " there used to be a time when if I had risen at this hour, Beaver would have been up before me, and would have come to me wagging his tail, eager for the new day's business. But Beaver now isin his dotage; page: 176-177[View Page 176-177] 17# TEMPEST-TOSSED. he would rather have one nap than ten frolics. Well, the old dog has a right to his kennel--he is gray and infirm. There is nothing that he likes so well to do, as to do nothing. A dog of seventeen is like a man of seventy; he is on the outer and final bound of life. Ah, Beaver, you will doze o' mornings for a few years longer, and then fall into a nap, never to waken more. Yes, the same shadowy slumber shall creep over dog and man. Meanwhile, when the dog sleeps, let the master watch." Rodney Vail was. so often roused in the night by some real or fancied noise, or plunge of the ship, that he was not specially startled by the tremor which he had felt in the Coromandel's timbers on this particular mwrning. "Perhaps I was dreaming," said he; "and yet the shock was surely something more than the dashing of a wave against the ship's side. Perhaps it was a clump of sea-weed; and yet in this dim light I see nothing of that kind. Perhaps some heedless night-bird in full flight dashed himself against the old hulk; many a sea-gull has met his death-blow in that headlong way, and folded his wings at rest forever. No," he added, looking listlessly about him, and noticing nothing in particular, " it must have been one of my many heated fancies, that flame up into delusions and cool off into disappointments." But Dr. Vail, on second thought, still believed that the Coromandel had come in contact with something more than a wave; and so he looked toward the bow to discover, by the breeze against his face, whether the ship was head to the wind. "Yes," said the watchful sailor, "the wind is square in my teeth." He walked forward and stood by the bowsprit, to see if the water-drag was in its place and doing its duty. "What?" he cried, perplexed at not seeing the customary mass of spars floating at the bow, " am I losing my eye-sight? I cannot see the drag! And yet it must be there. How could it get away? Did it break loose? Impossible-the A GLIMPSE THROUGH A SPY-GLASS. 1" chains are stronger than the ship herself. But I cannot see the drag. It ought to show plain enough in this starlight. Is there a fog low down on the water? No, the waves are all a-glitter. The drag must be gone. But what has become of it? And if gone, what keeps the ship head-to? There is some mystery." Dr. Vail's curiosity was now excited to the uttermost, mingled with alarm. For years past, in order to guard the ship from ground- ing on some unlooked-for shoal, he had kept one of hIis two large anchors hanging overboard from the bow, allow- ing the chain to reach down into the water about thirty fathoms, so that at any moment, day or night, the ship might anchor herself if the water grew shoaler than that safe depth. "How little motion the Coromandel now feels!" said Rodney, noticing that a strange fixedness and quietude had passed into the rolling hulk. Peering over the bow, he discovered that the chain-cable, which held the anchor, was not running perpendicularly down as usual, but trending out slantwise. Moreover, the other chain, which held the water-drag, was trailing along the ship's larboard side, and out astern as far as its length could reach. The water was rippling past from bow to stern, swift as a brook, showing to Rodney's keen glance that the ship, instead of floating with the current, was lying motionless in the midst of it. "My God!" he cried, "the Coromandel has come to anchor!" He sat down a moment, took off his felt hat, wiped some sudden beads of cold sweat from his brow, panted with a strange excitement, looked up, down, and around, and re- peated aloud, "Anchored at last!" Then, to make s'ure that he was not self-deluded, he struck his right hand against his forehead, as if to rouse his stupe- fied brain, and asked himself, page: 178-179[View Page 178-179] - t ' TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Am I sane or mad?-is this a reality or a dream?" He re-examined the anchor-chain. Sure enough, it was sloping off at an angle of forty-five degrees-holding the ship fast in the midst of a brisk current that danced by her at a merry pace. There could be no mistake; the Coro- mandel was anchored. "Heaven be praised! 5 he cried, with a thrill of ecstacy. Dr. Vail's ship had found a mooring; but where? He knew not, asked not, cared not; for at that moment, all he knew, asked, or cared was whether she was actually anchored; that was enough! The mouldy hulk, which had been adrift for nearly seven- teen years, carrying her anchor pendant from her bow, seeking for some friendly ridge or bank of the ocean's floor to cling to, at last had found a solid anchorage. "Yes," cried the wanderer, thinking the delightful thought over and over again, "I have long been moored tot he top "of the sea-chained to its loose, waves, but now at last I am anchored to the bottom, that holds fast and does not let go. The old ship's down-reached iron-hand, that has for years been feeling about through thirty fathoms of water to get some grasp and fellowship with the solid frame of things, now at last-at last-finds its rusty fingers caught and clutched by Mother Earth's own friendly gripe." To Rodney Vail, the mere thought was a fever and flushed his face with fire. It was an ecstasy of sane mad- ness. It was like the supreme joy of Leverrier at dis- covering Uranus-or of Joshua at seeing the obedient sun stand still. It was a sense, not only of the lost bottom of the ocean found at last, but of a new basis and corner- stone put under the universe itself. It was as if the heaven of heavens, after having been long reflected from the sky's blue height into the sea's bluer depth, had suddenly re- ascended to the top of the waves to outspread thereon a halcyon paradise under the tempest-tossed ship, and to salute the pilgrim-feet of her weary wanderers with a kiss. The sky above, the sea around, and the earth beneath-all A GLIMPSE THROUGH A SPY-GLASS. J17V C ature combined to pay simultaneous obeisance to one man. "Almighty Father, glory be to Thy name l" cried Rodney Vail, who stood with uncovered brow, upturned face, and uplifted hands, as if bearing up his soul's gratitude to heaven and holding it on high till sure of its acceptance above. Then suddenly his limbs tottered, a tremor passed through him, and he sat down on the deck overcome with joy. The rippling waters went by him as if in haste to carry to the shore the news of his ended voyage. The breeze blew softly over his iron-gray locks, to leave a --benediction on his souL With a tremulous voice, ,the happy man exclaimed, "Disappointment, sorrow, misery, agony, despair-all these I have taught myself to endure; but such a sudden hope, such an ecstasy, such a resurrection and life in the midst of death-how shall my heart brace itself to such a wonderful burden of delight?" The rest of the ship's company still slept. "What a day they will awake to!" he thought. In a few moments, Dr. Vail's first wild emotion, which had thoroughly overcome him, felt the curb of his strong- will; he regained his self-mastery; the child departed out of him; the man returned into him ; and he gazed into the dim, shadowy distance looking for land. "No trace of any shore," said he, " no roar of any surf." Then his busy brain filled itself with problems. Where was he? He could not guess. What had been yesterday's latitude and longitude? He remembered the figures-12 18' N.; 61 28' W. What part of the world was this? He had no map, and could not tell. "I suspect," said he, " that the ship is somewhere north of South America, or somewhere east of the West Indies. But perhaps, after all, she is only on a sunken shoal; per- haps no shore yet awaits our feet. How deep is the water? It must be less than thirty fathoms, for the anchor has found bottom, and the chain is aslant. No, the depth cannot be page: 180-181[View Page 180-181] 180 TEMPEST-TOSSED. more than twenty fathoms. The ship, therefore, is not far from shore. O, for the dawn of day!" Dr. Vail saw that nothing short of daylight could solve the misty problem of his strange situation, and he feared that when he came to see the actual trutn he would still find himself hopelessly surrounded by the same wild waste of waters on which, like an Arab of the desert, he had dwelt for so many weary years. "What wee, tiny, noisy birds!" he exclaimed, noticing a flock of snipe fluttering about him and chattering with small voices :-a tribe of chirruping visitors ;-which indicated (he thought) that the land must be near, for they were too multitudinous and feeble to be of the mid-ocean's stately brood of tireless wings. Hundreds of the little strangers, tiny and welcome, lighted on the ship and hopped about the deck while the day was breaking, delighted to discover a new resting-place amid the waters. Rodney Vail, looking westward through his spy-glass, saw the idol of his soul's quest, and exclaimed, "Land ho I He saw it with open eyes, not dreaming but awake. "There it is!" he cried. It was a strip of actual, veritable, solid earth; perhaps an island, perhaps a cape, perhaps a continent;--he could not tell which-but it was land. The beams of the dawn lighted it into unmistakable reality-and it was land. The illimitable ocean on either side of it sought to overwhelm it, but in vain-for it was land. The discoverer's feet, still standing on a ship's planks, had not yet felt the solid touch of that distant soil-but it was land. This self-same sailor had been cheated before by the hallucinations of mirage, but could not be deceived in what he now beheld-for it was land. "What will Mary say to this?" he cried. "And Bar- bara? And Jezebel? And Beaver?" / He thought particularly of Mary, and how he should A GLIMPSE THROUGH A SPY-GLASS. 181 break to her the glad tidings gently, and not overwhelm her with a too dangerous joy. "And yet why," said he, " should I temper her complete delight? Is not the kingdom of heaven taken by violence? Yes, sometimes. But sometimes also the kingdom of heaven captures its captor with a still greater violence of its own, and comes tumultuously rushing into a long-yearning heart with such immortal force as to blind with excess of light- to slay with excess of life. I will not say a word to Mary of the great tidings. I will summon her to the deck to make the discovery for herself." Descending to the cabin, he woke his wife and said, "'Mary, it will be the most beautiful sunrise that ever cdawned. Come and see it. Waken Barbara. Call Jezebel. Come up quickly and join me on deck." After giving this message, he went to Beaver's quarters, and patting the patriarch affectionately, exclaimed in a gentle tone, "Beaver, you old water-dog, would you like to set your feet on dry-land before you die? Come, old cripple, walk- ing like a broken-legged man on crutches,-move on and hobble up stairs!" It took something unusual to renew Beaver's youth in these late days ; but when once his sluggish blood was stirred, the old fire came back into his eyes, and he was still not wholly unequal to a great occasion. He now saw at a glance that he was expected to be a thorough dog. His feet were some- what lame, and his eyes a trifle blind; but a little impetus from his master, a little extra patting and command, a little expectation of plunging after a wounded gull always proved an elixir of life to Beaver's pulse. H That wise dog, having dike all good dogs) a long memory, tappeared to recall the first day of the wreck, for he gave Rodney the same sort of nudge which on that memorable morning had knocked his new master down. "Beaver," said Dr. Vail, greeting his aged companion on deck, "would you know a dog if you should see one? It is a dog's lifetime, my dear old fellow, since you last met and page: 182-183[View Page 182-183] 182 - TEMPEST-TOSSED. growled at one of your own race. You are now about to meet multitudes of curs of high and low degree. Do you think you will be able to nose out among them the compan- ions of your youth, now grown gray like yourself? Or will you find that they too are truants and rovers over the wide, wide world-? Or, alas, will they be all dead and gone! Ah Beaver, my brave old dog, it will be pleasant, not only for me but for you, to see the world again ; yet we have both been absent from it so long that we dare not guess what old friends have dropped out of it, or how many things we shall miss in it, or how greatly it will seem changed." Rodney Vail stood in the companion-way facing the east, and as his wife and Barbara came up, followed by slow and chattering Jezebel, he pointed to the day-break, saying, "I have called you all to view this sunrise because you may never see its equal in any climate." They all gazed. "How beautiful!" exclaimed Mary, softly. "It reminds mq of the mornings that used to break over the sea at Salem. O how many days have come and gone since we saw that dear coast!" "Yes," replied Rodney ; "but we shall see it again." Mary heaved a deep sigh and gazed in silence, struggling against her doubts and hiding her despair. "Father," said Barbara, who stood looking at the flushed beauty of the sky--her countenance flushed by it into a greater beauty of her own, " you know the sunrise is always beautiful; it is lovely to-day; but we have seen it just as fine on a thousand other mornings. O how many golden mornings we have seen! To-day's is bright, but not brighter than the rest; why then do you call it the brightest of all?" "True," answered Rodney, " we have seen these same burnished colors in the East, but did you ever see anything like yonder strange streaks in the West!" The little company all turned and looked at the opposite quarter of the sky. A GLIMPSE THROUGH A SPY-GLASS. 183 I / What is that?" inquired Barbara. ' That?" exclaimed her father, with a triumphant smile. What do you think it is?" "I do not know," replied the eager maiden, who, with in- tense curiosity, was gazing ignorantly at a small island, not suspecting it to be land. Mrs. Vail, who solved the riddle at a glance, sat with tearful eyes and could not speak a word. "Do not tell me," said Barbara. "Let me guess. Is it a ship? But it has no sails. Then it must be a wreck like the CoromandeL No, I can see that it is not a vessel. Is it a bank of floating-weed? No, it is too white; sea-weed does not glitter in the sun. Is it a great seal basking in the light? No, it is too rough and ragged. I cannot guess it - tell me what it is; I have never seen anything like it." "My daughter," replied her father, stepping up to her, and kissing her forehead, " it is the land." If then a white lily had suddenly taken root in the ship's deck, shooting up a magical stalk and bursting into imme- diate bloom by the side of Barbara's face, the flower would not have looked so pure and pale as that maiden's face for one astonished moment. i Never in all her life had Barbara experienced such a shock of delightful pain. "God is good!" she said softly, clasping her hands and lifting her clear eyes without tears toward heaven. Rodney, whose first solemnity of mind at his great dis- coery had come and gone before the rest of the family had I joied him on deck, was now almost beside himself with frolc. So much electricity shot through his blood that his fingers tingled to their tips. He waved his hands in saluta- tion to the friendly shore; he caught up Beaver by the forepaws, and troted that rheumatic patriarch round on his hind feet; he in sted on dancing a measure with Jezebel, - whose fatnessAiook in the process like jelly; he burst forth into singing a German student's song; he played the mad- cap with Barbara, swinging her arms in a game of love-. I page: 184-185[View Page 184-185] 184 TEMPEST-TOSSED. ribbon; and at last he sat down on the deck by Mary's chair, took her hand in his, and kissed it. Barbara's face, in a few moments, aot onlyregained its color, but blushed beyond the damask-rose at the strangeness of the new sensation, fulfilling Tennyson's accurate lines: As when a great thought strikes along the brain And flushes all the cheek." The excited maiden, whose heart beat like a bell-tongue, stood mute and outwardly calm, drinking-in the scene and drinking-in with it as from an unseen chalice, held by a heavenly hand, the last, best wine of the feast-the wine of life. Beaver evidently regarded the distant object as some great squatting duck or petrel, which the captain was about to shoot and which the dog was preposterously expected to nip hold of and lug back to the ship. The land was a gleaming white line of sea-beach with an uneven crest of green running above it. , Bel stood looking at it, her hands ignorantly lifted to shade her eyes from the sun, though the sun was behind her, and after gazing long and longingly, burst out into an incredulous laugh. "Lan'?" she inquired, with an air as if she could not be fooled with a false report; for she had so long accustomed herself to beholding the land with her inner sight, that she had forgotten how it appeared to the natural eye. "No!" she exclaimed, with amiable indignation, "dat's not de lan'! Whar's de white meetinghouse?-whar's de buryin'-ground and de grave-stones? - whar's de peak-roof on de ole Pritchard place, wid de big chimneys standin' up among de rees! De lan'? Lawks amassy, no!" N Yes, Jezebel," said Rodney, "that is the land." "What, dat little shinin' streak out dar?" she exclaimed, changing her disdain' into curiosity. "Is dat de lan'?-de same ole lan' what it used to be?--de place whar de birds sing?-whar de little chillen' go to school?-and whar de cows come home? Is dat ole Salem?" and she, rolled her A GLIMPSE THROUGH A SPY-ULAbS. 1A0 two hands together into the form of a spy-glass, as if expecting to behold through them the country of her childhood. "Well, suppose it is Salem, what den? Dar ain't noffin dar for ole Bel. Bruno, he's dead. Pete, he's gone. What's de good book say? No foot ob land do I possess, No cottage in de wilderness l' De lan'? Is it de lan' ob de livin'? Den dey must be all dead by dis time. Mebbe it's de land o' Goshen! Den de folks must be de Canaanites! Yes. What's de good book say?? / I , 'l Canaan's fair and happy lan' Whar my possessions lie.' Yes, dat's whar ole Bel's possessions lie. Dey are in de lan' on de odder side ob Jordan-de lan' ob de locuss and wild honey-de lan' ob de still pastures and green waters-de lan' ob Aberham, Isaac, and Jacob-de lan' ob Judas and de Twelve 'Ciples." Then, with a strange rapture in her eyes and a wild energy in her tone, she exclaimed, as if swift conviction were work- ing within her, "What's de good book say? ' Jesus sat by I! de 'sea side.' Wonder if He's a sittin' dAr yet! Lord, here am I. Behold, I come quickly. Glory, Hallelujah!" In uttering these words, her large frame trembled, and she involuntarily reached forth her right hand as if expect- ing her Lord to clasp it. It is not singular that old Jezebel, who had been so long away from the solid earth, and who had so long viewed it only in her rapt visions, should continue to conceive of the land as composed less of earthly than heavenly elements. Mrs. Vail sat in her old weather-beaten willow-chair on the deck, her heart too full for utterance, and her health too frail to bear so delightful an excitement without pallor and exhaustion. Barbara, who was the most deeply affected of all the party, was the most mute. She hardly spoke a word; nor, after the first few moments, could she even see the great page: 186-187[View Page 186-187] 186 ( TEMPEST-TOSSED. spectacle distinctly for the mist in her eyes. Gold and purple lights, such as one beholds in iridescent dreamys, dazzled her blurred sight. The sea was calm, but her heart was in a tumult. The breeze was gentle, but the noises of roaring gales rushed past her ears, making a tempest in her Soul. Barbara, like Columbus, had just discovered a new world; and like Atlas, she was bearing the whole weight of it at once. It was a supreme moment with the sweet maiden, ending her girlhood forever and making a woman of her on the spot. "It must be ten miles off," said Rodney. How shall we get to it?" asked Mary. But to Barbara it was not ten miles off; nor one mile; nor did she seek to get to the shore- for she was already there. She had in swift fancy glided in a moment over the waters to the enchanted city. She was landing amid its commerce-laden piers, and threading her way through its forest of masts. She was gazing at its chuirch-spires, as they glittered in the morning sun. She was saluting the busy throngs of men, women, and children who came out to take her by the hand. She was watching the horses and carriages -in the streets, and glancing at bazars and shop-windows filled with many-colored goods. She was stepping with cool feet on the strange stone pavements which in her dreams she had always imagined to be like blocks of ice. She was passing through the city's gates into the fields beyond, gaz- ing at the tall and monumental trees, comparing them with their pictures in her books-oak with oak-palm with palm - -passing under the benignant shade of each, and listening to the birds that sang in their boughs. She was following the faint tinkle of sheep-bells into the pastures, nodding her head to the kind shepherds and shepherdesses who tended ther flocks as in the story of Daphnis and Chloe, and accosting a group of dairy-maids with their milk-pails to ask them where she could find Lucy Wilmerding and-no, only Lucy; she checked herself from naming any other name. A GLIMPSE THROUGH A SP Y-GLASS. 187 .. In short, every engraved picture or wretched wood-cut which Barbara had seen in all the ship's books, representing cities, landscapes, people, animals, everything-now started into vivid reality before her mind's eye. She Stood in a half trance surveying the great panorama of the world, and shaping it in her fancy exactly as she expected to find it in fact. Imagination is thus one of God's merciful devices for helping human nature to comfort itself in a weary world. This miracle-working faculty had in a few swift moments re-gilded every chamber of Barbara's soul; it had strangely fired her fathers sedate mind; it had restored to Mary's aching heart a lost home; it had touched Jezebel's devout spirit and well-nigh opened to her the gate of heaven. Indeed, the realm of the imagination is the world in which God means His children mostly to dwell, and He gives them the outward frame and fulness of the earth chiefly to supply the rude materials for constructing the inward palace and paradise of the soul. Rodney Vail's first idea was that a steamer would soon be coming to meet him, and that amid the scream of steam- whistles, the flying of Vags, and the cheers of rescuers, he and his little band would be borne with boisterous wel- come into port. He thought he saw the smoke of such a vessel. For an hour, he had no other plan of landing than to wait for this convoy, and be taken ashore with music and festivities. "No convoy comes," said Barbara. "Why wait for it longer? Let us go right up to the land ourselves!" Having already gone there in fancy, Barbara saw no diffi- culty in getting there in fact. "O mother," she exclaimed with delight, "we shall now see the stone cities, the green trees, Lucy Wilmerding and -other persons." Dr. Vail surveyed the coast through his weather-glass, and then handed the instrument to Barbara, who looked through it as if peering into her future and her fate. page: 188-189[View Page 188-189] 188 TEMPEST-TOSSED. While she was thus regaling herself with brilliant fancies of the great metropolis that lay just before her, picking out its spires and minarets, counting its monuments and masts, Rodney put a bar into the capstan, and began to heave on the chain. This was not a new kind of labor for him. He had fre- quently lifted and lowered the anchor in this way. But there was a difference between hauling an anchor through the water up to the ship, and hauling the ship through the water up to an anchor. He tugged with might and main for half-an-hour, not getting more than two fathoms of the cable back, when suddenly the chain parted. Long contact with the salt water had gnawed like canker into some of the links, and the great strain of the vessel, while swaying in the strong current, had snapped the rusty iron asunder. "The ship," cried Rodney, "is once again adrift." "Father," exclaimed Barbara, "this is delightful!-We shall soon be there!-See how fast we go!" "My child," replied the anxious man, " there is danger of breakers-danger of rocks-danger of stranding-danger of swamping-danger of death from the very land to which we have been looking forward for newness of life!" "What are the dangers?" asked Barbara. "I see none. I see only the beautiful land, and we are rushing right straight to it!" "Barbara," cried Rodney, " run- haste- bring me the lead-line." Dr. Vail hove the lead and found the water suddenly shoaling. "I must get the other anchor ready," he cried, "or we shall run aground." Leaping to the starboard cathead, he cut loose the fasten- ings which kept his spare anchor in its place, lowered it slowly into the water about five fathoms, held it fast at that length, and allowed the Coromandel to drift toward the shore. X "The ship," said he, "will anchor where she can float in- I A GLIMPSE THROUGH A SPYGLASS, 189 stead of running aground. Five fathoms will by water enough under her to make her safe. Heaven keep this second chain from parting like the first." His excitement increased as he approached the coast. "Barbara," he exclaimed, " watch the lead-line as I heave it-call out the fathoms." Whereupon he hove the lead again and again, and his daughter reported the depth shoaling #p from nineteen fathoms to twelve, and from twelve to Seven. "O look at those wonderful white waves!" cried Barbara, pointing toward the shore. "See how they roll and break! Hear how they sing!" There was first a rough and boisterous line of breakers, full of threat and menace, whitening 11 the low beach, and roaring like enraged lions ready to tear the ship to pieces. Just beyond -these bellowing billows was a long and sleA(gr arm f sand or tapering shoal, stretching out half a mnn e or more in length, but hardly rising to a man's height alove the sea-level. Beyond this breakwater was a smooth md placid bay, hardly ruffled by a breath. This intervening bank received the east wind and waves on one side, and made a placid harbor on the other. "Yonder tranquil cove," cried Rodney, " will be a haven of peace and safety, if the ship can shoot into it and anchor there!" The Coromandel rapidly drifted shoreward, head to the wind as usual; for when she broke from her anchorage 1!ke water-drag voluntarily changed its place from the sten to the bow. The general current was from east to west, but when it reached the southern point of the bar, it turned abrtuly northward and followed the land up into the cove. The moment Rodney Vail swept his glass to leeward of the point, he satisfied himself that the land was an island (which he had suspected it to be), antthat to go beyond it westward would onl be going again out into the ocean. So he shortened the Lain from five'fathoms to three. page: 190-191[View Page 190-191] 190 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "If I anchor close in shore, just off this point," said he "the ship must swing round into the smooth water beyond.' His approach was as gentle as the current itself, and as swift. He soon found himself rounding the southern point, within pistol-shot of the shore-then bending northward through the sheet of sheltered, unruffled, yet fast-flowing water- and then approaching another point which shelved out before him about half a mile distant. It was between these two points that Nature had indented the cove which he had already discovered from a distance, making a tranquil refuge against the neighboring sea. Rodney now stood at the anchor, and Barbara made the soundings. "How many fathoms?" he asked. "Four and a half," she replied. "How many now?" "Four." "And now?" "Three." Hauling up the anchor a few feet further, Rodney resolved to drift still nearer in, before he chose his moorings. At this moment the water began to deepen. "Four fathoms," shouted Barbara. "Try again," said her father. "Five."' "Quick, again!" \ "Four." "And now?" ? "Three fathoms!" "Any change?" "Two and a half!" Just then the anchor touched bottom-the ship made a slow half-circle round the almost perpendicular chain, like a door on its -hinge-the water-drag sagged sternward-and the long voyage came to an end! "Anchored once more!" exclaimed Rodney, "and ill a A GLIMPSE THROUGH A SPY-GLASS. 191 safe place! Thank God for this good fortune. Our last days shall be our best." Barbara stood mute with astonishment, wondering whether she could believe her eyes, or whether,what she saw was really land. "This is paradise!" exclaimed her father, looking around at the quiet basin in which he was moored. The little narrow bay or river-mouth (he could not tell which) was as smooth as a creek whose tides sob up and down among rush-bearing marshes. "That lost pleiad, the earth," cried he, "is found at last." As Admiral Drake, after circumnavigating the globe, knelt with pride to receive knighthood from Queen Eliza- beth, so Rodney Vail walked to the companion-way where Mary sat in her chair, took off his hat, knelt at her feet, and received her white hand on his head. "O Rodney!" she exclaimed, "this is heaven on earth!- our wanderings are over!-our perils are past!-our exile is done! The world opens again its long-closed gate. We shall rejoin the human family. We shall once more tread our native land. What a d ay this is! And to think that we have all lived to see it? God has been very good." Mary's pale face grew bright and beautiful with emotion. "Yes," said Jezebel, who looked on with undisturbed quietude, "de Lord is better to us dan to de prophets and kings, for dey desired to see but died widout de sight." Barbara, without speaking, was as restless as a mouse waiting to be let out of/a trap. "Now for sober seconU thought," said Rodney, who leaned over the ship's rail with glass in hand to think out a scheme for getting ashore. "The people," said Barbara, "can easily come to us here. Let us be ready to meet them. But, O mother, we look like frights." The fastidious maiden then proposed that they should dress themselves with suitable magnificence to meet their expected guests. , page: 192-193[View Page 192-193] 192 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Law chile," said Jezebel, with whom great t lings never displaced small, "let us hab de breakfast all over fust, before de company comes." Rodney Vail's observations convinced him tIat he had reached a smatsland either lying somewhere in a general ocean-current, or else swept at that time by a strong flood- tide. "Or," said he, " both these surmises may be true. It may be that the perpetual current is' just now accelerated by the periodic tide. At all events I notice that while the gen- eral sea-drift has been from east to west, yet here is a strong stream, like a tide-way, flowing northeast up into the cove. If our ship were not anchored, she would go ashore yonder among those green trees." And he pointed to a shady grove by the water's brink. Well, let us go there," said the eager girl. Rodney reflected that if this stream were a flood-tide, sub- ject to an ebb, he would by and by be swayed back agaiin beyond the sandy point. So he immediately paid out the entire length of his cable-one hundred and twenty fath- oms-and drifted up the cove so near to its western shore that he could have tossed a sea-biscuit to a jutting rock, overhung by cocoa-nut-trees. He then hauled the water-drag to the side of the ship, took off his coat and shoes, coiled a small rope on deck so that it would easily run off, tied one end of it to a hawser and the other round his waist, got down upon the water-drag, drifted with it as f on a raft up the cove into the shallow -ater, and stepped ashore. Beaver accompanied his master. Once on the land, which was a new and thrilling sensation for the feet both of dog and man, the man patted the dog in congratulation: and received from that shaking piece of dripping shagginess a shower of sparkling dropt. Rodney- Vail then pulled toward him the small rope attached to the hawser, hauled the hawser ashore, and fastened it round the foot of a tree. / o , A GLIMPSE THROUGH A SPY-GLASS. 193 Moored thus at bow and stern, the ship would be safe and snug for either tide. This done, the mariner drew a long breath, swept one eager glance about the shore, scooped up a double handful of the pebbly sand, gazed at it as a gold-miner gazes at a rich quartz, kissed it, and exclaimed, "And so this is Mother Earth I She shall have my lips as well as my feet. I love her-I bless her-I caress her. How joyfully her children come back to her! They wait to step on her sands, her rocks, her turf. They shall not wait a moment more. They shall have this happiness at once. I will lead them hither in glad haste." And flinging his hand up joyfully against the sky, he added, "God has not forgotten man. This day he remembers his exiled children. The whole family of heaven and earth are one-and we are at last restored to the one fellowship of all human souls." Walking along the beach towards the cove's mouth, Dr. Vail leaped into the water and swam with the tide to the ship. Once again on the deck, and dripping like the dog, he exclaimed, "This is the greatest day in the history of the world. Barbara, beautify it with colors! Bring out all our flags! Set every ribbon spangling in the sun!"?) Barbara hoisted an old well-worn American flag, but not quite to the top of the staff. "Higher!" exclaimed Rodney. "That is half-mast. No mourning to-day! No signal of distress in this proud hour!" The ship was straightway clad in Joseph's eoat of many colors. "What shall we do next?" asked Mary. "Why, next," said Rodney, excitedly," let us eat Jezebel's breakfast. Is it ready? I have the appetite of a Carib." Descending into the cabin, he brought up one of the few remaining bottles of Mr. Jansen's sherry (which had greatly "improved with years and traveD, and, filling his glass, pro- ; 9 .i . page: 194-195[View Page 194-195] 194 TEMPEST-TOSSED. posed as a toast suitable to the great occasion, "Our God, our country, and ourselves," which for the comprehensive- ness of the sentiment, and the excellence of the wine, could hardly be surpassed. "Why don't the people come to meet us?" asked Barbara, "It is too early in the day," replied her father. "People in civilized countries slep long o' mornings. They were probably up late last night at their balls and masquerades. It is only the virtuous and unfortunate, like ourselves, who learn to rise early." 'After breakfast, Dr. Vail rigged a basket to roll along the hawser, forming a car such as he had seen used for ferries across mountain-gorges in Europe. At 14) A M. Mary and Barbara were ferried to the land; but Jezebel (a sort of Falstaff, only wiser) could not be tempted into the basket. "No," said the, "dis ole woman is too fat. Mebbe dat rope, like de Lord, is no respecter ob persons. It is a drefful ting to tempt Providence. What if de rope break? Ole Bel don't want to be steeped into de floods any more. Enough ob de Lord's deep waters hab rolled ober her already. Ole Bel will stay here." Then on second thought she added, "If you see my boy Pete, tell him I is waitin' here for him to come." The landscape was not remarkable in itself, but had a strange novelty to the eyes that then surveyed it; for of the three persons who stood on it as spectators, two were be- holding the solid earth for the first time in seventeen years, and the other for the first time in her life. "This place," said Barbara, looking round at the scene, awe-struck by it, "is Wonder Land itself." They began to walk about, and Barbara, though never awkward before, but always as graceful as a waving flag, was now unexpectedly at a loss to know what to do with her feet-there was such strange footing under them! ' O! I can't walk over these rough stones," said she. A GLIMPSE THROUGH A SPY-GLASS. 195 Her father and mother could not help smiling at her timid and comical tread, stepping as if she feared at every moment to sink through the surface, just as she would have done' in the water. "Our sea-mew," said Rodney, "now that she has got ashore, finds herself web-footed, and cannot walk." Dr. Vail himself, like any other sailor on going ashore after a long voyage, did not tread the land with deft and skilful step; and his sea-born daughter, a life-long sailor, whose feet had never touched the land before, could still less be expected to tread it as " to the manner born." Even Venus, who like Barbara was born amid the sea, and who like Barbara was wafted to the land, was probably also like Barbara a little surprised and bewildered at put- ting her heavenly feet for the first time on earthly ground. Mrs. Vail took her daughter by the hand, and led her a little way into some luxuriant grass, through which the maiden waded like a penguin in a marsh, or a pelican among the reeds. You may remain here and rest,"' said Rodney to Mary and Barbara, "and I will go forward and explore our new kingdom." Dr. Vail turned away, leaving his wife and daughter sitting under a shady tree. O," cried Barbara, " it is all so strange! It is so unlike what I expected! Mother, are you sure that this is reality? Am I Barbara? Are you Mary Vail? Is that the Coro- mandel?" Barbara was quite as much astonished at the appearance of the ship as of the land, for she had never before been outside of the vessel, except on the day when she fell over- board, and then her terror at the accident, and her blindness 'caused by her hair falling over her eyes, had prevented her itrom seeing the ship. The Coromandel, although the one //familiar object of Barbara's life-long acquaintance, now appeared to her a totally different thing from the ship that page: 196-197[View Page 196-197] 196 TEMPEST-TOSSED. she knew. Any vessel, as seen by a person on board, is strikingly different in appearance from the same Viewed from the outside. "I never suspected," said Barbara, " that the Coromandel was so narrow, long, and low; for she always seemed so high, wide, and deep." A stinging sensation now crept into, Barbara's feet, for her shoes had filled with sand, and the little sharp grains audaciously pricked her tender flesh. Noisy, tropical insects hummed about her, and their sounds seemed like invisible sand-grains entering her ears. Trees shook their branches over and around her, and when a leaf here and there was whisked off, she watched its flut- tering fall as a cat watches a bird. Little brown snipe flitted in and out-the same cheery creatures that her father had seen in the morning. Moss-clad rocks lay round her, as if Nature had first tumbled them down in great profusion, and then to heal their cuts and gashes had mantled them in green. "This scene," said Barbara, " makes me think of Arcadia - of Arden - of Elysium. Mother, you remember how Shakespeare speaks of tongues in trees? Hark, these trees are whispering over our heads. I wonder what they are saying?" "I am'more curious," said her mother, " to know the lan- guage of this country-whether the people speak English, French, Spanish, or what." "O mother, I hope they speak English, for you say our French is badly pronounced, and we speak no Spanish at all." \ Dr. Vail had meanwhile discovered a hill, sloping down on one side to the east, and on the other to the west. After a few minutes' walk, he reached the top and found himself at a commanding point of prospect. One glance from the summit showed him that the island was of very small compass. He could see nearly its whole coast-line at one view. Its extent could not have been more than two A GLIMPSE THROUGH A SPY-GLASS. 197 miles in one direction and a mile in another. It was shaped like a horse-shoe, and the Coromandel lay in the bend. It had no other ship nor harbor. There was no city, no town, no village, no house, no hut, no sign of human beings save the new-comers themselves. Some other fragments of land, few and small, lay scattered in the distance and appeared even more diminutive than the one on which he stood. He said to himself with a grim sense of isolation, "This is Alexander Selkirk's lone spot." A flock of white-breasted sea-gulls flew past. "O you social companions," he cried, addressing them, "I am acquainted with you all! Your brethren and I have met on the great deep! You are gathered to your tribes. When shall I mingle with my fellow-men?" Disappointed at seeing no trace of the human society for which he yearned, he nevertheless felt grateful for the priv- ilege of setting his feet once again on terra-firma, even had this been a barrep rock. "At least," said ,he, "I have found the earth, if not the world; I have found the land, if not mankind." Returning to his wife and daughter, he was eagerly saluted by both. "Father," cried Barbara, "what have you seen? Have you met the inhabitants? What language do they speak? What shall we say to them? How do they look? What country is this? Why don't you answer my questions?" "My child," replied her father, deliberately, "I have met the inhabitants. They are of our own race; they all speak English; they are by nature white-skinned and fair, but at present are badly sunburnt. In short, they are ourselves." "What!" exclaimed the girl. "Is there nobody else in all this great land? Is it uninhabited? Are we in a desert?" "This is a small island," replied Rodney, "and we are its only inhabitants-except the sea-gulls, the sand-pipers, the lizards, and the snakes." "And is this great earth about us," asked Barbara, " only a small island? And is it without inhabitants? Where, page: 198-199[View Page 198-199] 198 TEMPEST-TOSSED. then, is Lucy Wilmerding? And where is-" but she checked herself, Her father supposed that she was alluding to his friend Oliver Chantilly. "I have always thought," said Rodney, " that Oliver was on the ocean searching for the Coromandel. If so, then perhaps we are farther from him now than when we were in Capricorn." Looking toward the sky, Dr. Vail now noticed that it. threatened a shower. It will rain by and by," said he. "Come vith me. to the top of yonder hill, and see the whole heaven and the whole earth, before the clouds gather to shut out the prospect." The two women followed him to the spot, panting from the unusual exertion. ' The view was beautiful, and would have been impressive to any eyes, for it included all the sky and half the sea, yet the stretch of land was diminutive. But it was not diminu- tive to Barbara. Having never seen any land before, except the few square inches of soil within the rim of her geranium- pot, she thought the pigmy isle a continent. It realized her conception of size. It seemed, in some strange way, to be wider,than the horizon that contained it. Then, too, ,she was higher,in'the air than ever before, and this was an exhilaration. She saw the ship lying dwarfed at her feet, and this was a curiosity. She saw three other islands at a distance, and these renewed in her the sensations which she had felt when she first descried, on that morning, the land on which she now stood. She saw, too, and gathered with her own hands, the plantain, the pine-apple, and the orange -all growing wild-and this was at intoxication. "After all," exclaimed Barbara, with beaming eyes, "although I miss the human race and the cities which they have built, yet everything else is here. The land is clothed with bewitching beauty. The earth's green is lovelier than the sky's blue." GLIMPSE THROUGH A SPY-GLASS. 199 The travelers sat in the shade of some plaintain trees, ate of the pleasant fruits which their own hands had gathered by the wayside, enjoyed the breeze in their faces, rallied from their pedestrian fatigues, asked one another a hundred questions, forecast for each other a thousand hopes, and were suddenly startled by a distant roll of thunder. The clouds with stately speed rushed together toward the zenith, and shed a few great drops which, as they fell through the sunshine, were spangled with a rainbow. This was one of the long-familiar sights to the ocean-wanderers, and made them feel as if at home again on the deep. The heavens then rapidly grew thicker and darker, shutting out the sun. , Look," exclaimed Rodney, pointing to the sky, "in a few minutes it will rain in the old-fashioned tropical way -in torrents." "Rodney," said his wife, " this is the first storm to find us without the shelter of our ship's' cabin." "Mary," said he, " let us seek a covert in yonder grove." The travelers, in starting down the hill toward a cluster of trees, neglected to notice that they were going toward the west, not toward the east; in other words, that they were getting farther and farther from the ship. Hardly had they sheltered themselves under the leafy roof than the torrent beat upon it over their heads like arrows against an embossed shield. "How thick this shade is, and how dark!" said Barbara. They walked about in it as in a twilight at mid-day. What is that? suddenly exclaimed the keen-eyed maiden, pointing to a low wooden structure that stood amid the trees, and was overrun with vines. The travelers gazed at it with great curiosity. "It is a house," said Rodney, " a human habitation, but it looks as ancient as Time itself." Approaching nearer, Dr. Vail descried through the man- tling foliage which enveloped the building, two closed windows and a closed door between them,/all partly hidden page: 200-201[View Page 200-201] 200 / TEMPEST-TOSSED. by the overgrowth of vines. Then a peaked and moss- grown roof became partly visible. At last, as Dr. Vail drew nearer in front of the structure, a figure of a cross, carved in dark wood, and clad with lichens, revealed itself over the door. This emblem did not rise from the peak of the roof but occupied the small triangular space between the door and the eaves. "This is a Catholic country," said Mary, "and we shall find Christian hospitality." Inspired by a sudden hope of human welcome, the pilgrims drew near the house, mounted a great stone which served as a door-step, and knocked at the door. "O Mary," exclaimed Rodney, in a low voice, " how many years have passed since you and I have stood at the door of anybody's house " m They all breathlessly awaited a response from within, but the only sound was of the increasing wind that roared over their heads, creaking in the branches. "I think that this strange, building," whispered Mary, looking up at the antique cross, "must be a Hermit's Chapel." 1gS4 .*f I CHAPTER XII. -I GOLGOTHA. THE visitors at the Hermit's Chapel found neither a chapel nor a hermit; yet Mrs. Vail's guess, though not right, was not wrong; for the building had at one time been a chapel, and at another a hermitage. "As we are in the West Indies," said Dr. Vail, " perhaps this ancient structure is a memorial of the early Spanish or French settlers; wherever they went they carried the cross -they were robbers and churchmen." Dr. Vail and his companions had landed among the Cari- bee Islands, on one of the hundred or more specks in the sea I which are called the Grenadines, borrowing their diminutive name from their proximity to the Isle of Grenada. The whole hundred, though stretched out like beads on a string, make a rosary only sixty miles long. Even the giant of the group is not larger than a nobleman's country-seat; all the others are dwarfs and pigmies. The few that have names look on the map like grains of Sand; the rest dwindle into anonymous insignificance, or hide themselves altogether from the navigator's chart.' It was on one of these broken bits of mother earth- unnamed, uncharted, and unknown-that the Coromandel was cast. The history of this fragment of sea-girdled rock has been blotted into oblivion, but can be rewritten in a passing word. The early European explorers of the Spanish Mainf found the tall, brave Caribs practising a strange and cun- ning art-the curing of meat by red-drying without salt. page: 202-203[View Page 202-203] 202 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Thus cured, the flesh of the wild swine, with which the islands abounded, possessed in the hands of these foreign traders a market value as a novel article of commerce. The cured meat was called by the Caribs, " boucan;" from which the meat-curers became known in French as "boucaniers," and in English as " buccaneers." These early meat-packers were not marauders; their "buccaneering" was an honest business. The term " buccaneering," now used as a synonym for "piracy," did not acquire this thievish and murderous significance until many years later in West Indian History; that is, not till after the early race of swine had been exter- minated, leaving the meat-packers no more meat to pack, and tempting them to earn a shameful livelihood by pillag- ing richly-laden ships. The early buccaneers--in other words, the meat-marketers, not the ship-plunderers-were a secret order, oath-bound. In those days the Spaniards, claiming all the West Indies by right of discovery, tried to keep off all other foreigners from the islands. English, French, Portuguese, and Danish adventurers came to the West Indies to find themselves excluded from the Spanish settlements and trading-posts. This exclusion led them to cast their lot among the boar- hunters of the wodds and wilder coasts. They thus became buccaneers. When they increased in number, so as to be important enough to be persecuted by the Spanish power, they organized themselves into a league of defence, called the Brethren of the Coast, an order something like the Free Masons or Odd Fellows, only in a rude and crude form, and having often a bloody purpose. This league had its English headquarters in Tortugas, and its French at St. Kitt's. Its laws were unwritten, but not unexecuted. Its members, like the ancient Apostles, had/all things in common; its villages and communities were with- out locks and bolts on any doors. One of its distinguishing "features was a close partnership between two comrades, by which each man had a mate to whom he made oath of fidelity-each binding himself to help the other at all risks GOLGOTHA. aWm -each dividing with the other the last crust, and particu- larly the first and every bottle-the living partner to bury the dead with Christian rites-and the survivor to inherit in fee-simple the joint property of both. The little island to which the Coromandel had come had been in former days a bivouac of the Brethren of the Coast. The sudden rain that drove Rodney Vail's party to the Hermit's Chapel, continued to fall as the weather-bound pilgrims stood waiting at the door; - but the over-hanging trees, interlaced with vines, made a green roof over their heads, and protected them from the descending floods. - "The thickness of this foliage," said Rodney, " reminds me of Milton's phrase, ' star-proof." "O father!" exclaimed Barbara with a sudden shiver, "how dark the night would be in such a spot, since it is dusk here at mid-day!" Mrs. Vail had read of Roman Catholic countries in which holy men, weary of the world, had retired from its tumults to spend their old age in solitude and heavenly contempla- tion; and she had a secret hope of being met at the door by some such venerable father-confessor. Protestant though she was, yet to such a mind as hers there was so much that was romantic and ideal in the Roman Catholic church- including its history, its offices, its ceremonies-that she was willing to bow her head in reverence to any holy friar who should come forth across that threshold, under the sacred emblem that stood carved above that door. "These trees," said Rodney, " are lignum vite, and may be centuries old." "Yonder cross, then," suggested Mary, " was once prob- ably one of these living trees. The holy image of the tree of life is fitly carved in wood of that name." Rodney noticed that the threshold of the rude and antique building was worm-eaten and rotten, and yet the iron-like wood of the consecrated symbol was without any sign of decay, save the lichens and moss that grew under its out- w page: 204-205[View Page 204-205] 204 TEMPEST-TOSSED. stretched arms, where the pausing rain-drops now hung like icicles. "Mother, why does not some one answer our knock?" asked Barbara in a whisper, feeling a sensation of mingled curiosity, impatience, and dread. "My daughter," replied her mother in a low voice, "per- haps the hermit is at his prayers." The suggestion of a kneeling worshipper at his devotions was awe-inspiring to Mrs. Vail, and she -pictured an aged patriarch thus bowed within the hut. Rodney indulged in no such imaginings, but was rapidly making up his mind that the house was without a tenant, and the isle without an inhabitant. Walking back from the door-step to survey the structure all round, he noticed in detail that it was a small, oblong house, with a peaked roof, two windows and a door in front, two windows in the rear, and nothing on the sides except clustering ivies and other vines that hid the walls from view, "It is deserted," said Rodney; "4 it looks as if it had been abandoned long ago. Probably no one has been near it for years; there is no beaten path to the door; the windows are barricaded with shutters; the vines are as wild as a wilderness. Let me try the lock." But on stepping forward to the door, he found no lock,- nothing but a mouldy remnant of what had been a large wooden knob, which, as he grasped it, broke off in his hand. "It crumbles to ashes," he exclaimed, looking at the handful of rottenness that filled his palm. This accident startled him, for any token of extreme decay about a human habitation associates itself impressively with man's own mortality. "Perhaps," said Dr. Vail, "the door is locked on the inside." But on examination he found no trace of a key-hole. "Then," said he, "the door is not locked at all." GOLGOTHA. 2O0 "Do not open it!" exclaimed Mary, who felt an indefi- nable dread. Rodney hesitated a moment, as if doubting his right to enter unbidden. Barbara, to whom the uninhabited isle and its deserted hut had not fulfilled her morning's expectation of a world full of people, watched with intense interest tosee whether any human being dwelt in that abode. "Father," said she, " do not go in. The cross shows that this structure is a tomb, a sepulchre.' Let us return to the ship. The Coromandel has sheltered us from many storms, and will shelter us from one more." "MLy child," replied her father, "tombs and sepulchres are not built of wood, like living men's houses; this is not a sepulchre-it is a dwelling-house." Saying which, he pressed both hands against the door, and pushing it with all his might, burst it from its fasten- ings, and it fell inward, flat on the ground, with no little noise and scattering of dust, Suddenly out through the open space ran a terrified lizard, followed helter-skelter by a few musty mice, and by a panic- stricken army of centipedes, black beetles, and innumerable insects reeping and crawling in every direction. This loathsome spectacle startled the two women, par- ticularly Mrs. Vail. "O horror!" she exclaimed, "what place have we come to? It is an abode of desolation- a house of cor- ruption." "Stand here on the doorstep," said Rodney, " and let me enter alone." Dr. Vail stepped across the damp and rotten threshold and saw a sight that shook his nerves. "In Heaven's name, what are these?" he whispered, not speaking aloud for fear of alarming his companions. Before him lay a row of human skulls. They were placed in careful order, each on a separate pedestal of lignum vitae, about half a yard apart, eleven in page: 206-207[View Page 206-207] 206 TEMPESTsTOSSED. number, making altogether a ghastly line reaching across the charnel-house.' 'There were no skeletons or bones; nothing but these heads; bleached to a gleaming whiteness, as if exposed to the air for many years, and looking now as if undisturbed ever since; quietly awaiting the Day of Judgment. 1r. Vail shrank from the ghastly spectacle, and staggered back into the daylight. "What did you see?" asked Mary, who noticed a strange pallor on his face. "Let me look again," said he; whereupon, without mak- ing further answer, he re-entered this Golgotha. Gazing now more composedly than before, he contemplated the scene with deep emotion. "Ah," thought he, feeling a sense of reverence, inter- mingled with dread, " every one of these skulls was once a living man like myself, and I too shall be one day like each and all. Perhaps these men now dead were alive in the world long after I went into exile from it. How my heart would leap, could I meet them here to-day all in life instead of death! ]Never did I dream that after my long absence from my fellow-men, my first returning glimpse of them would be of their bleached, unburied skulls. No ; I had hoped instead * to see their flushed faces full of greeting and joy. Ah! he asked, heaving a deep sigh, "are all my hopes, as soon as they spring to life to be thus continually struck with mortality and laid in a sepulchre?, Is the whole earth to become for me a perpetual death-chamber?-an urn full of ashes? Have I this day returned to life and the world only to associate with the dead in their vault? But O you ghastly skulls of men, you are a welcome spectacle to my eyes, for you were once my fellows, my kindred, my race! O my brethren, I come back to you, and you receive me not! I salute you, and you greet me not! Ah, dumb tongues that cannot tell your own tale, were you too a ship's com- pany of wanderers cast away on this desolate shore? Were you too a band of exiles from all men's faces save your own? Whoever you ares forgive the intrusion of a stranger, and let me loiter among you as among long-lost, new-found friends." Dr. Vail noticed that each skull bore a faded and dnim inscription on its' forehead in Spanish, the first that he deciphered running as follows: ' "Soy Carlos Barrado- t *2 6 un Ave Maria y un Padre Neustro por Dios, hermano."' After he had slowly picked out the much obliterated words, he turned them into English, repeating in a low voice, as if giving the dead a muffled tongue : "I am Carlos Barrado; for God's sake, brother, an Ave Maria and a Paternoster." Glancing in quick succession at all the skulls, he observed that each 'had a different name, but otherwise the same inscription. Looking round the strange place, he saw nothing in it but these death's-heads; no altar, no churchly furniture, no ob- jects of any kind, sacred or common; nothing save these grim memorials of life and death. "Rodney, my dear husband, why do you stay so long?" cried his wife, from the outside. "Come back!" "Father, what have you seen?"asked Barbara, as he obeyed her mother's summons. "I have seen," he replied, ' what I have not looked upon before for nearly twenty years-Death." Barbara gave a start-almost a leap ; for of all her expec- tations of novel sights on the land, death was not one; she had never entertained a thought of it; the solemn end of life had no place in her new beginning of it. "Death?" she exclaimed. "Is it Lucy Wilmerding? Is she dead? Or is it-?" Barbara was on the point of mentioning another name, but checked herself, and simply added,. "No, it cannot be!" On second thought, she impulsively rushed into the charnel .* . *- page: 208-209[View Page 208-209] 208 TEMPEST-TOSSED. house as if to-- rescue Lucy Wilmerding, or a still more pre- cious and imperiled victim, from a mortal fate. Mrs. Vail followed her; and father, mother and daughter surveyed the skulls. Barbara, whose keen eyes at once detected the faded in- scriptions, was about to pick up one of the heads exclaiming, as she put forth her hand, "O, mother, what if we should here find the names of our own best friends on earth!" The thought was an agony to Barbara, and cleft her soul as with a fiery bolt; she trembled with a dread which she could not have expressed if she would, and would not if she could. "No," said her mother, reassuringly, "no friends or kindred of ours have ever been in this part of the earth." Still Barbara was determined to examine the names and to satisfy herself that none of her soul's idols lay there in death. "My daughter," protested her mother, "do not set your hands on these skulls. It is sacrilege to disturb the dead. Whoever these men were in life, whether priests or saints, pirates or murderers, they are now dead and entitled to their rest. They are in God's keeping; let them be beyond our touch." The excited maid looked quickly at the writing on each of the skulls, but finding no familiar name, drew a long, free, comfortable breath. "My child," said her father, " you were right in guessing that this was a burial-place. I never saw one like it. Had I known what was inside this house before breaking open the door, I would rather have waited for Gabriel himself to blow his trump than hake lifted my hand to jar the ears of these sleepers with a rude noise. Let us retire from this tomb. It belongs to other tenants than ourselves. Quite soon enough we shall each have one of our own, from which our feet can never depart." Emerging from the antique house of the dead, the trav- elers welcomed the open air again, even though it was laden J GOLGOTHA. ' A 0U with rain and mist, and gloomyt-ith the shadows of the trees. How Nature, even amid her weeping, seemed trying to smile ! And above all, how full the great earth seemed of life and growth, in comparison with one small spectacle of death and decay! Barbara, who had always been accustomed to seeing in the daytime an exuberance of daylight, was oppressed with the thick gloom of the low, dense trees, and exclaimed: "This grove is as dim as a tomb!" Dr. Vail noticed that the darkness was increasing, and knew therefore that the storm was increasing with it.' In the climate of the Caribee Islands, showers at noon are common toward the end of May, coming quickly and clearing in an hour or two. During a week or fortnight the rain comes and goes spasmodically, before finally settling into the steady flood that constitutes the rainy June and July. The dry season steps eat-footedly into the wet. The shower, that had fallen upon the travelers with such fierceness, was of short duration; and, in a few moments, a sudden sunbeam pierced the grove. " Where shall we go now ? " inquired Barbara "To the ship," answered Rodney; and they wended their way through tle dripping trees and watery grass in search of the cove. The road was rough, difficult and tiresome. The sun came out, hot and oppressive. A calm settled on' the sea. Stillness reigned over the, green landscape. Not a leaf stirred. Barbara, who was yet in her pupilage in the art of walk- ing on the uneven soil, fought her way awhile through the wet paths, full of rough stones and sharp briars, and soon complained of fatigue. " Let us sit and rest," said she. "Why should we haste ? Why try to travel faster than the ship did ? This is our first day on the land ; let us make it a long one!" Dr. Vail looked about for a resting-place. He found one in the shadow of some scattered trees. It was a ledge of rock which, with a few detached boulders, gave the tired page: 210-211[View Page 210-211] 210 TEMPEST.-TOSSED. travelers a choice of adamantine cushions-the same choice which Jacob had of pillows when he slept at Bethel. "Where is Beaver?" asked Barbara, who had once be- fore spoken of the dog's absence, and now lifted her voice and called him. "Beaver!" she cried. Her cry was loud and clear, and went sounding down the hill and over the rolling isle. After calling his name she whistled to him, which was her more familiar summons for in disciplining her dog, Barbara had long been in the habit of talking to him, reading to him, singingto him, and whistling to him. Her whistled call was not of the few com- mon explosive notes that dogs ordinarily hear from their mandatory masters, but a cadence that she had composed of a whole octave of sounds. She rang it forth like a chime of bells, or like a bird's call to its mate. But Beaver did not come. "Beaver feels his liberty," remarked Rodney. "Let him enjoy it. He cannot get far away. He will not be lost!" Beaver had been nosing in the water, and been nipped sharply by a crab. This was a new sensation to a dog accustomed to receive respect, and gave him an unpleasant impression of the world. He. accordingly had gone swim- ming back to the Coromandel in disgust. ' At length the travelers reached the cove where the ship lay. Barbara, who knew her mother's feebleness and feared the results of over-exertion, said to her, "Mother dear, you had better let father ferry you at once to the ship, so that you can go immediately to your room and rest. If you walk more to-day you will not be able to stir a step to-morrow. Besides, Jezebel has been deserted long enough. Father, please go on board with mother, but let me stay a little while on shore to roam about alone." Mrs. Vail at first demurred to this, but when Barbara urged it, her mother reflected how much she would be with- holding from her child to deny it, and assented graciously. GOLGOTHA. 2" "My daughter," said her father, warningly, "you are the sovereign princess of the isle. Go and possess it-only don't get lost in the woods." Barbara was thus left alone on the island ; no human foot touching its soil save her own. "So-this," said she, drawing a long breath, "this is the world, and I am in it at last!' Is it possible that I am out of my prison and am free? Let me then have a taste of my freedom all to myself!" To make her escape from bondage all the more manifest, and to heighten her enjoyment of it, she walked back from the shore out of sight of the ship, and sauntered at will into any and every path that lured her feet. Nor did she think of marking her way of return, for having never had any expe- rience of getting lost, she thought of no precaution against going astray. She passed through a tangled labyrinth of trees, shrubs, and vines, over grass, moss and stones, and noted no landmarks for retracing her steps. In her wild vagrancy she did not even think of a return to the ship. "O how strange, how strange everything seems " she exclaimed. , But had she asked herself whether she was wandering into a paradise or out of one; whether she was approaching the cherished goal of her life-long hopes or only drawing nigh to a bitter disappointment, she could hardly have told. The day and its experiences had been full of equal pleasure and pain; the pleasure of hopes excited, and the pain of hopes unfulfilled. "It is not as I expected it ,to be," she said, " and yet it is God's world; He made it as pleased Him best; I shall be content with it, as I find it. Yes, it is very beautiful and strange. But I longed to see my fellow-beings, my kindred, my dear Lucy-and-" Even in solitude Barbara had a habit of checking her utterance of the one name which her swelling heart kept always tossing up dangerously to her lips. As she walked along she gazed with soul-lit eyes at every- page: 212-213[View Page 212-213] 212 TEMPEST-TOSSED. thing she passed ;-at the billowy waves of the land, which she still kept expecting to 'see move and change like the hillocks of the sea ; at the fruits which she plucked and ate, none being forbidden as in the first Eden; at the brilliant butterflies, more lustrous than the6 few stray yellow-wings that had fluttered across the Coromandel's deck at sea; at the many purple-breasted birds that had no webbed feet and never dipped their wings into the salt waves ; at the beau- tiful snakes, harmless and graceful, and as bright as Madame D'Arblay's neck-ribbons of watery-green; at the flowers of many hues that spangled the way for her on either side;- at all the strange pageant that surrounded her, which she saw not only as compared with her life on shipboard that was so different from this, but also through the vague yet glowing hopes that now hung like a day-break over her new future. "O, what wonderful colors!" exclaimed the wanderer looking at the flowers that had been freshened by the rain. She toyed affectionately with the buds, plucking some of them as her mother had done, yet half shrinking from breaking their stems, through an unwillingness to put an end to their beautiful lives. "O, they are alive," said Barbara, "and if I pluck them they will die. No, let them live. Life must be sweet to all living things. Perhaps a flower's life is sweeter to itself than even its own fragrance can be to any other creature. These roses are fragile enough at best, and short-lived-why should I destroy them before their time?" Barbara was the more impelled to this conviction because, having seen the butterflies first and the flowers afterward, she fancifully regarded the flowers as another species of butterflies which might at any moment lift their wings and fly off their stalks. In the midst of the variegated scene, Barbara was bewil- dered and delighted, but not satisfied. "No," said she, "I am not content; this is enchantment and yet disenchantment. It is not, the world I sought to I -GOLGOTHA. 213 enter. It gives me no human society. It shows me no paradise of house and home. It offers me only the same few and familiar faces which I have brought with me into it. O if Lucy Wilmerding were only here! That dear, noble woman-when shall I ever see her? 0O that I could know something of life as she knows it!-O0 that I might have an opportunity to see the world as she sees it!-O that I could go among my fellow-creatures as she does eyery day! But perhaps God keeps me back from entering the real world because I am not fit to mingle with it-because my training has not disciplined me for it-because I might not know how to act if I were in it. Yes, I can see my Heav- enly Father's reason for condemning me to solitude and exile; I might otherwise make him ashamed of his poor child Barbara-his ignorant, desolate, lonely Barbara. Pos- sibly I am such a ' sea-mew' (as my mother calls me) that I ought always to live on the waves. Perhaps I am altogether unlike other young women of my years-sothat I ought to be kept aloof from such companions- put into a class by myself) as my father classifies strange sea-weeds or fishes, making them a genus of their own. Of course I cannot be Lucy Wilmerding, yet why was I made if I am to be nothing at all?" Barbara spoke these thoughts aloud. This was her cus- tom in soliloquy. She had never cultivated reticence or repression, except concerning one solitary name and theme. Moreover she had never known what it was to carry her tongue into the company of eprs that had no right to listen to her sacred and secret thoughts. So, as she walked along, she spoke aloud, willing that both the earth and the heavens should hear. "After all," she exclaimed, "the world, whether on sea or land, is more full of sunshine than of cloud; anid this is a sign that the soul also should have more-peace than pain. It shall be so with this heart of mine." Barbara then rallied'herself to one more effort against dis- appointment-an effort to realize, if not all, at least a part page: 214-215[View Page 214-215] 2i4 TEMPEST-TOSSED., of her day-dreams of the land of Beulah. They who expect the most from the world are they who have had the least I experience of it. Barbara, whose lifetime had yielded noi experience of it at all, had therefore always looked forward to it through an atmosphere of hallucination. Stricken now. - with sore disappointment at not seeing her fellow-beings,9 she would not permit the failure of this expectation to argue' to her the consequent failure of her other glowing pre-con- ceptions. When a supreme hope, which the soul has long worshipped as its idol, suddenly falls to the ground like a crumbled image, the bereaved soul, instead of giving over its idolatry, simply seeks another object for its adoration. Accordingly when Barbara saw that she was not to meet her! fellow-beings, she all the more expected to see all the other- long-coveted wonders of the world, as if the whol' collection: had been gathered together in this solitary isle-amassed there by Nature in a single museum for her especial gaze. Shut out from Humanity, Barbara therefore turned with her whole soul to Nature. Having read on shipboard of the green earth's wonderful vegetation, until the very pages of her book had effloresced and blossomed before her eyes, she! now demanded that the island, in denying her a sight of mankind, should compensate her loss by revealing to her i the whole glorious pageant of the world's mountains, forests, cascades, meadows, gardens, flowers, and all the natural i beauties which her father lad painted for her in words dipped in their own glowing hues. Barbara found herself looking for Mt. Blanc, with its crown of eternal snow; for Niagara, with its everlasting ! song; for the Mississippi's stream, with its ribbon of silver; i for the prairie with its sea of grass ; for the Banyan-tree with an army encamped under its boughs; for the solemn- throated Vesuvius belching up its flame; for the monstrous serpents of the forest, twining round the giant trees as round Laocoon in the picture-book; for the majestic lion, which she would have ignorantly met without fear; for the cattle on a thousand hills, that she saw forever browsing in-her GOLGOTHA. 215 fancy; for the camel under the palm; for the deer, drinking at the mountain-brook; for the apple-blooms of Pritchard farm; for the primrose, the violet, the daisy, the aster, and the golden rod; for all these and a thousand other sights great and small did Barbara gaze about her; but instead of finding them out-spread in beautiful array before her eyes, she ominously beheld the afternoon sun declining into a fit emblem of her morning's hopes. "Now I must return," said she, "'for the day is fleeing away." Attempting to retrace her steps, she did not know the way back. She wandered first in one direction, then in another, never getting into the old paths, but only into new. She was in a labyrinth, and a lengthening, shadow was creeping over it to hide all clews of return. She was en- tangled in a mass of difficulties. The thickets tore her dress; the branches caught her hair; the stones bruised her feet. She often stumbled and sometimes fell. "O how rough the path is! she exclaimed, " how thorny, how distressing!" Barbara was beginning life in earnest, and at every suc- cessive hour the present reality seemed more and more a mockery of her previous ideal. Still the lovely maiden was not a babe. Like all children of the tropics, she had devel- oped early both in body and character, and was now stout of heart, sinewy of frame, pure of soul. So she went on through the thickets as the ship had gone through the sea- without hart or helm-lost but not harmed. "Why do my hands burn?" she exclaimed, alarmed at a strange sensation in her finger-tips. Barbara had here and there trailed her fingers gently along a delicate pink-stemmed vine with rich, dark leaves, and this creeper had returned her graciousness by poisoning her hand, till it was now swollen with pain. But the world has many worse stings for the young and innocent. Then a cloud rose out of the sea, covered the west, hid the sun, grew red with a glory unutterable, paled, faded, page: 216-217[View Page 216-217] 216\ TEMPEST-TOSSED. and left a twilight in which the stars began to peep forth one by one. "Where is the ship?" sighed the pilgrim. "Am I near- ing the cove or going away from it? Alas, I cannot tell." Looking for a hilr to climb, there seemed now to be noth- t ing but a rolling country with no particular knoll. higher than another. She saw the ocean-this was plain enough; so was the sky; but she could not discover the cove or the Coromandel. "O which is the way back?" exclaimed the bewildered maiden. Another cloud arose, not in the West, but in the East, just as in the forenoon. First there came with it a swift ! breeze; then a few drops of rain; then a stronger puff of wind; then a heavier dash of rain; then lightning, first far off, then with loud thunder crackling near by; and at last a pouring flood-the morning's delude over again-Nature's second experiment in bringing on the rainy season. "It is another storm," she cried; "I must flee to some refuge." Barbara escaped into a thicket of dense, old trees, and sat down on a fallen trunk that was covered with lichens and moss. .The green roof protected her, just as a similar shield of leaves had done in the morning. The storm was full of anger. The rain was accompanied with wind. The branches were violently shaken over her head. The night was grow- ing pitch dark, save when lit by the lurid flames. It was a tempest, and the maiden-was alone in it. "How fearful!" she exclaimed, shuddering and wrapping her thin scarf about her as if seeking to hide herself within its folds. Barbara had been in storms before, but she then had human companionehip-the friendliest which all the world i could offer to her. Now she was alone and full of fear. Alone! This was a sensation that she had never before experienced. Never for a day or a night had she been separated from her parents until now. And now she was '. WLbjU Le. nA. wJL simultaneously overtaken by three grim terrors--night, tempest, and solitude. But though Barbara was alarmed she was not dismayed. Thq lightnings for years had been her playmates, and they now wore no new fac to her. The winds had all her life been her sisters, and she could call them by name. The night, too, was one of her best-known companions. It was only the solitude that oppOessed her. i"What shall I do?" she exclaimed, and she sat stock-still and cdid nothing. The night continued to darken; the wind continued to blow; the rain continued to pour. "O, I am sick at heart!" murmured the lonely girl. Barbara was now more fatigued than she had ever been on any day or night of her life before. Frequently weary in her life-long search for the world, she at last was thrice- weary on the very day of finding it. "I am full of misery!" she cried. Her feet were blistered, her hands were full of poisonous pain, and her heart panted with anxiety at the distress which she knew her parents would feel at her absence. "O what will they think?" sighed the agonized child. "My dear motherdid not want me to go wandering about alone. Hov* disobedient it was in me to overcome her wishes, and to bring her into this grief! She is weeping, I know. O my darling mother, do not break your heart over your perverse child!" Barbara then bitterly reflected that this was the first parting she had ever known-except during her brief peril overboard. "What if I should never see them again! she exclaimed with a shudder. This was the same thought that hadl passed through her mind during the few moments of her struggle with the waves; and now, in thinking it a second tin'e, it seemed to have double the horror of the first. 10 page: 218-219[View Page 218-219] 218 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Just then the wind opened the branches above her head, and let down the rain upon her. She rose hastily and groped her way still further under the trees to the denser foliage. She staggered forward until she could see nothing at all. It was pitch dark. No rain fell on her now-not a drop. The ground itself was not even wet-only cool enough to be almojt cold. The chills ran from her body into her soul. Where was she? Little did she suspect the real character of her resting-place. O O God!" she cried, as she sat awe-stricken and in woe. "This is my first day of hope and thus it ends--ends in darkness-ends in anguish! Forgive me, O heaven, for my complaints, but my heart is heavy-my burden is greater than I can bear. Did I not yearn through many weary years for this day? and yet it ends in such a night! Did I not pray to set my feet on the land? and now that my prayer is answered, I cannot bear the answer. O how often I have cried to God to deliver me out of my floating prison, and yet no sooner am I set free from it than I immediately cry to Him to take me back again to that same lonely ship! O my dear mother and father, what will you do without your daughter? what will your daughter do without you?" Barbara wept bitterly. This was an unusual brokenness for her strong heart; for though, during the past few years, Barbara had borne many sorrows, yet she had shed few tears. Unused were her eyes to such dews. Fire was plentiful in them; sparkles were there often ; sunshine had at one period made them its constant abode; mirth glittered in them on occasion; love shone in them always; but tears were rare guests in those blue orbs. "This is the most miserable hour of my life!" she said, and sobbed as if her heart would break. - Barbara's tears did not yield her the relief which tears sometimes bring, but only melted her spirit into weakness and dread; for her weeping seemed to her an added and outward testimony to the distress of her situatioa. GOLGOTHA. 29 She was unstrung; she quaked with fright; her imagina tion conjured up a thousand perils and shadowed her with the mysterious dread of the unknown. "O how my head reels! how my temples throb!" she cried. Weakness, faintness and drowsiness oppressed her flesh and spirit. Her thoughts were then seized with a strange dizziness and began to Wander. She fancied the ship gone away and her parents gone also, so that they would never come for her. She fancied her mother clasping her hands in agony, crying : " my daughter, my daughter, come back!"She fancied Jezebel reaching out to her the kindly arms with which that old nurse had enfolded her ever since she was a babe. She fancied herself returning to the Coromandel, stepping into the basket, and the joyful family all pulling on the rope to trundle her home again. She fancied Beaver licking her hand and whining a welcome over her rescue. She fancied her father standing under a hundred gay and flying streamers, lifting a wine-glass in honor of her return. She fancied all the waves of the sea suddenly standing still, and sprouting with flowers and fruits. Thus wildly did the wearied girl's thoughts and visions range from one image to another, until in her unknown shelter, lying on the breast of Mother Earth, she at last, like a fretful infant that sobs itself to rest, fell asleep. Poor Barbara's eyes, once shut, were locked too tight to be opened by the shimmering heat-lightnings that played round the sky, and that pierced the grove with momentary luridness. These flashes might as well have danced round a blind girl. But well was it for her that no fitful gleam suddenly illumined the ghastly chamber in which she was Iying! Well was it that she had no suspicion of her place of rest! Well was it that she knew not in what grim- company she slept! For Barbara had hideous and unknown companions. They stayed with her during all her slumber, yet did not page: 220-221[View Page 220-221] 220 TEMPEST-TOSSED. wak-,n her; they did not awake themselves; they slept a still sounder sleep than hers. They were eleven human skulls! Barbara was fast asleep in the Hermit's Chapel. Poor Barbara, take your rest I Dear tired maiden, sleep awhile!-do not open your eyes too soon!-slumber until the storm is over-past 1 Poor heart-broken, sleep-comforted Barbara! Heaven protect you in your loneliness and inno- cence! Soon a fire-fly flew in, bearing his lighted lamp ; then another followed; then another. These were the West Indian fire-flies that rank among the wonders of the world; the same burning and shining lights that Basil Ringgrove found among those islands in the days of the buccaneers, declaring in his journal that a cluster of these glow-worms at night, on a branch or twig, seemed to him like a beacon-fire in the woods, and that even a single one of them, if put under a wine-glass in his ship's cabin, would give him light enough to write his notes; the same torch-bearers which Philip Henry Gosse, the entomologist, describes as carrying each on his back two lights like the bull's-eyes of a ship's deck,pmitting a vivid greenish and golden splendor; the same insects which Latrelle, the nat- uralist, measured an inch in length, and found so fiery that a handful hung in a glass globe would illumine a chapel for vespers. i In the West Indies, no night can be dark when these lamp- lighters take a freak to illumine it. Clouds and rain may quench the stars of heaven, but no storms can put out these Stars of the earth and diamonds of the night." But while Barbara slept, what were these lustrous lights to her closed eyes? The fire-flies, having been roused from their lodging in the green leaves by the pelting rain, and fleeing for shelter elsewhere, followed their habit to fly in at an open door or window, and thus found their way into the Hermit's Chapel ;first by twos and threes, then by dozens and scores, GOLGOTHA. 21 afterward by hundreds, until at last they were as numerous as if a swarm of bees had mistaken the chapel for a hive. As the ancient building was now open to them perhaps for the first time in a century, they made haste to flock Into it from near and far, attracted by each other's lights. They filled the damp and solitary chamber with their multitudi- nous sparks. They settled on the floor, on the ceiling, on the window-sills, on the door-posts, on Barbara's sleeping form, and on the eleven ancient skulls. These winged and phosphorescent worms illuminated the darkness of the charnel-house as no day-beam ever pierced far enough through the trees to do. Their light, proceeding from no one point, but from all points, was without shadow. It revealed every nook and cranny. It shone with unearthly brightness. It glittered and gleamed as from, a thousand lamps. It gilded every grain of sand, every spider's web, every particle of floating dust. It made the whole space shine like one translucent jewel. It set the very atmos- phere on fire. Sheltered from the storm without, these multitudinous living lights tarried in their new-found cloister-remaining there like the wise virgins that had oil and could keep their lamps burning, while poor Barbara, lying on the ground asleep, was like one of the foolish that must wait in dalfness all the night long. The dear girl, who slept through the fierce lightnings of heaven, slept also through these gentler lightnings of the earth. Her face was illumined as if she were in the sun- shine, only with an unearthly hue. She lay with her head on her arm, sleeping a child's sleep. She looked more dead than death, more alive than life. She was like one who had "Suffered a sea-change - Into something rich and strange." A swarm of the fire-flies settled like a many-faced emerald in her hair, but nothing else molested her. A snappish toad hopped about, attempting to catch the gilded flies, but he respected Barbara. The green lizard, that had fled at the page: 222-223[View Page 222-223] 23 - TEMPEST-TOSSED. opening of the door, had long since returned, and was fast asleep on one of the sk lls-his back now more green and brilliant than by day. Tne little ground-mice, unaccustomed to the great light, and to their human guest, were whist and mute, and dared not venture forth. Barbara continued to sleep :-to sleep soundly, full of earth's weariness-to sleep sweetly, full of heaven's peace. Meanwhile the rushing rain no longer poured, but only pattered; then no longer pattered, but only trickled; and at last altogether ceased. As soon as the noise of the tempest was lulled, and the air was still enough to convey other sounds than of the roaring winds that had just howled through the firmament, there arose a strong and agonizing cry of a human voice, shout- ing "Barbara!" Again at short intervals, like a minute- gun, it could be heard crying "Barbara!" Above all the strange stridulations, screechings, ringings, pipings, and chirp- ings which, after the rain, burst forth like a chorus from beasts, birds, and insects, this solitary voice of human woe went on exclaiming "Barbara! Hour after hour it kept ringing like a funeral-bell as if to waken the dead at mid- night for resurrection before morning, and its one and only summons was "Barbara!" Conquering all other noises it covered the whole island, penetrated the thicket, echoed through the Hermit's Chapel, and made the very roof re-echo the name "Barbara!" O the piercing power of a human voice with an agonizing soul behind it lending anguish to its cry! It vibrates through the earth and goes quivering up to Heaven! It is the chosen message-bearer of those distressed spirits whom God cannot help avenging because they "cry unto him day and night." , L At last the voice that shouted "Barbara!" stole into Barbara's ears as she slept; yet it waked her not, but only mingled with her dreams. She heard it whispering to her; she heard it pleading with her); she heard it beseeching her; she heard it rebuking her; she heard it commanding her; -.8 GOLGOTHA. 223 she heard it terrifying her. And then, amid groanings as of nightmare, she turned and writhed in her sleep. Once again, shooting like an arrow through the air, passed that swift and awful cry--"Barbara!" The sleeper heard it, and waking suddenly, sat up and looked round, blinded by the dazzling light. "Where am I?" she cried, rubbing her swollen eyes with her swollen hands. "This strange daylight-what is it? What golden fires! Am I awake, or do I dream? These creeping things-why do they dazzle me so?. And flying about? What are they? They fill the whole cabin!-They are all over the ship!-They are on my hands-my feet- my head!' Where is my father? O father, take them away! Is that a snake? See how green it is! It is crawling into a corner of the state-room! How did it ever get into the Coromandel? O dear father, come quick!" Brushing the night-films from her eyes, and perceiving the skulls, she was stung by the remembered and ghastly spectacle into complete consciousness, and leaping to her feet she clasped her hands to her temples and shrieked, "O heaven, I am in the charnel-house!-I am in my grave!-I am dead!" She fell to the earthen floor in a s oon, and lay lifeless on the cool, damp ground-clay to clay-dust to dust. Meanwhile, over the low hills, a fying voice rose fainter and further in the distance, until its repeated shriek became a dull call, then a muffled moan, and finally a far-off mur- mur, but always the one vain cry-"Barbara!" page: 224-225[View Page 224-225] CHAPTER XIII. FOUNDED ON A ROCK. ARBARA'S parents, after leaving her to wander at her sweet'will through the solitary isle-little dreaming that their daughter's first day on the green earth was to end in a hideous night, in a charnel-house, among dead men's skulls,-slowly crossed in the ferry-basket, one at a time, from the shore to the ship. No sooner had they both descended into the cabin than Jezebel, who missed Barbara, demanded the cause of her absence, and on being informed, was filled with alarm and solicitude. The more the father-and mother attempted to pacify the old nurse, the more she expressed her disapproval of their parental laxity; until at last, with superior grandmotherly authority, she flatly countermanded the dangerous permis- sion which they had given to their vagrant child. "Massa Vail," exclaimed that rarely-worried woman, "'taint right fop our dear lamb to be agwine off alone into strange pastures. Dere is danger in dis strayin' from de flock-dis wanderin' from de fold. We must go after de lost one. Ole Bel is agwine to start right away. Massa Vail, put me into de basket, and tote me ashore. De Lord wont let de rope break dis time. He knows ole Bel is agwine after Barbara. Beaver, you ole rheumatiz, come along. What's de good book say? ' Widout are dogs.' Now how can dogs be widout, if dey stay all de time in de cabin, on a rug, fas' asleep? Come, ole lazy bones, let's go and find our dear lamb." The old woman's energy and will, her determination to go, r!UUAsDE VA A K viv. and her instinct that some peril would otherwise befall Bar- bara, impelled both Dr. Vail and his wife to join Jezebel in the search, though they did not consider Barbara exposed to any harm. All threes left the ship and went ashore. It was Jezebel's first step on the land for many a year, and her clumsy feet waddled like a duck's. Beaver, who did not ride in the basket, but swam in his semi-native element, circumspectly avoided the crabs, shook himself dry, and trudged along with the other travelers. At first, they strolled about without anxiety, hardly look- ing for Barbara, whom they expected to meet suddenly at any moment. They devoted their attention to the wonders of tropical vegetation. 'Dis aint like de ole Pritchard farm," said Jezebel. "Nobody's been attendin' to de fences; nobody's been a hoin' de garden; nobody's been a pullin' up de weeds. Everyt'ing is runnin' wild. Dere aint no place Ifor to put your foot down widout treadin' on de tender leaves and wines. What's de good book say? De Lord into His garden comes- De lilies yield deir rich perfumes.1 But dar aint no lily here like Barbara. Whar's dat sun- flower a hiding her bright face?" Dr. Vail was just then thinking, not of Barbara's face, but of the eleven skulls. Mary," said he, " in the bloody days when nations were mere flocks of sheep born to be led to the slaughter, Tamer- lane in Asia built monuments of gory heads-to fester, bleach, and grin in honor of his name. Montezuma reared in Mexico a pyramid terraced with the heads of his slain foes. How singular that these two conquerors-one in the Orient, the other in the Occident-separated by a great gulf of time and history-should each, in ignorance of the other, have commemorated their butcheries by piles of human heads! Now, in comparison with these ancient millions of decapa -n page: 226-227[View Page 226-227] 226 TEMPEST-TOSSED. itated men, how insignificant in number are the few skulls in the Hermit's Chapel. Nevertheless, we take a more pathetic interest in the death of one man than of half an army. The eleven skulls in our Golgotha affect me more tenderly than if I had seen Tamerlane's monument or Mon- tezuma's pyramid. The dumb occupants of our charnel- house seem to me more alive than dead.". "OO Rodney," exclaimed Mary, shuddering, "I have been in dread of them ever since I saw them this morning. They are before me whichever way I look. I can see them open their eyes-I can hear them rattle their jaws and grind their teeth. They fill me with horror." "And yet," remarked Rodney, "you gave Barbara a lesson from Hamlet's speech on Yorick's skull." "Yes," replied the teacher, " the skull is fascinating in the play, but noisome in the reality." "But," said Rodney, "Yorick's skull was more interesting to Hamlet in one sad moment, than Yorick's wit had been in a merry lifetime." "When I die," remarked Mary, "let me be buried deep in the earth, and not left t9 waste to a skeleton above it." Dr. Vail put forth various conjectures to account for the skulls, but could not explain the problem satisfactorily either to his own mind or to Mary s: she thought that the eleven victims had been martyrs of the church; but he was inclined to regard them as pirates of the high seas. The truth was that among the early Spaniards, in the West Indies a custom prevailed of inscribing the skulls of their dead with requests for prayers for their departed souls. The skulls, thus marked, were deposited in some sacred resort and exposed to the pious pity of passers-by, who, on reading the inscriptions, might perhaps be moved to beseech heaven to grant the departed souls a safe passage through purgatory to paradise. - Stevens, the traveler in Central America, found charnel-houses containing the skulls of Spaniards arranged and inscribed in the same fantastic way as in the Hermit's Chapel. 1 $ ru J Y eU J 1J- V1N aX aVdoS The bleached occupants of this antique structure were Spaniards of the early West India colonization, who, dying in the faith of a purgatorial fire, and of a prayerful rescue therefrom, now begged of Dr. Vail "an Ave Maria and a Paternoster, for God's sake." Probably not for a century had any human being saluted this little congregation of the dead in their solitude until Rodney Vail broke in upon their rest. "What sad, silent Pharisees they are," he exclaimed, "forever praying, to be seen of men. Let us hope that the unconscious and innocent hypocrites have not been neglected of God." The buccaneers of the Caribee Islands, being mainly French, were of the same religion with their enemies, the Spaniards. The French buccaneers and the Spanish settlers, living always at war with each other, frequently captured not only one another's marketable goods, such as the gold of Panama, the pearls of Cumana, and the boucan of San Domingo, but also each other's church-bells, crossest pictures, altar-cloths, and other sacred gauds. With these trophies the Brethren of the Coast built chapels for their pious hours in various out-of-the-way places on the islands. Some of the buccaneers have left enviable reputations for devout strictness in the faith. For instance, Captain Saw- kins threw overboard all dice which he saw in use on Sun- days. Captain John Watling compelled his jovial crew to keep the solemn feasts of the church. Captain De Montro rose during a chapel service, drew his pistol on a drunken sailor who was disturbing it, shot him dead, ordered the corpse to be immediately removed from the holy house, and had the reverent satisfaction of seeing the service proceed with heightened solemnity to the end. Thus was religion re- spected in those islands! "Shall we walk to the Hermit's Chapel?" asked Rodney. "No," replied his shrinking wife, with a shudder, "let us never enter it again!" page: 228-229[View Page 228-229] 228 TEMPEST-TOSSED. During this conversation, Jezebel had straggled behind- talking to herself, scolding Beaver, quoting scripture, pluck- ing fruits, and looking for Barbara. Dr. Vail and Mary, wandering by pathless paths, found themselves climbing a gentle hillock on whose slope they were entangled in a thicket of trees and vines. "Our underbrush needs trimming," remarked Rodney. Old Bel, who was panting, and endeavoring to clear her garments from the clutch of briars, exclaimed, "Lawks a-massy! What's de good book say? 'A ram shall be caught in de thicket.' Now yer's de thicket, but whar's de ram? But, O Lord, nebber mind de ram-jist gib me back my lost lamb." Mary stopped suddenly, and clung timorously to her hus- band's arm. "Look," said she, pointing between the dense trees, "yonder is another weather-beaten and desolate house. It is another burial-vault. Let us go back." "No," replied her husband, "let us go forward; there would be but one burial-place in so small an island. Here is probably a human habitation; the other was for the dead, this for the living." It was a small house, not unlike the other, though not so large, and had no cross or other ornament over the door. "My dear husband," exclaimed his timorous wife, with an earnest appeal in her look, " do not enter this strange house." Rodney, without making a reply, advanced to the door- step. No lock was on the door, nor fastening of ny kind; and instead of a knob, there was a richly ornamen ed brass handle covered with mould-which Rodney conjectured to have been the handle of a sea-chest. "I shall try to enter," said he. Pushing the door with his hand, it grated harshy on rusty hinges, not breaking off like the other, and swung open with a groan, disclosing the antique interior of a small, low dwell- ing-house. FOUNDED ON A ROCK. . 229 The first impression of the venturesome intruder was one of surprise at seeing variously-colored lights streaming into the house through stained-glass windows. "This also must be a chapel," said he. A closer scrutiny showed that the windows were composed of figured panes which evidently were fragments of what had once been the great window of some church or cathedral in another part of the world. This original window had been broken to pieces, and some of its brilliant bits been brought hither for re-setting in three of thei four walls of this little house. The miscellaneous jumble lIst here all its ecclesias- tical meaning, but presented a kaleidoscopic medley of many lustrous lights. On the wall that had no window was a grotesque and highly-colored image of the Blessed Virgin, that evidently had neverbeen a church ornament, but only a ship's figure-head. There was a solid floor of lignum vitae, laid at some dis- tance above the ground, so that the timbers had not rotted. Among the objects scattered about the room were a few chairs of fantastic pattern, each unlike the others; a round table of European workmanship; and a solid chest inlaid with brass. Dr. Vail then noticed that adjoining this main apartment were two small chambers, each opening into it through a narrow door, on either side of the Virgin's image. These two chambers had each a window of stained glass, contain- ing more of the unmeaning but glittering fragments of the same cathedral design. In each chamber was a quaint, narrow bedstead made of brass rods, designed to be folded and carried away in small compass. On the wall of each chamber was a crucifix, with a foot- stool under it for a prie-dieu. The interior of the main room, though mouldy and damp, and evidently very old, showed no/ token of decay, and. being lighted with rays borrowing their hues from churchly glass, was picturesque and weird. page: 230-231[View Page 230-231] 230 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "This sparkling glass," said Rodney, "looks as if some stately temple had been broken to pieces on purpose to furnish these walls with these gay shreds and patches just to glitter here in a most admired disorder." "How strange!" exclaimed Mrs. Vail. "This house has been the abode of some pious Catholic family, probably Spaniards. Their dead were buried in the other structure; the living dwelt here-making their dwelling-house their chapel. My dear Rodney, all homes should be dedicated to the same pious use, for the Apostle says, ' Commend me to the church that is in thine house.' I thought I should dread to enter this place, but I am charmed to be here." Mrs. Vail was almost as delighted at seeing a human habitation as if it had contained a human inhabitant. The impression previously left on her mind by the scene in the charnel-house was now effaced completely by the solemn beauty-the dim, religious light-of this unexpected abode. Jezebel, who from the moment of entering had not said a word, but gazed stolidly at the garish surroundings as if entertaining a Cromwellian disdain for such sacred finery, discovered an object more interesting to her curious mind. "What's dat?" she exclaimed. "Why sure as you're born; dat's a chist. Den I must rummage it. What's de good book say? 'Man looketh at de outward appearance, but de Lord looketh at de heart.' Dat means, man looks at de outside, but de Lord at de inside. Now ole Bel aint agwine to foiler no man, but only de Lord." Whereupon the dusky dame, who had early established a monopoly of such explorations on the ship, tried to open the chest.- Like the doors of the house, the lid was unlocked; there was a 0lock on it, but no key; the hinges were rusty; nevertheless, after a little tugging and straining by Jezebel, assisted by Rodney, the strong, box was opened. "Now jist look!" cried Bel. "What's de good book say? 'Dere's noffin hidden dat shall not be revealed.' Look! see!" The three spectators peered with curious eyes into the ancient box. FOUNDED ON A ROCK. 231 The contents consisted, first, of a wicker-case of wine- bottles filled with wine, waxed and wired about the neck, showing that they had been carefully sealed; next, a few sacred articles used to decorate a-Roman Catholic altar, together with a rosary of beautiful beads and an illuminated breviary; finally, a small bundle of manuscripts on stiff paper, resembling parchment or some other dried skin. "If wine," said Rodney, "improves with age, this is ancient enough to be good." "These papers," observed Mary, turning over the manu- scripts, "1 may possibly tell us the story of the island." On examination, the records were found to be not Spanish but French-old French, which it was difficult for Mrs. Vail to decipher accurately, although she made out that the entries were accounts of merchandise bought and sold- chiefly of boucan and hides. "What book is this?" said she, opening a breviary. "This fly-leaf is covered with the same handwriting. It is the same language. The paper is stained, and the letters are faded with age." . "Can you make out this inscription?" inquired Rodney. "I can, in part," replied his wife, "enough perhaps to guess the rest." They put their two heads together, and finally deciphered the quaint record, which may be freely translated as fol- lows: "I, Francois Garcelon, brother of the Brethren of the Coast, having lost by death my beloved comrade Manuel de Brayere, and peace having been declared between France and her enemies, and being myself in great age and desiring to lay my bones in Brittany, hereby bequeath my house, and whatsoever goods and chattels I shall leave therein, to the Brethren of the Coast, to be awarded by them to some brother thereof, who shall comply with the conditions hereunto annexed; the same being, first-that he is poor and needy-and second, that he shall say daily an Ave and a Paternoster for this testator's soul. ( ANO DOMNI, 1693. Signed, Day of St. Agnes, ( FRANqOIS GARCELON, aged 71 years." page: 232-233[View Page 232-233] 232 TEMPEST-TOSSED. After reading the above, and pondering it long, Rodney remarked, "There is nothing in this document to explain the skulls. The paper is French-the skulls Spanish. What connection had this Frenchman with those Spariards?" "The Brethren of the Coast," saiC Mary, " were probably an order like the Dominicans or Franciscans, and this old man was one of their priests." "No," answered Rodney, " the Brethren of the Coast are well known to have been buccaneers." "Was the old hermit, then, a pirate?" asked Mary, with a sudden shock to her religious preconception of that vener- able man. "No," replied Rodney, "he was a buccaneer-one of those who practised meat-curing, not man-killing." Mrs. Vail's disappointment at her hermit's not having been one of the fathers of the chbirch was visible in her pious face. "As to the two buildings," said her husband, " they were probably constructed by the Spaniards, who used one for a priest's house, and the other for a chapel. The buccaneers then captured the island, and kept the priest's house for a sufficient chapel, turning the real chapel into a store-house for their packed meats, and leaving the death's-heads undis- turbed in it to be sentinels of security against superstitious and God-fearing thieves." Dr. Vail, by the help of old Garcelon's papers, thus came to a correct solution of the mystery of the island and its hermitage. "Rodney," said Mary beseechingly, " let us change our abode from the ship to this house. We have lived on the sea long enough; let us try the land." ' "Yes," chimed in Jezebel, who stood in mortal dread of being drawn back to the Coromandel in a basket-a contin- gency at which she quaked more than she would have done at the circumnavigation of the globe. "Yes," said she, giving a more Anglo-African and less Puritanic look at the FOUNDED ON A ROCK. 233 stained glass, "let's camp down in dis pink-ribbon place. What's de good book say? ' Dis is de Lord's house-dis is de gate ob hebben to our souls.' Let's find Barbara and show her dis spangled home." "How delighted," exclaimed Rodney, "our daughter will be at this brilliant glass-these red, these green, these purple panes!" "Yes," said Mary quietly, "and to be in a house-an actual, solid house-and on the land too-this will be to Barbara the joy of joys!" The rain that had been threatening during these investi- gations, and that already began to fall before the travelers noticed the gathering of the clouds, now startled Dr. Vail, and he rushed out of the house to find Barbara. He looked for her, near and far; he called her, loud and long; he sought for her over the whole island. He retraced his steps to the house to see if she had accidentally found it in his absence. But she had not. Thinking then that she might have gone to the ship, he hastened thither, and went on board, but saw the great hulk for the first time utterly deserted of all occupants save himself. "No, she is not here!" he exclaimed, and he hurried back again in the basket to the shore. Sallying forth ini a renewed search, he was soon overtaken by the twilight and then by the night. Wherever he went, he lifted up his voice and shouted "Barbara!" The cry, had there been ears to hear it, could have been heard a mile away. Why does she not answer me? ' he asked. "She can- not be beyond hearing;-she must be in some peril." Twice he returned to the house during the night, but each time hastened forth again into the darkness, to seek but not to find. "O Barbara, my daughter, my daughter, what has hap- pened to you?" he cried, as he went agonizing over hill and rock. i Meanwhile Mary and Jezebel, at the house, were walking to and fro in indescribable grief, refusing to be comforted. page: 234-235[View Page 234-235] 234 TEMPEST-TOSSED. So, altogether, the first night which the various members ofethis little family spent on the much-coveted land, proved to be the most miserable hours of their whole lifetime. Such is the vanity of human expectations! But such disappoint- ments are inseparable from all human lives; for, to all who live, life itself is its own chief vanity. Meanwhile Barbara, who had wakened in the Hermit's Chapel amid the fire-flies and skulls, and who in fright had fallen to the ground in a swoon, was far too exhausted to rally immediately into wakefulness, and so glided out of her stupor into a natural sleep. She lay motionless in her strange, fire-lit chamber till the night had well-nigh waned. Beaver, meanwhile, too much exhausted for further tramp- ing with hiso master, and not comprehending the object of the tramp, lagged behind Rodney, and at last composed his aged limbs to rest under a tree-the only kennel of this sort which he had ever known. At length when the morning drew nigh, a young woman stood on a hill-top, fear-stricken and bewildered, bare-headed and haggard, before a streak of dawn had yet dimmed the stars,--gazing intently toward the gloomy sea, waiting for light enough to discover her way to the ship. It was Barbara!-poor agonized Barbara!-to whom the world, which she had long sought and at last found, had in a few hours cruelly belied all her life-long expectations, and turned her promised delights into woes. At the same hour, at a little distance off, a man with iron- gray hair was picking his way up the same hill, crackling onward through the branches, his garments wet, his hat lost, his feet sore, his face pale, and his manner desperate. It was Barbara's father!-more distracted and haggard than herself. a In a moment they met: they met without a word, for neither could speak. They did not stop to look into each other's eyes; they simply threw their arms around each other's neck and wept. FOUNDED ON A ROCK. WD There they stood, clasped heart to heart. Not among all the twinkling lights that glowed upon them from the sky, was there a more heavenly fire than burned within those two human breasts, melting both ;-the one with paternal, the other with filial love. Each had loved the other for a lifetime, but neither had ever felt-not even during the brief struggle overboard-the full force of Nature's tie between them, until this last prolonged and horrible test. It was a mutual revelation. If the quality of mercy is twice blest, blessing both him that gives and him that takes, then the quality of love must be fourfold beatific, since each of two loving hearts not only gives but takes-not only takes but gives-each giving all, each taking all, and each to the other becoming all in all. At length Barbara, in excess of joy, her mind once more springing to-its natural sprightliness, exclaimed: "O father, I have for years chased a rainbow, following it round the world, hunting for the sack of gold that lies at its foot, but I have now found a richer treasure in my father's love." Swift and hurried were the explanations between them, and they then started with weary yet jocund feet to give joy to the lonely watchers in the ancient house. They reached this new home just as the dawn touched the east with purple-Barbara herself being the chief sunbeam that brought on the day. The rapturous greeting which the lost child received from her mother went to Barbara's heait with a sweet repetition of the joy she had experienced in her father's arms. Barbara had hitherto supposed that filial love had always, to its fullest possible measure, filled her heart; but she now felt for her parents a passionate devotion which for depth, intensity and irresistible power was superior to any emotion of this kind that she had heretofore known. She rebuked herself for having lived so long without nourishing this beautiful flower to its utmost bloom. page: 236-237[View Page 236-237] 236 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "I have been a wicked child to cause you so much trouble," said the guiltless penitent caressing her mother, " but I shall now love you better than ever." She gave each of her parents a kiss from a full heart overflowing. "Only think," she exclaimed, "what I should have lost in losing you! What if either one of you had died! YTester- day morning I thought I had found the civilized world, and was full of delight ; but last night I lost you, and was driven mad. What would the whole earth, with all its riches and pleasures, with all its manifold opportunities,-what would all these be to me without you, my dear father and mother? O, I have just found out how precious you are-yes, and Jezebel too, and Beaver!" ' Whereupon she gave each of those old friends an affec- tionate salutation,-hiding herself in Jezebel's arms as the child was wont to do in her childhood. Barbara's experience of renewed love for her parents awoke. in them a renewed love for her. Heretofore they never had been parted from her for a day. Never, until yesterday, had she been a ship's length from them in her life-not even when overboard. They seldom knew what it was to leave. her a half-hour out of sight, and never a moment out of call. The sense of parting with her had heretofore been unknown to them. True, they had sometimes fancied her possible sickness and death, and had dreamed unquietly of witnessing hel burial, but they had never before had their hearts wrung by any continuous sense of peril to their darling's life. They now had a real experience of what it would be to lose her. They had seen each other's faces ghastly white at her night-long absence. They had shuddered at a storm which they knew was beating somewhere on her unpro- tected head. They had faced the horrible fact that she was a lost wanderer beyond the reach of their sheltering care. They had thus suffered a new grief over Barbara, and as a consequence took more joy in their daughter than ever. , By a strange law of divine compensation for human suf- fering, it is ohly they who pass through the utmost severity of pain that attain the chief felicity of peace. "Barbai," said her mother, "we are going to quit the ship and live here. Look around. Heaven, you see, has beneficently provided for us a comfortable house. Shall we reject this blessing? No, let us accept it with gratitude. This has been once a Christian home-we can make it so again." Barbara surveyed the premises with the air of a newly- crowned princess who is asked how she likes a rich ancestral estate to which she has fallen heir. "It is very beautiful," said she, " and the windows look like Madame D'Arblay's kaleidoscope." To Barbara the stained glass, the rich dark wood, the carved chairs, the romantic history, and above all a house-an actual home-and on land-seemed a realization of one of life's promised pleashres; and the idea of dwelling in this quaint house was a delight that she seized upon as she would have clutched at some golden butterfly to which she had long given chase. Barbara immediately restored to its pedestal in her mind her original high opinion of the world, which since yesterday had been an idol overthrown. With alacrity she seconded her mother's proposition for housekeeping- particularly in a house with purple-glass windows-a vine-clad home among the trees. "Yes," exclaimed Barbara with pride, " now that we have a country, let us have a country-seat." "First," said Rodney, " let us have our breakfast!" Aunt Bel, who had relished yesterday's healthy havoc among the pine-apples and plaintains, had already quietly stolen out of the house and brought back a bounteous armful of dewy-cool and new-plucked fruit. "I aint agwine to cook no breakfast dis yer mornin," said she. "1What's de good book say? cDey shall bring forth fruits, some sixty, some seventy, and some a hundred page: 238-239[View Page 238-239] 238 TEMPEST-TOSSED. fold.' Now folks haint always got so much as dat to bring forth. But de good Lord 'cables us to bring forth fruits in Script'ral 'bundance dis blessed day." Then, with happy hearts, the re-assembled -family, having spread their luxuries on the ancient table, sat down to their first repast in their new home. As they partook of Nature's fresh bounties, just. gathered from her wild garden, they thought gratefully of the-Giver of every good and perfect gift. Mrs. Vail, amid the many-colored lights of an oriel- mirrored morning, said that the scene seemed ecclesiastical and sacred. "It is like a church," she repeated. This similitude was the more striking because the little company sat like worshippers at the feet of the Holy Virgin -Barbara being, in her father's eyes, the comelier virgin of the two. "If," observed Rodney, after the feast was ended, " if you all decide to tarry here, rather than on the ship, for the next few days, or until I can build a boat for a voyage of discovery to the next island, I will bring ashore some of our goods and chattels to equip this ancient domain with some appurtenances of modern comfort." Dr. Vail's ferry-basket, in pursuance of this suggestion, ran back and forth a dozen or twenty times between ship and shore, importing (free of duty) all the articles which Mary and Barbara deemed essential for their domestic economy-such as knives and forks, cups and plates, table- cloths and towels, beds and mattresses, together with a few cans of meats. "We are busier than the bees," said Barbara, who had been noticing those honey-thieving creatures, and who thought their occupation of flying from flower to flower rather an idleness than a toil. Dr. Vail, with Barbara's assistance, but amid Beaver's grumblings, transferred from the ship as many needful arti- cles as he could land during the long forenoon and before the probable mid-day rain. FOUNDED ON A ROCK. 239 Such running to and fro, such rolling up of pillow-cases and sheets, such getting in each other's way, such jesting at each other's mistakes, indeed such a general frolic, Barbara had never known in her life before, and she enjoyed it as a Frenchwoman enjoys a revolution. The maiden's face glowed with animation. Her parents had never seen her so beautiful as on that day. She had been lost and found.' She stood re-glorified in their admir- ing eyes. Beaver, however, remained a malcontent through the whole tumultuous scene, for he was very old, and was as much opposed to innovations as to crabs. He whined not a little, and grew so peevish that Barbara gently boxed his ears,-giving him just such a love-tap as a certain young sailor on a Federal gunboat would gladly have accepted in the dog's stead, from the lady's hand. "Dis house," said Jezebel, "will keep us safe and sound. What's de good book say? ' Dere shall be a tabernacle in de day time from de heat, and a covert from de storm and de rain.' Massa Vail sometimes tink we are de lost tribes ob de chillen ob Israel, 'cause nobody else 'cep de Lord knows where to find us." The noon came and brought its shower, but the busy family were safely ensconced under their sheltering roof, with their household gods ranged about them in an antique temple. Dr. Vail, in portioning out the house to its occupants, said, "Mary and I will take the large room, Barbara the left- hand chamber, and Jezebel the right." "It's jist like kittens in a cream cupboard," said Jezebel. "It's de richness ob life put right under our wery nose. What's de good book say? ' In my Fader's house am many mansions."' " "I feel the lack," said Barbara, "of the ship's motion under my feet. I wish this house would roll 'and toss a little, just enough to seem natural. But that might rattle out the beautiful windows! O, how brilliant they are! It page: 240-241[View Page 240-241] 240 TEMPEST-TOSSED. is like looking through the gauze of butterflies' wings! I wonder how the moonlight would look shining through them! I am impatient for the night to come. There is a young moon. It will rise early, so I shall be awake to see it. These painted panes, I think, must show the same colors that shine in the lovely poem of St. Agnes' Eve. I wonder if the moonlight will stream through them for me as it did for Madeline?" At last the night came, and Mrs. Vail said, "There! we did not think to bring any lamps." "Never mind," replied Barbara, " keep the door open and the lamps will come flying in of themselves." Just then, as if to fulfil the word to the letter, in came, driven by the freshening breeze, a little squad of three fire-flies traveling together. They flew about the room awhile, and finally lighted on the Virgin's image, giving as much light as if consecrated andles had been burning on a church-altar. Then more of these weird insects stragglgd in, settling quietly on various objects until they illumined the room as with astral flames. ; Mary Vail opened her Bible, and by the strangest light that ever enabled her to scan its familiar pages (for it bur- nished them with a mild shimmer of gold and green), she read aloud the following passage : Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence? If - I ascend into heaven, Thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,'even there shall Thy hand guide me and Thy right hand shall hold me. - Even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness and the light are both alike to Thee. "Father," said Barbara, at the close of the reading, as he sat on the old chest, his head leaning on his hand, " what are you thinking of so profoundly? "I am reminded," said he, "that seventeen years ago, on the last night that your mother and I spent in our native land, and before you were born, old Grandfather Pritchard FrUUlN LLJ, UN A RUCK. 241 opened the family Bible and read aloud to us those same words. How well I remember that evening! On the next Horning we went to Boston and sailed on the long, long voyage which has only just come to an end." "Yes," replied Mary, pleased "with the reminiscence, "jI too was thinking of that same evening-so I turned to the same passage." "Yes, chillen," said Jezebel, "de word ob de Lord is de same yesterday, to-day, and foreber. It is de same on de Pritchard farm as on de isles ob de sea. It is de same from generation to generation. How wonderful de Lord is to de chillen of men! It is de Lord dat took care ob our ship on de great deep. It is de Lord dat hab fed us as Elijah fed de ravens in de wilderness. It is de Lord dat hab rolled up for us, on de right han' and on de leff, de walls ob Jordan, and dat hab brought us to de dry lan'. What's de good book say? "Cept de Lord build de house, dey labor in vain dat build it.' So let us say in de blessed words ob de Psalmist, selah! amen!" By the light of the fire-flies, the little --company, sitting in different attitudes about the room, presented a picturesque appearance. Rodney had stretched himself on the floor, resting his head on Beaver for a pillow-a familiar attitude both for man and dog. Barbara sat in a grotesquely carven chair, its arms terminating in griffin's claws, each talon clasping a round ball; and in the intervals of the conversa- tion she watched the luminous insects whose light made a strange struggle with the light of the rising moon, as if the two splendors tried to oitdo each other. Mrs. Vail pored silently over the book from which she had been reading aloud, and went on her way still further through the green pastures and by the still waters of the sacred page. Jezebel sat thinking of Pete, her face glowing in the light of the glqw-worms, till it shone like some huge animated bronze, or 'as if the statue of Memnon had been touched at night with the rays of morn. At length the company dispersed to their rooms. page: 242-243[View Page 242-243] 242 TEMPEST-TOSSED. As Barbara entered hers and closed the door, her heart beat with a strange delight. s This is a palace of enchantment," said she. That night, for the first time in her life, she was to sleep in a dwelling-house I The room was, to her, a royal chamber. It was filled with beautiful rays of light, though she did not see the most beautiful of them all-for these beamed from her sparkling eyes. The window, with its many-colored panes, seemed to invite St. Agnes to peep through it and to invade the pure maid's dreams. But how could she dream unless she could sleep, and how could she sleep while a certain far-off prince and ideal hero held vigil in her mind? For who, at once, can love and rest?" So Barbara lay wakeful and wistful v Occasionally she lifted her fair arm into a slanting ray of purple or green light, to see the beams break and mend on her rounded and glowing flesh. As she turned restlessly on her pillow, her long loose golden tresses seemed floating in a sea of rainbows. The coverlid, that hid her under its fleece, was smitten with prismatic rays, till it became span- gled like a high priests breast-plate. In the midst of this midnight and moonlit splendor, Bar- bara watched and gazed until weariness brought sleep. Then at a charmed moment in her dream, there stole into the chaste chamber of her mind a young Porphyro whose name she never spoke aloud in her waking hours, but whom in her tell-tale slumbers she now saluted with a soft sigh, murmuring-"Philip! s CHAPTER XIV. GREEN PASTURES , AND STILL WATERS. N the next morning, Rodney Vail rose before the dawn, and hastened through the dew-wet vines and grass to the covey to see whether the .Coromandel was safe and sound. His habit for years past had been to go on deck at this hour, in order to examine by the earliest light whether the water-drag was in its place-whether the hanging anchor had found bottom-whether the wind had changed- whether a ship was passing-whether there would be any hunting or fishing that day-whether the psumps testified to a leak-or whether there was a prospect of reaching land. On this morning, he found himself once again following his familiar habit of looking after the Coromandel at day- break. A few swift glances satisfied him that the ship had not been disturbed, for she was lying in tranquil solitude, like a sleeper that did not mean to stir, even though the morning had come. Her master's most anxious vigil now was to sweep the horizon with his weather-glass in hope of sighting a sail. "I am in the West Indies," said he, "and am therefore surrounded by commercial seas." Inspired by a lively hope of hailing a vessel, he made his way to the summit of a hill commanding a wide horizon of dawn-lit water. He gazed with keen eyes, long and sadly. No ship was in sight save the Coromandel. The atmosphere was clear, having been purified of haze by the recent rains. page: 244-245[View Page 244-245] ,44 I ,244 TEMPEST-TOSSED. The adjacent islands, which yesterday seemed a long dis- tance off, had now tfloated a league nearer, and their former blue had turned to green. A few others of the group, not seen before, now lifted their tiny heads above the great deep. The nearest island of all seemed to the naked eye almost within cannon range. The weather-glass, which brought it still nearer, revealed a swelling hill clad with shining green, and a sandy coast fringed with white foam. ' "If yonder isle," said he, " is as nigh as it seems, it can- not be larger than Grandfather Pritchard's garden-it is a i mere handful of sand and grass; nevertheless it is large enough to have a few human beings dwelling on it. I will signal it, and wait for a response." Dr. Vail's idea was to cut a tall slender staff-perhaps a bamboo or cane (if the island would afford one)-and to erect it on this hill, in order to keep a flag flying. "After I have done this," said he, "perhaps I shall not need to build a boat , my signal may be followed by imme- diate succor; nevertheless as I have always had small suc- cess in trusting to my hopes, I shall begin my boat-building without delay. If after my boat is finished, I find no occasion to use it, so much the better. May heaven send to me with flying speed some human neighbor in this green world." Whereupon, in the cool morning air, which the laggard sun had not yet made sultry, Dr. Vail walked with elastic steps toward the house, meditating a model for a skiff. "No eggshell, said he, will answer for my craft; she ought to be tough aud strong-these are dangerous coasts. Well, here are lignum-vitve trees, crooked as ram's horns- these will give me knee-joints. But no, they are as hard as iron, and will break the edge of my axe. Besides, they would be green, and I need seasoned wood. I must cut it, then, from the Coromandel. The good old ship, like a mother to her offspring, will not begrudge bone of her bone for a small boat to be built out of her hull. But it will be tough work to get her timbers apart and put them together vIvM^An rAn V Kitvo AINIre lIAJL WAAIIh O. DDEJ again. After all, why do I need such heavy stuff? The binnacle is light-framed; I will knock that to pieces for materials. No, then the cabin would be exposed to rain- and perhaps we shall need our old shelter still. But on such a fair day as this, with the ocean as smooth as a lake, even a canoe would do for so short a voyage. Yes, I might almost paddle myself across on the trunk of a cocoa-palm." While evolving these plans, and rejecting each, he noticed a graceful wreath of blue smoke curling over the tops of the trees in the direction of the house. "That smoke," he said musingly, "reminds me of my early days-it takes me back to Salem farm-it is a cottage- fire." On approaching nearer, he found that Jezebel had made a fire, not in the house, as he imagined, but out-of-doors, on some large stones, and was roasting plantains and preparing some other luxuries for the little family's morning repast. - Barbara ran forth to meet her father, saluting him with more music in her voice than Jephtha's daughter sounded from her timbrel. i "What a beautiful morning!" she exclaimed. "The air is sweeter than we have ever known it on board the ship. It is cool and delicious." Barbara was not the first discoverer of that exquisite climate. Columbus himself, when he landed in Trinidad-not many miles, away--found the air so balmy that- he compared it with the enchanting spring-time in beautiful Valencia. The same climate has continued in those sunny isles ever since, perpetuating itself from age to age. Even in dog- days, when the sun at noon is pitiless, the nights and mornings, with their heavy dews and sea-breezes, are so full of refreshing coolness that the traveler finds in this region the chief luxury which the midsummer can anywhere afford -a wish to button his coat about him against a genial chill. The ancient Ophir, from which Solomon procured the gold 4 page: 246-247[View Page 246-247] 246 TEMPEST-TOSSED. for the Temple at Jerusalem, was once supposed to be in this same quarter; and this belief has still one shining evidence of its credibility in the fact that the skies there are even more golden than gold. "Yes, exclaimed Rodney, "think of the heats that we suffered in crossing the line, when the tar between the ship's seams melted in the sun, and now the morning air is like an April day in our northern home. This is the bland and beautiful climate that led the first voyagers of the Spanish Main to locate the Garden of Eden among these isles." After the little family partook of their fruity breakfast, Dr. Vail and Barbara, who were eager for adventure, left Mary in Jezebel's care-for the invalid needed a long day's rest and ease-and sallied forth to explore the island. "1 Come this way, father," said Barbara, taking him by the hand and leading him with amiable wilfulness out of the course on which he had started. "The foliage is thickest yonder. Let us go straight into the heart of our garden. Show me the trees, the flowers, the birds, and tell me their names. First of all let us find the robin red-breast, that covered the babes in the wood with leaves; and then-0O what next?-how many things I want to see!-I want to see the chamois leaping from rock to rock-yes, and the mistletoe bough, like the one in the story of Ginevra-and the zebra with his beautiful stripes-and the black glossy raven croaking among the old elms-and the dear gazelle with its soft black eye- and the silk-worm that made Madame D'Arblay's green dress-and the white elephant swinging hi! trunk, picking off the sweet blossoms to eat- and the tea-plant that mother wants us so much to find- and the primrose, violet, daisy- yes, and the squirrel--0, I want above all things to see a squirrel!" Dr. Vail smiled at his daughter's ignorant and impossible wishes, which she sent forth naively to the four quarters of the earth, and which for their fulfillment would have required all its climates and seasons to be present at a moment's no- tice on one spot, !g GREEN PASTURES AND STILL WATERS, 247 1 4 "My daughter," said he, "you would need to search through many lands to find all that you expect to see; and even if you could take the journey, life itself would not be long enough to show you the complete pageant." Barbara's spirit had now caught all the brightness of the sky. She had braver put her disappointnients and agonies behind her, and h9 set her face once more toward-the sun- shine, as in the days of her childhood. The soul's wounds quickly heal under the double magic of youth and hope. On this new and fresh morning she was fresher than the morning itself, and was as gay and brilliant as if her life were without a cross and her heart without a pang. Once again "The world was all before her, where to choose." Now that eager Barbara was walking in the woods, what particular trees did she expect to find in that little grove? She had read, while on the mid-ocean, of the proud forests that green the great Earth's face. They had shaken their stately tops in her fancy many a time. Often had she con- jured before her mind's eye the cedars of Lebanon, shading to this day their sacred mountain with the self-same branches under which the patriarchs and prophets sat of old. So, too, she had reveled in visions of the bread-fruit tree of Otaheite, with its nutritious loaf as large as a child's head; of the traveler's-tree of Madagascar, catching the rain inits basin of leaves, and keeping it cool for the thirsty pilgrim in the dry season; of the cypress of the Mediterranean, funereal and poetic; of the palm of Sahara, ripening its dates under a sun so pitiless that no other green thing can live ; of the boabab of Abyssinia, beloved by negroes and bees; of the weeping-tree of the Canaries, distilling showers under a clear sky; of the nutmeg-groves of Ceylon, scenting the air afar off with their spice; of the dragon-tree of Teneriffe, as old as the sun and rain; of the upas of Japan, in whose poisonous boughs birds perch and drop dead, and in whose shade a maiden who walks bareheaded shall see her tresses fall out hair by hair ;---Barbara had read of all these and many other page: 248-249[View Page 248-249] 248 - TEMPEST-TOSSED. wonderful growths of all zones ; and she now had a dreamy expectation of seeing all this scattered verdure of many lands gathered into the greenness of one small isle. . . Beaver, walking with an occasional limp, and greatly fretted by a frequent briar, now joined the two strollers, who, after wandering among the short and crooked lignum- vitX trees in avain search for the mighty boabab and banyan, wended their way toward the Coromandel. "My daughter, come and make a voyage with me on a raft," said her father. Dr. Vail then explained to Barbara that when he previ- ously came to the ship that morning, he noticed that the tide had just begun to flow up the cove. It would be flowing in this direction for four or five hours more. This fact sug- gested to him the idea of extemporizing a raft to drift to the head of the cove, which was about a mile distant, and which there lost itself in a thick forest of flower-clad trees. "Let us sail up into yonder woods," said he. "Those trees have all the Hebrew luxuriance of ' willows by the water-courses.' I shall there cut a keel for my boat. I shall there get also a bundle of canes, and bind them together like the Roman fasces, to make a strong flag-staff for yonder hill-top." Dr. Vail emptied the water from four of his casks, turned them down on their sides, lashed them together. fastened the ship's forward hatch on them for a floor, and launched his clumsy but buoyant barge between the ship and the bank. - Before it was laden it drew about six inches of water, and was two feet above the surface. A boat-hock, a long oar, a rope, and an axe were put on board, together with a cane-chair for Barbara. , The fair Cleopatra then took her seat, and Beaver personated Marc Antony at her side. Dr. Vail stood in front, and, giving one push with the oar, dis- lodged the little argosy from the sandy edge of the cove, and they all went voyaging up the gentle stream. "O father," cried Barbara, who noticed how the trees on the banks kept gliding past, "the island is running away!" GREEN PASTURES AND STILL WATERS. 249 "It will not run so far," he replied, "but that we can catch it the moment we stop the chase." "How lovely!" exclaimed Barbara. "How strange- how enchanting!" The cove was fringed on both sides, east and west, with cocoa-nut trees, and as this green barricade had not yet been climbed by the morning sun, the narrow stream still lay in cool shadow. This silent estuary wound its salty way for a mile above the Coromandel, and being studded on either side by these slender-tufted columns of cocoa-palms, presented a picture strikingly architectural. "There are more cocoa-nut trees in the world," said Dr. Vail, "than there are human beings. These trees grow by the sea-side, and are like the sea-sands for multitude. Mil. lions of them border and beautify the great continent that lies to the south of us. How tall their trunks are! Yonder tufted shaft is as high and straight as a Maypole. The bark is ringed. Every year the two lower leaves drop off, scarring the place where they grew. Count two rings for a year and you can tell how old the tree is." i Barbara, lifting her forefinger, counted the rings of one of the trees, and replied, "A hundred and forty-that tree is seventy years old." "These cocoa-palms," said her father, "love to grow by the sea. Their nuts are born sailors. Look! one has just dropped into the water yonder--did you not hear the splash? See! the dancing thing is in the centre of those ripples. How it sails along with the tide! Every cocoa-nut has a thick husk which on one side is like a boat's keel. This is nature's device for sowing the sea-coast with cocoa-palms; for the nut, as soon as it drops into the water, goes sail- ing like a boat wherever wind. and tide will carry it. Sometimes it is cast up a thousand miles from where it grew, taking root in some sand-bar or barren beach, and propagating itself in new groves, always ready to offer its meat and milk to the castaway. The little globe of the page: 250-251[View Page 250-251] 250 TEMPEST-TOSSED. cocoa-nut is a world of itself; many a man has found in it his house and home." "How so?" exclaimed Barbara, frowning a gentle dis- credit on the tale. "Yes," remarked her father, "it is true. Capt. Bixby, who made voyages from Boston to Rio Janeiro-0, how long ago it seems!--it must be thirty years-told me when I was a boy a story of the cocoa-nut, and of the many uses to which men have put it. A pilgrim was ready to drop under the noonday sun and perish in the sand from heat, thirst, hunger, and fatigue. He then espied a little cabin, shaded by cocoa-palms. The surrounding region, far and near, was a desert stretching miles away on either hand. The fainting traveler, taking hope at the sight, made a last effort to walk, and dragged himself forward to this green spot of refuge. Hospitality awaited him at the hut. His host offered to his parched lips a cool, acid drink, tempered with sugar to the taste. Then a bounteous repast was speedily prepared, con- sisting of several kinds of white meats, with a vegetable something like cabbage-all neatly served on highly-polished dishes which were neither of porcelain nor clay, but of fibrous wood. A wine of pleasant flavor, and an abundance of sweet milk, enriched the repast. Comfits and a strong cordial tasting like brandy were added as dessert. The pil- grim, after refreshing himself with these unexpected deli- cacies, rose from the table of his kind host and begged leave to examine his cottage. Its walls were of durable wood ; its roof was of interwoven leaves ; its furniture was of many de- vices for convenience; its bed-chamber contained a swinging hammock ; its floor was softened with matting; and in one corner stood a writing-table, whereon lay parchments, pens, and an ink-horn, together with a lamp and cruise of oil ready for the night-as if the hut were the retired haunt of some scholar pursuing his studies remote from the world. But the chief novelty which the pilgrim admired was the strangely-woven garment worn by his host-a flexible and brownish fabric, harmonizing in color with the wearer's olive GREEN PASTURES AND STILL WATERS. G lJ complexion-as if the sun had tinged at the same time his j face and his dress. At length the traveler exclaimed, "What a beautiful home you have here in the desert! Many a camel must have brought you his burden of goods from afar, to supply you with so many comforts.' 'No,' replied the host, 'no camel's foot has ever trod this sand; I live apart from the highways of the desert; seldom does any human being stray into this isolated haunt.' 'How then,' asked the guest, 'could you bring hither the luxuries of so many climes?' ' All these things,' said the host, ' grew for me on my cocoa-paltms. These trees enabled me to build my cabin. Their leaves supplied its thatched roof. My chairs and tables were all cut from my grove. This hammock, these mats, this garment that I wear-all were made from the fibrous threads of the cocoa-leaves. My scrolls of parch- ment, my pens, my ink-these too are gifts to me from my bountiful trees. The cool acid drink which you quaffed on your arrival was the water of the unripe nut-and sometimes I have taken four pounds of water from a single nut. The milk which you relished-came from the nut when fully ripe. The nutritious white meats-which you thought to be of several different kinds-all came from the self-same tree; the variety arising from plucking the nuts at different stages of their growth. The cabbage was cut from the top leaves of the cocoa-tufts. The wine was the fresh juice that flows from the flower-stalks on plunging a knife through their tender rinds. The cordial was the same juice after passing through distillment in the sun. The sugar was extracted from this cordial. The dishes and goblets were nut-shells which I have cut into various patterns, and have polished in my leisure hours. My lamp-bowl was made of one of the largest shells; the oil too, which I shall burn to-night, is from the same creamy nut. In short, everything I possess comes from my cocoa-palms!' The pilgrim, after hearing this strange recital, thanked his host for such hospitality, and went on his way refreshed-not knowing which to ad- mire most, the prodigal wonders of Nature or the ingenious page: 252-253[View Page 252-253] i.52 TEMPEST-TOSSED. wit of man. Indeed," added Dr. Vail, on closing the nar- rative, "Nature is a kindly mother to us all, and like God Himself-whose other self she is-she seems unwilling that any- member of her human family should miserably perish, for she takes pains to support mankind in the most desert places, where not even a wild beast, nor a reptile, nor a creeping thing could dwell." Barbara, who had dipped her hand into the water and caught the floating cocoa-nut that -had fallen into the stream a few moments before, exclaimed as she surveyed its drip- ping husk, "Yes, father, you are right ; this round nut is God's little image of the great globe; and if I find that I am to be ex- cluded forever from the real world, I shall try to be a con- tented pigmy and live in a cocoa-nut shell." A bend in the cove now brought the voyagers to the head of it, where they found themselves amid a great variety of rank trees, bound together as an army of prisoners by a flowery cordage of vines running around their trunks and boughs. "How can a tree," asked Barbara, s bear so many differ- ent kinds of flowers on the same branch?" "It is not the trees," said he, " that bear these flowers ; it -is. the vines that run up to the tree-tops and there out- spread their blossoms to the sky." The two voyagers were now in the midst of a scene not extensive, but rich and ravishing. Fragrant vanillas drooped from^ the branches in graceful festoons. Variegated lianas twisted themselves spirally upward with heaven-seeking ambition. Passion-flowers struggled with them in beauteous rivalry. Flame-colored heliconias enkindled the eyes of the gazers at every turn. Enormous bromelias, with innumer- able flowers, flourished in musky rankness on trunks which they long ago had killed. Orchids, that feed "on the chameleon's dish-the air," grew without roots as if foreign to the earth but congenial to the sky. In the midst of this multitude of colors-white, deep GREEN PASTURES- AND STILL WATERS. 253 yellow, light scarlet, rose, violet-all intertwined in one wild mass of concordant contrast-birds flew in and out whose plumage in the sunshine flashed a still brighter blazonry than the flowers. Some of these winged and burnished creatures were humming-birds, and while one of them hung poised over some honey-cup, he seemed to add another flower to the flower. Curious macaws emerged from their nests in the hollow trees and screamed at the strangers in shrill resentment at their intrusion. Proud and talkative paroquets added to the jargon their dissonant chatterings. In the occasional pauses a strange bird whose note -was like a violin uttered his AEolian strain.. The bird-of-paradise, stateliest of the little island's feathered foresters, bent his lemon-colored head in silent scrutiny of the human invaders, f stretched his emerald-green neck, lifted his chestnut wings, and soared away in beautiful fear. "We have struck a snag," said Rodney, " and can go no further." The little raft had reached a thicket of mangrove trees- those banyans of the marsh, whose branches dip downward into the water as if yearning for the fellowship of their roots. Dr. Vail, in disentangling himself from this snare, laid hold of one of these submerged branches to lift it out of his way. "It is as heavy as a stone," said he, and drawing the sunken branch- out of the water, he found it covered with oysters. "What are these?" asked Barbara. Dr. Vail knocked off the clustering bivalves with his axe, and, as they fell on the raft, said with a smile, "These stones are bread." Barbara, who had eaten many an oyster from a can, now for the first time ate one from its natural dish-the shell. "What tall canes!" exclaimed her father, with an eye to his future flag-staff; and he waded ashore, chopped down an armful of bamboos, tied them together, and moored them in the water to the side of the raft. page: 254-255[View Page 254-255] 254 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "What is yonder white flower??" asked Barbara, point. ing to some low shrubs, in snowy bloom. He went after a specimen, and returned with it in his hand. "Do you not know this?" he asked, with a smile, holding it up by its black stem and showing its crown of white fleece. "No," said she, " what is it?" "I am astonished," replied he, gayly, "that you do not know a blossom which you have worn in your dress ever since you were a child." Barbara looked at it with increased curiosity. "I have never worn any flower in my dress, except a red blossom of my geranium," said she. "You are wearing this same white flower in your dress at this moment," responded her father, "your whole dress is made of it. This plant is cotton. My dear daughter, pay your respects to it, for in our country it is king; all the people bow down to it." Mary had expressed a wish that her husband would find for her the tea-plant with its womanly and unforbidden fruit-but long forbidden to this woman. Nature had denied this soul-soothing product to the island; but had furnished instead a wild variety of coffee which grew in the moisture of the marsh, fostered by the cool shadows of the trees. When Dr. Vail saw the twin-grained berry that makes glad the heart of all mankind, his own heart grew warm with aromatic memories of years gone by. "This coffee," said he, after gathering a handful of the grains and wrapping them in leaves, " will cause Jezebel's face to shine with Mosaic light. She will be almost as glad to see this old friend as to see her boy Pete. It will make the old woman young again,-to roast it, to dry it in the air, to grind it between two stones, and to brew it into the old- time beverage, smoking hot." Beaver, during this voyage up a stream inhabited by crabs, had hitherto manifested no disposition - to leap overboard; - 1 GREEN PASTURES AND STILL WATERS. but he now, in one eager moment, forgot his age, jumped into the shallow water, ran through a shower of his own splashings to the bank beyond, .and disappeared in the thicket-his bark sounding along through it at a distance. Then he ceased to bark, and uttered a guttural growl as if munching a muskrat. Presently the crackling of branches announced that he was returning. In a few minutes he Bmerged from the thicket, proud, rejuvenated and masterful -holding in his mouth a small animal, something in size and appearance like a rabbit. "Dear father, what creature is that ? Is it a squirrel ? If so, my dog shall not bite it. Why, poor thing-it is dead!" " It is the agouti," replied her father; ' but I would rather that Beaver had brought me a monkey, for that would have yielded me some resemblance to the look of the lost human race." The sun was now climbing to the zenith and shooting his fiery beams through the shady trees. The tide was begin- ning to ebb. It was time to return. "Our voyage back," said Rodney, "must be under the fierce sun, unless we provide a shade." Whereupon he cut down one of those strange arborescent ferns that grow as if in mocking imitation of the palm-tree, shooting up a tall slender stalk and crowning it with a thin outspread green umbrella of shady leaves. This graceful canopy, Rodney held over his barge, and in the shadow of it.drifted back on the ebb-tide to the Coro- mandel. After hauling ashore his bundle of canes and putting the ship's hatch back into its place, he and Barbara hastened through a mid-day shower to the house, where Jezebel, queen of cooks, received them with kindly grumblings because they had come late to dinner. In the afternoon, Dr. Vail raised his flag-staff and hoisted his flag. At first there was no breeze to straighten out the bunting; the old emblem drooped like a bird's broken wing; page: 256-257[View Page 256-257] 256 TEMPEST-TOSSED. but at last a light wind from the north bore out the sluggish folds. Still, as the island to which Dr. Vail made signal lay directly northward, his flag could present only its edge to his neighbor's eyes-if, indeed, he had any neighbor to see it at all. "My dear father," said Barbara, " we must go again to the head of the cove; you forgot to cut there a keel for your boat." "No, my daughter, I have changed my model-I shall make the keel and gunwales of these canes." Dr. Vail's plan of construction was peculiar. Having floated safely on the ocean in an Arctic ship, he resolved to do the same again in an Arctic boat. At Copenhagen he had seen a Greenlander's kayak-a light gossamer craft that danced on the water like a gull's feather. A man sat in the middle of it, plying an oar or paddle with a blade at each end. Tie curious-craft belonged to an old Baltic sailor who earned his living by teaching medical students (and other lovers of frolic and adventure) how to go kayaking for pastime. Dr. Vail had himself been one of these kayakers. He now under- took to build a kayak. The Copenhagen model was so light that a man could pick it up and carry it on his shoulder. It was a mere shell-a floating nautilus. The frame or skeleton was as slight and tough as a willow basket. The extreme length from tip to tip was twenty feet, the width two, and the depth one. The boat had a shear like a crescent moon. The deck was roofed, all except a man-hole. The solitary navigator sat in the centre, his hips below the deck-cloth, and his lower limbs stretched out at full length along the floor. The deck-cloth was seal-skin, and came up round the kayaker's waist- lashed tight about him so that a rolling wave, in passing over the boat, could not creep down into the hull. Dr. Vail, in planning his tropical kayak, meant to use bamboo rods for a frame, barrel hoops for ribs, and flannel for the inner sides and deck-the whole structure to be then outwardly covered with a water-tight sheathing made of three oil-cloth coats, cut into strips, and sewed together like the Greenlander's seal-skins. "I don't like this boat," said Barbara, after her father began to build it.' "Why not?" "Because it will hold only one person, and I cannot go with you." Barbara assisted her father in binding the bamboo rods two by two-the tip of one against the butt of the other--so that two rods, thus fastened side by side, made one con- tinuous thickness and strength. The zealous maid had never learned to handle edged-tools, and yet in this sort of boat- building there was one instrument to which she had served an apprenticeship-this was the needle; Barbara sewed every -stitch both of the inner and the outer coating of the kayak. "My daughter," said her father one morning, "before we go to work on our boat to-day, let us make a journey of exploration round our island's sea-edge. I want to examine its coast-line. It will give us a five-mile walk." Barbara started on this pilgrimage with -great eagerness, Beaver trudging along at her side, wearing a green collar of plaited ribbon-grass which she had woven round his neck. "At every step I take," said she, "I see something new. Look yonder-what a strange plant is growing on the bare rock." "That is a cactus," Dr. Vail replied, "the porcupine of plants. Notice its tubercles and spines. Other flowers must moisten their beauty to keep it fresh; they must dampen their roots in the marsh or mould; but this plant grows on the hot, dry rocks, where nothing but itself with- stands the sun." "How then does it live?" "Its leaves," said he, "are so thick that they imbibe moisture enough during the rainy season to give it drink during the dry. The cactus is like the camel, drinking enough at a draught to last it for a drought." "What grotesque shapes it assumes," said Barbara; page: 258-259[View Page 258-259] 258 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "here is one like a pincushion full of pis-there another like the picture of the thistle in the book." "It is from this plant," said Dr. Vail, "that your mother's scarlet shawl took its color-redder than the fire that Pro- metheus stole from the gods." "But this cactus is not scarlet," said Barbara, "it is green." "On this plant," he-replied, "lives the cochineal insect, that lends to fine ladies its carmine for a dye-stuf." Turning from the cactus, Barbara came into the shadow of a stately tree-an erect trunk with dark, cracked bark, showing the wood within to be a dull gray. "I do not know this tree," said Dr. Vail, who could not identify the small yellow flowers that covered it in multitu- dinous profusion. "How its leaves shine!" said Barbara, and she crushed some of them in her right hand to feel their coolness; for her poisoned hand was still feverish, and the touch of moist vegetation soothed the dull heat. Just then, shaken of the wind, one of the upper branches cast down a nut as large as a goose-egg. "Is this an apple?" asked Barbara. O how I want to see an apple!" "No," replied her father, who now recognized the tree by the fruit, "this is the mango." Dr. Vail, glancing through the trees, saw the white sea- beach, and said, "y dlaughter, you are not to be disappointed in every- thing; one of your expectations is to be gratified; you are to see the corals. I observe them gleaming just beyond us. Barbara, without turning to look in the direction her father had pointed, uttered a cry of pain. "Have you been hurt?" he asked anxiously. "Look!" cried the astonished girl, pointing to some light green plants. "'They wither at my touch. I trod on one and killed it, and now all the rest are afraid of me-they shrink away in terror! GREEN PASTURES AND STILL WATERS. 259 Barbara had come upon a cluster of those beautiful mimo- sas known as sensitive plants. "No, my daughter, you have not killed them. They will recover their lives again, and their courage too; see, they are already reviving. Do you think they have mistaken you for some wild beast of the forest, come to rend them limb from limb? They would show the same pretty terror at any other touch, even at the stroke of a falling drop of rain. Yes, a frowning cloud passing over them without rain, and only dropping its shadow on them, is enough to give them the same shock." The travelers had now arrived at the surf-beaten coast, where the rollers--with the morning sun shooting its low level ray through their pale green scrolls - presented a pageant of rare splendor. "We never saw such waves at sea," said Barbara. "No," said he, " for if one wishes to see breakers with the sun shining through them, one must be on the land." She sat on a coral reef, whose exquisite branches disap- peared gradually in the water as if the sea had rolled over a flower-garden and transmuted it into perennial stone. "Look, father!" said she, pointing down into the briny bed. "How like the cactus, yonder coral is! And here is one like the passion-flower--there one like the cocoa-palm -and there another like the plaintain-leaf. Do you think the little insects that built these rocks really meant to model them after the plants on the island?" "My daughter, the same great Architect who dictated the shapes of both, is fond of making all the forms and moulds of Nature harmonize." Barbara, who had brought her microscope on purpose to search for the living coral-insect, found this cunning artisan in the midst of his toils:-a tiny white creature, so small that a thousand of them together would not make a snow- flake, and so delicate that when one of them is taken out of the water the fragile sculptor can hardly be kept alive long enough to be looked at before he dies ;-and yet this insig- page: 260-261[View Page 260-261] 260 -TEMPEST-TOSSED. nificant and perishing white worm has built a great portion of the most enduring foundations of the earth, under-girding the great oceans with a solid masonry of rock which, instead of wearing away, only increases with time, and on which many a noble ship has gone to wreck. " "What is Beaver running after now?" asked his mistress, who saw him trot off again with remarkable celerity for so old a dog. Turning an abrupt corner of the shore, the strollers wit- nessed an animating spectacle-Beaver in full chase of a sea-turtle! The dog had intercepted the alarmed amphibian in its escape from the shrubbery to the sea. But Beaver bit the shelly fugitive in vain; he might as well have gnawed a rolling rock. The unharmed turtle hastened onward in a majestic flurry to the sea. Beaver plunged in after his escaping prey, but quickly returned empty-mouthed, and avenged himself by standing at the water's edge howling dismally at his lost prize. A small army of turtles, that had been keeping company with the first, now took the alarm, and came scrambling down the sand-beach, scraping it with their flippers, and making their best speed from the clutches of dog and man into the safe refuge of the sea. The dog's mortification at being utterly unable to resist these scarab-like giants, and his impatient whine as they escaped him one by one, gave him something like a spoiled child's puckering features during a spasm of ill-temper. "Turn them on their backs," cried Dr. Vail, who exempli- fied this cunning trick by instantly turning one of the run- aways upside down. Barbara ran to another and endeavored to treat him in the same way. At the stroke of his flipper, she shrank back from her formidable foe, and he made off into the water. She pursued another and another, and at last turned one over, leaving him to lie in his shell like a babe in a cradle. Her father had meanwhile overturned seven. 1' Beaver, in defiance of the proverb that " old dogs cannot GREEN PASTURES AND STILL WATERS. 261 be taught new tricks," now changed his point of attack from the turtle's impregnable roof, ran his shrewd nose under the crawling creature's side, and, after receiving several bruises over his eyes from the strong flippers, successfully turned the victim over on his back, and mounting the prostrate lower shell, which now lay upward, gave a bark of triumph. Barbara added another to the catalogue of the captured, making two for herself, one for the dog, and seven for her father-ten turtles in all, out of perhaps one hundred and fifty. "Glory enough for one day!" exclaimed Rodney, looking at the captives that lay round him in meek resignation, as if their instinct foresaw that Jezebel would turn them into turtle-soup. Sea-turtles were no new prizes to Dr. Vail, for he had taken them at least seven hundred leagues from land; but the advantage of finding them on shore was that he would be sure to find their eggs in the sand. It is the habit of these turtles to come in great numbers out of the sea at night to lay their eggs on, desolate shores. ;They dig their nests in the darkness, and a motherly turtle in one night will lay a hundred eggs. After this feat she re- freshes herself by nibbling a few grasses and vegetables in the morning, and hastens back to the sea. In three weeks she comes back and lays another nestful of eggs. Then three weeks later, she comes once more, and performs her maternal duty for the third and last time during the year. Each nestful of eggs is left covered with sand, to prevent the sun's rays from killing their germs. The eggs, when taken from the nest, are soft-shelled and flexible to the touch. In a fortnight or three weeks after the eggs are laid, the young turtles are hatched and crawl by instinct towards the water. The white innocent creatures, whose shells are yet unformed--like the shell of the soft- crab'--are hovered over during their journey down the beach by birds of prey, and are welcomed at the moment of their entrance into the sea by voracious fish. page: 262-263[View Page 262-263] 262 TEMPEST-TOSSED. ' Is this a turtle's nest," asked Barbare, eto peered into a wide crevice between two rocks. "No," replied her father, 4iyou must search for the nests in the open sand-beach, here is one--here another- and another." Dr. Vail found six nests in all, and gathering the eggs from these six and heaping them into one nest, covered the precious plunder with broken branches to mark the spot. "How shall we get our turtles home?" asked Barbara. "Toward evening," said he, "we will return, and, with Jezebel to accompany and assist us, we will hitch ropes to them and drag them quietly on their backs up through the grass to the house. And: there they will make a dish to set before the king." The two explorers proceeded on their journey. "Here are great heaps of our old familiar sea-weed," exclaimed Barbara, and she stepped gayly on a bleached winrow of it, that lay faded and dry, showing the high- water mark of some long-past storm. "With my feet on this sea-weed I feel once again on the Coromandel's deck." Here and there a little group of white bones gleamed on the sand-being the skeletons of fishes and birds, and lay bleaching like ivory. "What a strange tree!" cried Barbara, looking toward a gaunt trunk in the distance. "What singular foliage! The tree-top looks like a handful of dry sticks." "The trunk is dead," said Rodney, " and the tuft on the top is not foliage, but a fish-hawk's nest. That nest was probably built fifty years ago. Successive generations of fish- hawks have been born in it, lived in it, and died in it-leav- ing it to their posterity as an ancestral home." Barbara stooped and picked up a conch-shell. "What a beautiful lining!" she exclaimed. "It is pink and purple." "This shell," said Rodney, "is the wonderful cup that holds the whole Atlantic ocean." GREEN PASTURES AND STILL WATE RS. 263 "That is not possible," she retorted, " and besides there is not even a single drop of water in it." "Put the shell to your ear, my daughter, and you will hear all the roarings of all the seas." Barbara, on putting the pretty triton's-horn to her ear, was astonished at the sudden sound. "It sings louder than these breakers," she exclaimed with delight. Hitherto the explorers had been skirting the western side of the island ; they now reached its northernmost point and turned to follow its eastern coast. Here the wind was perceptibly fresher; the breakers were larger and louder; and the whole coast was rockier, presenting the bleak tokens of many storms. One of the relics was a sad monument in the shape of a few rotting ribs of a wrecked ship. How long this wreck had been lying there, Dr. Vail could not tell, but as the strangely-shaped skeleton was not patterned after the naval architecture of modern days, the sea-fowls of a hundred years may have perched upon its weather-beaten joints. This part of the coast, being constantly washed by the equatorial current, was strewn with thousands of waifs cast up by that incessant flood, lining it with chips, blocks of wood, fragments of spars, fish-bones, sea-weeds, scraps of ropes, lids of orange boxes, broken casks and barrels, and here and there a ship's hatch or hen-coop, or a boat's broken oar -constituting a great mass of interesting rubbish, all cast upon that exposed beach by tropical storms and by the everlasting current from the east. "What a museum of curiosities!" exclaimed Dr. Vail. "Let us search among them. They have a strange connec- tion with the outer world. They are memorials of the human race. They seem to me messages from our fellow- beings." Suddenly a gleaming sunbeam glinted from a purple-glass bottle and dazzled his eyes. "A wine-bottle," said he, picking it up. "It is sealed. page: 264-265[View Page 264-265] 264 TEMPEST-TOSSED. and there is a paper rolled up inside of it. O Barbara, other ships have been wrecked like ours, and other castaways have sent messages from the great deep. But this little record was written in vain-it comes to an uninhabited shore. It might better be still on the sea, than stranded on this lonely coast. Nevertheless it shall not go unread by human eyes; let me open it-we will give to the sad writer, whoever he may be, the sympathy of hearts that have suffered misfortunes like his own. fly dear Barbara, this little waif makes me feel that the story of human life and hope is writ in water." Breaking off the bottle's neck against a stone and unroll- ing the paper inside, Dr. Vail was thunderstruck at seeing his own handwriting! The sea had given back to him the self-same letter which he had written a few weeks before to his father and had thrown overboard from the Coro- mandel. It had probably kept company with the drifting vessel and reached the shore at the same time. Dr. Vail's discovery of it among the litter on this lonely beach filled him with a sickening sense of the frustration of one of his most cherished hopes. He sat on a rock and sighed. "My daughter," said he, "these little sheets were the fly- leaves of the Bible that my mother gave me the year before she died. I had a fancy that they might spread their wings and fly home again to my father's house. But heaven has once more shipwrecked my hope. Alas! am I never again to see my father's face? Even if he yet lives, he is an old man-past three-score and ten. But does he live? Perhaps he is dead-yes, the good old man, having no staff or prop for his declining years, sitting lonely and grief-stricken by his desolate hearth-stone, worn out with waiting for his unreturning son, may long ago have gone tottering to the tomb as his only refuge from sorrow and age. Nevertheless, though heaven denies me a sight of my father's face, it can- not forbid me to clasp my mother's hand-to kiss my mother's lips!" Whereupon he held the sacred leaves to his lips, and kissed them reverently. GREEN PASTURES AND STILL WATERS. 265 - This incident ended the day's explorations; for Dr. Vail, contrary to his usual buoyancy, was too dispir'ited to seek for further pleasure, just then, either by sea or shore. As the father and daughter walked silently homeward, the pensive maid pondered a subtle and mystic problem that arose in her mind. "If," said she, whispering softly to her innermost self, "if any of the little glass ships which I have launched on the great ocean should be wafted back in the same way to mne, I wonder if they would bring me somebody's hand to clasp -somebody's lips to kiss."' Barbara's whisper was so soft and silent that whom she meant by somebody, if she named anybody, since she could be heard by nobody, must be left to the guess of everybody. page: 266-267[View Page 266-267] CHAPTER XV. THE UNDER WORLD. TOOKlI exclaimed Dr. Vail, as he stood by the flag- J staff, early one morning, " a whiff of smoke is rising from yonder island. Look, Barbara! that is a signal; we are recognized; a bonfire has been kindled by the inhab- itants to inform us that our flag has been seen. A few hours more, and we shall be rescued at last. Here, take the spy-glass, my daughter, and look with your bright eyes. That is the great inhabited world lying yonder-near, very near-hardly a bowshot off-just a mere span-certainly not seven miles away. How comely its coast is!-how green and fair!-how welcome a look it puts on!-shining in the morn- ing sun I It glitters in the light-its dews can hardly be dried-our grass is still wet. What if we should tread that happy soil before this day's noon! Yes, my child, my dar- ling, this is our last day of exile from the world! The sun shall not set to-night before we are rejoined to the human race! Look, my daughter, how the smoke rises! Yonder is where mankind dwell! We are restored to the human family! God resumes this day His empire over chance and fate! Look, Barbara, the column mounts and swells!-it is the pillar of a cloud by day to guide us to the promised land!" Barbara ran with breathless haste to report the joyful intelligence to her mother. Her impatient father was eager to cross to the island before the islanders could cross to him. But sudden expectations, which kindle the mind to a fever, sometimes chill the heart to a frost. Dr. Vail had need of THE UNDER WORLD. 267 calm patience. The smoke continued to ascend, but no other response was given. The vigilant observer watched through his glass for some sign of busy men embarking to meet him but he caught no glimpse of anything save breakers, sand, and grass. Hours passed, night came, day dawned again; and during all this time the smoke rose at intervals -as if the fire whenever it died down, was promptly rekindled to keep the castaway in good cheer; but no other sign or token was vouchsafed to Dr. Vail's straining eyes save only this hospi- table and friendly smoke. The second morning came, and he noticed as before that after he raised his flag the smoke responded to it. He dipped and raised it many times in succession, and had the satisfaction of seeing the column of smoke increase in volume. "There are inhabitaits," said he, "on yonder island, and they keep making friendly answers to my flag. My boat is so nearly finished that I shall launch her to-day, and give her a trial in the calm water of the cove, I shall need a little practice with the paddle before venturing out to sea. To-morrow, if the weather be clear and mild, I shall cross to the opposite shore." Dr. Vail's boat was so light that a less muscular man than he might have borne it on his back, as an Indian his birch- canoe. After launching-it, he moored it to the shore. To ascertain whether it was water-tight, he put on board about two hundred and fifty pounds of stone. This weight, which was considerably greater than that of his body, did not at the end of half an hour develop a leak--not even a drop. Then carefully unlading his water-proof shallop, he made an attempt to step on board. But he was not the first boat- man whose feet a shell-boat has suddenly tripped and slipped from under, leaving the unwilling acrobat to take a plunge- bath. This inexperienced kayaker was cast out of his kayak page: 268-269[View Page 268-269] - 68 TEMPEST-TOSSED, %. like an arrow from a bow. He fell with a splash into the water, and the boat drifted away from him to the opposite bank.- He had no alternative but to swim across after the truant, and try again on the other side. Barbara, who was a witness of this proceeding, was full of mingled fear for her father's safety, and of merriment at his mishap. "If you laugh," said he, laughing back to her across the basin, "I will let you try it yourself, and your calico dress will not need another washing." Dr. Vail had no sooner succeeded in seating himself in his frail craft than he remembered thbat his oar was lying on the opposite bank, near Barbara's feet. In this emergency he used his hands to ferry himself over. "How slight a force," said he, "propels this boat! I believe that with my broad blade I can shoot across to the other island in two hours." He spent the day in careful exercise with his kayak, sur- prising himself at the facility with which he handled his oar, and at the flying speed he attained. "No bird in the air," said Barbara, " is more graceful on the wing than your beautiful little ship on the wave." "What shall be her name?" asked her proud builder and master. "Call her the Snowflake," said Barbara, " for perhaps she is the only one I shall ever see." "No," said he, glancing at the light-colored oil-cloth deck, "a snowflake is not yellow like this, and besides it would melt away in the water." "Call her, then," said Barbara, "the New Moon, for she is a crescent." "The New Moon," replied Dr. Vail, " has for many years been a very old acquaintance of ours-let us add some greater stranger to our list. An Arctic model deserves an Arctic name; I christen her the Esquimau-the only scion i F of that Greenland race ever born in a tropic clime-the slenderest daughter of that plump tribe." Early the next morning, between dawn and daybreak, the whole family came down to the water's edge, where Dr. Vail, after a leave-taking as formal and affecting as if for a voyage round the world, shot away from them with surprising speed, and was wafted onward by their waving hands, their smiles and tears, their good wishes and prayers-while Beaver kept running along the bank in pursuit of his departing master, barking in expostulation at being left behind. "Beaver!" cried Barbara, in a tone of command, " come back!" The dog stopped a moment, looked first at the father, then at the daughter, and perceiving a divided duty, came trotting reluctantly back while his heart was at sea. "'Let us go to the top of the hill," suggested Mrs. Vail, "and watch the boat through the spy-glass." Reaching the flag-staff, Barbara lowered and hoisted the flag to her father in continuous salute several times. "Is it possible," asked her mother, .with an anxious look, "that so small a boat can navigate so great an ocean-? Look! the little thing is now a mere speck shining in the sun. May God keep my dear husband in safety!" and she clasped her hands in prayer. Jezebel, who stood gazing over the great expanse of glittering water at the tiny craft growing less and less, was so impressed with the largeness of the universe, and with the insignificance of a single human creature in it, that she involuntarily exclaimed, "What's de good book say? Man is a worm ob de dust.' But dere ain't much dust out dar in de water. So de worm looks little on de big sea. But de Lord hab got his watchful eye on dat precious worm. Praise de Lord- Selah!" Barbara--mute, wistful, and expectant- followed the dear voyager with her glass-and with her heart's hopes. Suddenly the smoke, with which they had now been page: 270-271[View Page 270-271] ^270 TEMPEST-TOSSED, familiar for several days, belched up in rolling masses, white and fleecy at the top-now borne down by the breeze, and now mounting up during the intervals of calm. "The islanders," said Barbara, "are preparing to give my dear father a great welcome." But Barbara's conjecture was only a pleasing fancy. Her father's theory concerning the smoke had been wholly wrong. The daily fumes did not rise from the signal-fire of a hospitable coast, nor did they bear any salutation of welcome from man to man. They were simply clouds of sulphurous steam, emitted from one of the many safety- valves through which Nature lets off the internal heats of the earth. These volcanic vents are numerous in the West Indies, particularly in the Caribee Islands. These islands, extending in a northern and southern line for seven hundred miles, consist of many points that all jut from one submerged bank or submarine shoal, which, lying at no great distance under the water, is full of volcanic heats, and sends up its fires through a series of chimneys- including nearly a dozen active volcanoes, and as many extinct craters. Among these islands are numerous low volcanic mounds, hardly lifting their heads above the sea, yet emitting as from the very sea itself clouds of steam streaked with yellow jets of noisome sulphur, fetid to the smell of man and beast. The island which Rodney Vail had gone forth to seek was one of these flues of the internal furnace of the earth; but the little company of spectators by the flag-staff did not know or suspect this fact. "O Bel," cried Mrs. Vail, putting her hand to her head as in pain, "I am dizzy ;' and she staggered toward Jezebel for support; but the old nurse herself at that moment tottered in the same way, and was cast headlong to the ground. "O pitiful heaven!" exclaimed Barbara, "the sky is THE UNDER WORLD. 271 breaking loose-the hills swim round and round-the land shakes-the world is vanishing away!" and she convul- sively clasped her arms about the trunk of a tree, as many a less terrified Rosalind has been known to do with a gentler embrace. "It is an earthquake," said Mary, who, as soon as she comprehended the situation, composed herself into that mild courage which had always distinguished her in great emer- gencies. Jezebel rose to her feet, apparently not at all disconcerted, and remarked in her quaint way, "It's de Lord's han' a knockin' agin de ground--it's de Lord's feet a walkin' over de hills. How den can de solid lan' keep from shakin' up and down? Bymeby de Lord will come and knock so hard--and walk so heavy-dat he will break de whole world to pieces, and all de elements shall melt wid fervent heat. What's de good book say? 'As de lightnin' dat lightins in de east lightens even unto de west so shall de comin' ob de Son ob Man be."' "O my dear mother," exclaimed Barbara, after recovering from her first trepidation, and finding that no harm had been done, "I told you when we first landed that I feared the ground would roll and swell beneath out feet, and that we would break through the surface just as if we were walking on the sea. And you said no, the land was solid. But it is not solid. It heaves and tosses like the ocean itself. O what if we should sink through it as through a wave, and be swallowed in its awful depths! ' The mother and daughter were further agitated by the absence of their natural protector, though, had he been present, he would have been powerless to protect them against such perturbations of Nature- that disdains man's bidding, and defies his works. Their hearts failed them for fear. The shock lasted but a few moments, nor was it violent; but it was enough to fill them with panic. There is no sense of human helpless- ness so extreme as when an earthquake removes the solid page: 272-273[View Page 272-273] 272 TEMPEST-TOSSED. q foundations from under the universe, and leaves nothing to mankind but woe and despair. "O how dreadful!" exclaimed Mary. "My dear, dear husband! This calamity has overtaken him on the sea!" The three women, as soon as they felt the ground steady again under their feet, walked back to the top of the hill (from which they had a little way descended) and sought through the glass for some trace of the imperiled navigator. He was nowhere to be seen. The breakers were distinctly visible, but no boat. A sudden apprehension seized Mrs. Vail that her husband had been swallowed by the waves. A pallor of anguish overspread her face, and for a few faint and sickening mo- ments she wished that the earth might open under her feet so that she could pass immediately to death. Meanwhile Dr. Vail, unconscious on the water of the great shock that was passing through the land, sped in his flying shallop along his course. The rising sun was at his right hand, the surf-beaten shore of his own island at his left, the sea rolling gently under him, and the cool dewy breath of the morning in his face. His oar smote the water like a strong fin, and his swift boat glided like a fish. "She skims the sea," thought he, " as Camilla scoured the plain," and he surveyed his craft with a true boatman's ride. A school of porpoises suddenly broke about him, lending excitement to his mind and nerve to his stroke. His boat leaped among them superiorto themselves-plunging from wave to wave without panting for breath like the snorting fish. He sometimes feared that his merry and thoughtless comrades would jostle him dangerously, or flap their tails against his keel, and break his egg-shell at a stroke. Still, though the slowest ship keeps up with all the porpoises that gather at her bow, yet the fastest steamer has never been known to leave one of them astern. Swift as was Dr. Vail's kayak, the porpoises outsped her. He followed them like a huntsman who never catches his game, The minutes fled as fast as the fish-twenty-forty-sixty -one hour was ended; then another; then his voyage-or nearly so; for he was just outside the breakers on the strange island. The earthquake, which he had crossed without feeling it, had diffused its shock through the waves, giving him no suspicion of any other commotion than the sea's customary restlessness. Looking before him with magnificent expectation, he now saw the column of smoke growing broader and rising higher. "How shall I land?" he thought. "If I attempt to shoot through the breakers, they may dash me to pieces. I will follow the western coast in search of an inlet." He dextrously effected a landing through an open gate of coral reefs that formed a lagoon. "Once again," said he, "I am on the solid earth;" and he looked about him with something of the same pride that had animated his discovery of the island he had just left. "Have my friends who lighted the signal seen me? Did they notice my setting out? Have they followed my course? Do they know of my arrival? Will they come down to meet me here?" After asking himself these questions, he waited a few moments for the inhabitants to present themselves, during which interval he flung himself down to rest. His blood was aglow with the excitement of his race. Thirst seized him. Picking up a sea-shell, he dipped it into a shaded spring of water and began to drink. "This tastes like sulphur!" he exclaimed, throwing away the shell and its contents-and frowning at the indescribable unpalatableness of the unwelcome draught. Glancing at the rocky basin which held the nIoisome water, he saw little whiffs of steam rising through its crevices, as if Nature were newly charging the mineral spring with sulphurous potency.. "To what strange place have I come? - he cried. Ascending the hillside, he saw at a glance that the island page: 274-275[View Page 274-275] I 274 TEMPEST-TOSSED. was a mere handful of rock and sand, with a little green grass on the hill and a fringe of cocoa-nut trees around the shore. "It seems desolate and uninhabited," he said with a sigh; for he saw no sign of house or man, and nothing but a strange sterility, which the scanty vegetation served to heighten rather than to hide. "Why then this signal-light?" thought he. : Who built the fire? - What keeps it burning?" A few observations based on some geological knowledge made him suspect that the fire was none other than a jet of yellow fume from one of Nature's altars, fed from under- ground. In a few moments the volcanic emission doubled in volume. This fact instantly put an end to all his doubts. "Alas!" he said. "Am I baffled again? First the sea shipwrecked me and held me for years a prisoner-then the earth denied me a sight of her inhabitants-and now hell belches her fumes in my face!" The island was a low hill above the sea. On the top was an indentation or grass-clad basin, neither wide nor deep, with a ledge of jagged rocks at the bottom, between whose crevices ascended the steaming column. A hissing noise accompanied the emission, as when ordinary steam is blown from an ordinary pipe. The crater had long ago lost its primeval fire, and could now yield only smoke and steam. The mimic eruption was increasing in energy, the wind sometimes lifting the vapors on high, and then treacherously puffing them down into Rodney Yail's face. Standing on the grassy rim, he counted three orifices in the crater, pouring forth separate volumes of sulphurous gas, which united above into one roll or wreath. A few shrubs but no trees grew within the volcanic basin. Lumps of lava, probably centuries old, were lying all about the island, and constituted Nature's substitute for stones. With the exception of these, and of the ledge whence they had once come forth in a molten stream, the island was little more than a mound of sand. The soil was so friable that it frequently broke away beneath Dr. Vail's feet. With the hot sun, the increasing smoke, and the offensive sulphur, the atmosphere grew oppressive. Thirst again seized him, and many springs tempted him to drink; but the water in all, even when not sulphurous, was brackish and bitter. -"I cannot bear this heat-this suffocation-this parching throat," he exclaimed. The base of the smoky column was becoming dark-yellow, showing that its sulphurous element was thickening. Something of a naturalist, Dr. Vail had a curiosity to examine the unfolding phenomenon, but desired first to put himself on the windward side of the fumes. The sky was cloudlessly clear, the sun pitilessly bright, and the air oppressively calm. A sense of fatigue passed through him, due not merely to the natural reaction from his exertions, but more to the stifling smokiness of the air. He made his way down the eastern slope of the hill and rested in the only shadow the island afforded-that of the cocoa-nut trees. No sooner had he stretched himself out to rest and to watch from a windward and comfortable point of view the ascending wreaths of smoke, than a jar or trembling motion passed through the earth beneath him, shaking the trees so sensibly that hundreds of their nuts fell round him in a shower. "An earthquake!" he exclaimed; and a sudden white- ness overspread his face; for no man is courageous enough not to blanch a little when Mother Earth herself proves a coward and trembles with fear. Looking about him a moment, collecting his scattered thoughts, and fearing that the trees might fall and crush him with their heavy trunks, he started to run toward an open space on the hillside, when a second shock made him totter against a tree, to which he clung to keep from falling. At the next moment, he was struck violently on the right page: 276-277[View Page 276-277] I 3276 TEMPEST-TOSSED. li * shoulder by the sharp edge of a falling cocoa-nut-a- stroke which lamed him as if it had been a blow from a spent cannon-ball. The pain was excruciating. Hardly a minute elapsed between the two shocks of earthquake, the last being less violent than the first, but accompanied with an increased profusion of smoke and steam, which mitigated the outward tremor to the earth's crust. A heavy shower of rain followed, and the volcanic column mingled with the other clouds, overspreading the whole sky with watery smoke. A dead calm prevailed, during which the hissing of the steam from the rocks, the spattering of the rain on the sea, and the beating of the surf on the beach were loud and constant. Dr. Vail now wished that he had not undertaken his voyage. His absence from -his family, the keen pain in his shoulder, the vague terror engendered by the earthquake, the steady rain that was pouring from above, and the wilder storm that was belching from below-all this, coupled with the thought that several miles of the dangerous ocean lay between him and all he held dearest in the world, overcame the stout-hearted man and filled him with distress. "How shall I get back again?" thought he. "Can I propel my boat with this aching arm? And yet, suppose I stay longer-what if this smoke should turn to fire? What if I should be suffocated in these fumes? What if lava should pour forth and destroy my boat? Ought I to start now or wait? But if I start, suppose a hurricane should smite me on the way? O, into what strange perils I am cast! Am I to be forever, forever tangled in the toils of fate?" The strong man chafed like a lion in a net. By the time he reached his boat, the wind had suddenly risen and was blowing an angry gust. This forbade his embarkation. Within half an hour, the fickle tempest blew from three different quarters of the heavens. Then sud- THE UNDER WORLD. 2" denly the storm-clouds broke away, the wind lulled, the sun poured forth his fiery beams, and the sea which had quickly swollen sank as quickly to rest. "Is there no fresh water to drink?" cried the suffering explorer, whose thirst came upon him once more. The sandy soil had greedily swallowed all the rain, and did not yield him any pool in which to slake his thirst. His excitement produced a faintness which was followed by hunger. This led him to think of the cocoa-nuts, and he thereupon ate of their meat and drank of their milk. Not a plantain, pine-apple or coffee-berry, not even a shrub of wild cinnamon, grew on the island. The dreary spot was given up to sterility, solitude and sulphur. So far as Dr. Vail could perceive, not even a lizard sunned himself on a stone nor a snake glided through the scanty grass. "When will this surf die down?" thought he. The sun had wheeled midway into the afternoon before Dr. Vail attempted the passage of the foam-covered bar at the mouth of the lagoon. Twice he endeavored to shoot through the breakers but was driven back between the coral reefs; which, had they touched his cockle-shell, would have torn it to shreds. The tide had gone down, making the water at the mouth of his little harbor three feet shoaler than when he had entered it; and this shoalness now made it thrice angrier than before. "Hardly three hours," he exclaimed, "are left of the day- light ; I must make one more attempt to cross the bar, or I shall be caught here all night." Plunging his oar again into the waves, he made a few swift strokes, every one of which reacted upon his shoulder with a twinge of pain; but he shot over the roaring bar, and was once again dancing on the open sex. None of the mad speed of the morning marked his home- ward course. He did not now expect to cover the distance in two hours. Fortunate would he be if his unnerved right arm could fulfill its painful task before sunset. The current had a tendency to carry him westward of his page: 278-279[View Page 278-279] I4 278 TEMPEST-TOSSED. own island, and he had to struggle hard not to be borne away by its powerful flood. When he was about midway between the two islands a sudden change occurred in the weather; the air became murky and motionless; a haze overspread the sky; and, at a time of day when coolness should prevail, the heat was more oppressive than at noon. An oily stillness covered the waves, softening them into a gentle roll. Fearing a coming blast, Dr. Vail propelled his craft with- out mercy to his nerves or sinews-his whole body reeking with sweat, his garments sticking to his skin, his strong chest panting like an athlete in the last rivalry of a race. "One mile more," he exclaimed, "and I shall then be at the Coromandel's cove." He had now passed the northern point of the island, and by landing here might have saved himself the toil of propel- ling his boat as far southward as where the ship lay, but a dangerous barrier of breakers warned him to seek no landing- place short of the ship's roadstead. He sped along just outside the line of the surf, and watched its white violence at his right hand. The sun went down, and the short tropical twilight deepened swiftly into darkness. But darkness reigned only for a few moments, for the full moon immediately showed her upper edge above the calm sea in the east. A slender and slowly broadening moonbeam, level with the ocean's expanse, silvered the long low shore. "What a magnificent picture!" he exclaimed, looking with admiration at the moonlit surf, that shone like a great snow-wreath along the beach. Just then a booming sound, as when the fort at Gibraltar salutes the setting sun, broke forth from the island, and rattled and rolled through the soft air, making the glassy ocean shudder with ripples far and near. Before Dr. Vail had time to reflect on the cause of this cannonade-which seemed to jar the land, the sea, and the sky-he suddenly noticed in the moonlight that the breakers, which had hitherto been running up from the sea to the shore, as breakers do, now suddenly fled back from the shore to the sea. He imagined them rushing at his intruding skiff, to over- whelm it. But these mad and shallow billows, on reaching the deep water, mingled with it to form one sober wave, which, with- out furious foam, but with tremendous power, rolled toward the kayak, lifted it on high, passed under it as under a floating feather, and flowed outward a mile at sea. Then it stopped, turned, gathered to itself a multitude of waters, and with a strange sound-like the roaring of many oceans pouring their hoarse melodies into one surge-rushed back with headlong speed and mountainous swell toward the defenceless boat. The moving wall of water had meanwhile curled into a crest and was pouring down a stately waterfall which, to the astonished voyager, seemed about to engulph him with instant destruction. The imminent wave then swept over him with a tempest of foam, picked up his little boat like a chip, whirled it over and over, twisted it round his body like a girdle, and at last tore it away from him like the stripping off of a garment- leaving him a struggling swimmer, clasping his oar with desperate hands, as a drowning man grasps a straw. At the next moment, by some supernal force which he could neither resist nor comprehend, he was swept onward beyond the beach-hurled up among the trembling trunks of a half-submerged grove of cocoa-nut trees-and flung senseless, and like a dead-man, nearly forty yards inland from the customary water-line. The ill-fated adventurer-too greatly stunned to be con- scious of his misfortune-was left lying on a green hill-side in the soft grass-his eyes closed-his face pallid in the moonlight-and his hands still clenching his oar as with a death-grip, showing the last hope to which he had clung in his struggle for life. page: 280-281[View Page 280-281] 1. * 280 TEMPEST-TOSSED. What was this phenomenon?-this swift and boisterous treachery of a tranquil sea? It was an earthquake of fearful power-one of those great upheavals by which, along tropical sea-coasts, the agitated land, moving to and fro, pushes the sea back from the shore, and receives the refluent water in one wild and awful surge. This retiring and returning flood is sometimes of such vol- ume and violence as to overflow the tops of trees, and to oarry stately frigates up into green fields. It was on such a billow that Rodney Vail's cockle-shell was caught and crushed. Had the fragile craft been an admiral's flag-ship, its fate could not have been different. An angrier wave than the great ocean ever breeds in any storm had whelmed the tempest-tossed adventurer in a resist- less deluge. Nature, without warning to man, and without pity for her own fair hills and coasts, had smitten the earth with a convulsion that shook the night-dews from every blade'of grass throughout the Antilles, and that stopped every church clock simultaneously from Trinidad to St. Kitts-as if to prolong a moment of havoc into an eternity of suspense. CHAPTER XVI. OUT OF THE JAWS OF DEATH. ARTHQUAKES are of two classes or types. The first are called by the Spanish Creoles "Trem- blores" or tremors, in which the slight swell or motion of the surface does not cast down buildings or endanger life, and which, at the changing of the seasons, sometimes occur daily, even two or three times a day, for weeks in succession. The second are called "Terremotos" or earthquakes proper, happily not frequent in any country,-beginning with loud noises as of heavy wagon-wheels rolling over the ground, followed by the opening of seams and fissures, the engulph- ment of rocks and forests, and the ruin of towns and cities. The tremors or "Tremblores " can be faced and outhraved by familiar experience, but the "Terremotos " or real earth- quakes are beyond all reconcilement to the overpowered senses of man, and excel all other natural 'phenomena in oppressing the mind with a sense of helplessness and woe. On the day of Dr. Vail's voyage in the kayak, the Calribee Islands were visited by four shocks of earthquake-the first three consisting of slight pulsations of the class of "Trem- blores" or tremors ; and the fourth, of the class of "Terre- motos" or earthquakes proper. Of the three slight shocks, the first occurred early in the morning just after the little company of womanly watchers left the flag-staff where they had stood gazing at Rodney Vail's departing kayak. The other two followed at eleven o'clock in the forenoon,-coming close together, with just page: 282-283[View Page 282-283] 282 TEMPEST-TOSSED. enough time between them to draw a long breath. The first, or morning shock, was by far the most violent, the others being full of more threat than peril. Three ground-swells in the solid earth, all occurring in one brief day, inspired the women, as night approached, with a dread of remaining on the land. Accordingly, at Barbara's suggestion, they abandoned the house and took refuge on the ship. They had a vague idea that the water, being accustomed to heavings and swellings of its own, would be native to these tumults, as to "the manner born," and would therefore afford the refugees a kindlier asylum than the land. "We shall be safe here," exclaimed Barbara, looking round the cabin wherein all three were re-ensconced in their old sea-faring quarters, " for this dear old ship has been an ark of safety to us so long that she would not know how to desert us now, even if she should try; but she will not try; she will hide us in her heart of oak." "O why does not my husband return?" exclaimed Mary, after reaching the cabin. "Where have these convulsions overtaken him? Heaven grant that no calamity has crossed him on his way." Meanwhile, as the sun had not yet gone down, Barbara thought how to relieve her mother's apprehensions concern- ing the voyager in the kayak, and said, "My dear mother, let me go on shore and walk to the flag- staff, to look through the glass for some trace of my father and his boat." "No," replied her mother, "do not go--I am fearful that danger will befall you on the way." So Barbara abandoned her adventurous project. The sunset came. The Coromandel, as she lay immured in her land-locked cove between green walls of cocoa-trees, could not furnish from her deck a view of the ocean to the northward; so her anxious company were prevented from watching Dr. Vail's homeward, as they had watched his outward, OUT OF THE JAWS OF DEATH. 283 course. His continuous absence filled them with apprehen- sion, and the deepening twilight shadowed them with dread. What if other shocks should now come? thought they; if so, might not these affect the water as well as the land? the ship as well as the isle? Darkness begets fear, and fear chills the reason. When hope is paralyzed, the whole mind is benumbed. Mary and Barbara now gloomily convinced themselves that the ship partook of the helplessness of her company, and was no real covert or sure defence. They waited in a kind of calm dismay. "Where is my dog? ' asked Barbara, looking round for him in the dusk. "He came on board with us, but has gone off again. I want him to come back. He must stay in this safe place-if it is safe. But, O where is any safety on earth?" Two or three times she mounted the binnacle, and called Beaver's name, whistling her peculiar note of summons, but without success; the dog was neither to be seen nor heard. Mary's increasing uneasiness at her husband's non-appear- ance now covered her cheek with pallor, which grew all the whiter by contrast with the red velvet cushion on which she sat-leaning against the Leaning Tower. Jezebel was silent and solemn, under a shadowy convic- tion that the end of the world was at hand. "How dark it is growing," said Barbara; "how short the twilight has been; let us light the cabin-lamp." The familiar swinging-lamp, for the first time since their arrival on the shore, was now set burning in its accustomed place, as in past years at sea. "Thank you, my darling," remarked Mary to her daughter, grateful for the sudden glow of good cheer which the lamp- light shed through the surrounding gloom. "God will not desert us. He sees our misery. He will answer our prayers. He will be our strong tower of refuge." Jezebel's face, which the lamplight strangely illumined, page: 284-285[View Page 284-285] 284 TEMPEST-TOSSED. gradually assumed a look of uncommon serenity. In all faces, even in the humblest, there are moments when the feelings so powerfully portray themselves on the features as to change and heighten the familiar aspect of the counte- nance. There had been many occasions in Jezebel's life when some high spiritual thought, working within her mind, had moulded her bronze face into a momentary majesty. Such a moment was now winging its shadowy flight across that venerable front. She looked like an aged sybil-an ancient seer. She immediately became the chief spirit of the three. Mary and Barbara found themselves involun- tarily looking up to the old Ethiop with the homage and reverence due to a superior soul. "My chillen," exclaimed the strange creature, "listen to ole Bel. What's de good book say? ' De great day ob de Lord is near, it is near. Dat day is a day ob wrath, a day ob trouble and distress, a day ob wasteness and desolation, a day ob darkness and gloominess, a day ob clouds and tick darkness.' Yes, my chillen, dat's de word ob de Lord, spoken by de 'Postle Zeffniah. Dat's de word ob de Lord. But dat's not de whole ob de word ob de Lord. No, my chillen, when de Lord speaks a powerful word like dat, like a rushin' mighty wind-He den right away speaks a sweet and gentle word, like a still small woice. What's de good book say! 'Gadder yourselves before de day pass as de chaff-before de fierce anger ob de Lord come upon you- for it may be ye shall be hid in de day ob de Lord's anger.' '0, Jerus'lem, Jerus'lem, how often would I hab gaddered dy chillen togedder as a hen gadders her brood under her wings, and 'ye would not.' Dat was Jerus'lem. But, my chillen, we ain't dem folks; no, we are agwine to let de Lord gadder us togedder under His own great and mighty wings." It was just at this moment, the night having just set in, the full moon having just risen, and Rodney Vail in his flying kayak having just sprung with fresh energy into the last mile of his voyage-that the first signs appeared of the OtJ UTP OLn JAWO Lr .L.,Ai n, i approach of an earthquake which was to shake every island of the Caribbean chain, and especially the little island which the Coromandel had too blindly chosen for herself from all the others in the sea. A sudden and awful calm-a sepulchral stillness-per- vaded the firmament. The ocean was as smooth as oil. The land showed no tree that dared to shake a leaf before the appointed time. Not a whiff of smoke from the neigh- boring volcanic isle defiled the transparent air. Nothing in all nature seemed to move except the moon, that made haste to climb entirely clear of the sea so as to lift her com- plete round eye above the horizon just in time to behold "The wreck of matter and the crush of worlds." Suddenly, in the midst of the universal hush, a sound broke forth which, as it penetrated the cabin of the jarred ship, Mrs. Vail thought to be like the rolling of artillery- carriages over the ground; but which Barbara, having no knowledge to serve her for such a comparison, imagined to be a clap of thunder made by the earth instead of the sky. "This loud noise," said Mrs. Vail, timidly, "is premoni- tory of something-I know not what. The elements are at war. May God take care of my husband in his fragile craft." Jezebel rose to her feet, swayed her body to and fro, closed her eyes, and exclaimed with a weird and powerful voice, "It is de great and terrible day ob de Lord. What's de good book say? 'De noise ob chariots on de tops ob de mountains!-de noise ob a flame o' fire eat devoureth de stubble! De earth shall quake!-de hebbens shall tremble! -de sun and moon shall widdraw deir shining'. De day ob de Lord is great and werry terrible, and who can abide it? Darfore says de Lord, ' Turn ye to me wid all your hearts, and wid fastin', and wid weepin', for de Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and ob great kindness, and trepenteth Him ob de evil.' Amen." page: 286-287[View Page 286-287] 286 - TEMPEST-TOSSED. While Jezebel was yet speaking, the chain-cable by which the ship was anchored, racked back and forth with a grating noise in the iron-clad aperture through which it passed; then a great blow seemed to be dealt against the keel, as if some Titanic sledge-hammer had smitten it from under the earth; and three panic-stricken women in the ship's cabin were dashed violently to the floor, where they crouched in fear and woe-praying, moaning, and wringing their hands. -"O God," cried Barbara, "what is to be our fate? Al- mighty Father, be merciful! Leave us not to perish." Mary sat clenching her white hands-in agony at her husband's absence and probable destruction. "O Rodney, Rodney, where are you?-Lost? Killed? Dead?-O0 my husband!-O God! O God!" In miserable situations, miseries multiply. No sooner had the women been thus dashed to the floor-where the consternation on their faces was dimly revealed by the cabin- lamp that kept swinging and quivering over their heads- than the ship suddenly rose, rocked, lurched, and fell on her beam ends-hurling her three occupants swiftly down to the starboard side-jarring the air into a windy breath that blew out the lamp- and setting loose, in the appalling darkness, an avalanche of all the cabin furniture and mov- ables, so that they slid down into a jumbled heap, sounding as if the ship had been crushed and her timbers were breaking and snapping on all sides. "O heaven! the Coromandel has capsized and is going to pieces!" shouted Barbara, lifting her voice above the din. "Mother, let us run to the deck! Haste, Bel, quick! It may not be too late to save our lives." Barbara instantly led the way, groping through the dark- ness to find the passage up-stairs. "No," said her mother in mortal anguish, but with a strange calm, "I shall not --stir from this spot. Let death find me here-I am ready and waiting. O Barbara, your father is dead! Yes, I know it-I am sure of it! Then let me die, too! I wish not to survive him for a single hour. OUT OF THE JAWS OF DEATH. 287 O Rodney, Rodney, my dear husband, you once faced death in this very cabin for my sake-I will face it here for yours." And she sat in the darkness burying her head in her hands. Barbara, who had now reached the cabin-stairs, was pre- vented from hearing her mother's distressful words by the great noise-a noise not only within the cabin, but without -for in addition to the interior bedlam of the crackling furniture, there was an exterior tumult of rushing waters, falling trees, and splitting banks. "Thank heaven," cried Barbara, "the stairway has not been broken to pieces," and as she mounted its canted steps she thought her mother and Jezebel were following her, in obedience to her summons to them to flee for their lives. But Mary remained behind, and Jezebel remained with her. "Dear lamb," exclaimed Jezebel to Mary, as soon as the old nurse regained the complete composure which she had partially lost, "what's de good book say? 'Peace, troubled soul.' We hab de troubled soul-now let us hab de peace." "O Rodney, Rodney," exclaimed the despairing wife, "why do I yet breathe!" Mrs. Vail's conviction of her husband's death was so vivid that she could not endure to think of herself as still alive- he being dead. The instinct of life had never been strong with her; it was not comparable with her instinct of love; and she was now eager that her life should instantly flee the way of her love. But Barbara, who was clambering to the deck, seeking for an escape, had a strong desire to live. She had not yet known either life or love. She therefore had no welcome for death. Her brave soul roused itself to find a way to live. The lion-heart of her father, which had been transmitted by inheritance to her own breast, was roused within her. She was alert and defiant. She put aside her fear as her chief peril, and nerved herself into a dauntless heroine. She determined not to die, if she could live. page: 288-289[View Page 288-289] 288 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Then, at the moment she reached the deck, she found herself facing not death, but life ;-not fear, but hope;- Nature had provided for her a new astonishment. "O my wild brain " exclaimed Barbara. "Is this a delu- sion or a reality? - Has the earth been turned upside down, or have I simply lost my wits?" For as soon as Barbara had fixed her footing on the deck, which was now slanting like a pitched roof, and to which she clung as to a housetop, she was amazed to see the quiet moonlight revealing everywhere a landscape so peaceful and serene, so apparently undisturbed, and so full of instanta- neous comfort to her agonized mind, that she could not comprehend the stupendous upheaval of a few minutes before. "Has God wrought some miracle?" she cried, perplexed yet cheered-. Looking about her with a swift and eager penetration into the scene, she not only saw the earth abiding in its place, but saw no further contention of any of the fierce elements that had just been shaking its foundations. "One moment ago," thought she, surveying the scene, "one brief moment ago all was chaos, and now all is calm." Barbara shared the bewilderment common to many persons who, after passing through a great earthquake, experience at the next moment a sense of something miracu- lous in the sudden change from Nature's universal commo- tion to universal tranquillity- for although the lighter shocks of earthquake awaken dread of others to follow, yet a profound and terrific concussion, shaking the earth to its centre, driving the sea from its shore, and appearing to set the sky loose, wreaks its full terror on the mind at once, and when it passes, leaves the sweet solace that follows great pain. "It is over at last," exclaimed Barbara, drawing a long and joyful breath, " and still the earth abides-and still we live." The keen-eyed girl, accustomed to looking through dis- OUT OF THE JAWS OF DEATH, 289 tances at night, saw at a glance that the shp, though on her beamn ends, was still in the same familiar cove, and had neither been cast ashore, nor unmoored from her anchorage. The simple fact was (though Barbara did not comprehend it) that the bottom of the cove had been upheaved about seven feet, and its reservoir of water been emptied with a rushing noise into the sea-or so nearly emptied that what was left was not deep enough to float the ship, and she had fallen over on her side. Barbara saw that instead of the sea breaking into the cove, the water of the cove was gliding at a mad and musical rate toward the sea. She saw many other evidences that a great change had taken place in this familiar spot. But she saw also that, however awful and stupendous the force had been that could accomplish these wonders in so brief a time, yet angry Nature had already become once again like the nun in Il Penseroso, "Sober, steadfast, and demure." She saw with increasing wonder that the moonlight was- making the ruins so beautiful as to have already healed or hidden their rents ; while, at the same time, a soft and balmy wind was blowing over the scene, as if the great earth, like a kindly mother, were lulling her little isle, like a fretted babe, to rest. "O" exclaimed Barbara, " how strange, how magical, how miraculous!" and she turned expecting to find her mother and Jezebel at her side. Discovering that they had not followed her to the deck, she picked her way down the declivitous staircase into the cabin, to report to their agonized minds that the terrible convulsion was overpast and their peril at an end: The earthquake had run with thunderous havoc through two hundred and fifty volcanic islands; large and: small, named and un-named,-shaking all their green crests by the impulse of the same internal fire. Every island that had a volcanic vent belched forth 13 page: 290-291[View Page 290-291] 90 TEMPEST-TOSSED. smoke and steam, and sometimes flame. These safety-valves lessened a shock which might otherwise have still more fiercely torn their crusts. But in all the islands which had no such craters or flues for the safe escape of the inward wrath, the scene was terrible. The solid soil was upheaved; great seams were opened ; trees were toppled down headlong; rocks were hurled from their base; houses fell; men, women, and children rushed in dismay to the open spaces; birds flew about wildly; animals spread apart their feet and bent their heads to the ground; and the sea fled from its shore, return- ing to it again with such a swell of power that ships were torn from their moorings, carried by a flood-wave to un- wonted water-marks up the banks, and sometimes stranded i on the tops of hills, like the Ark on Mount Ararat., The Grenadines suffered more than the other islands. Such shocks frequently find their chief centres of violence away from the great volcanoes and high lands, and make their fiercest havoc in low isles that have no large chim. neys for blowing off the overcharged fires and fumes, and no weight of earth sufficient to press down the internal wave or hold captive the struggling Enceladus beneath. Some of the Grenadines were so violently moved as to be almost cast against each other in the sea. The motion in the Coromandel's island was both lateral and perpendicular. The whole surface partook of both movements; it swayed from side to side, and it rose and fell. The motion sideways was as if the fin of some great fish were beating the water with leisurely stroke. Hence the apparent retirement of the sea from the shore, and the great return wave :-a phenomenon usually spoken of as the flee. ing of the sea from the shore, though it is really the sudden movement of the land to and fro in the sea, beating against the water, and exciting it to a supernatural surge. The rising and falling motion throughout the island car- ried the trees up and down with it as an undulating bay swells and sinks under its ships, boats, and floating weeds; OUT OF rTHE JAWS OF DEATH. 291 -the soil breaking open in places and quickly closing; breaking open in other places and not closing; rising into new knolls and mounds which stood fixed and permanent in their sudden heights, and depressing former hillocks into basins like the troughs of great waves. In a word, by a various magic of creative change-as if the Divine Archi- tect were re-modelling the earth-it made a new topography of the island, particularly along the coast;-where, for ex- ample, the coral reefs were li4ted between three and four feet beyond their former level; and the gaunt tree of the fish-hawk's nest was flung down across the sand-beach, and the nest cast into the breakers-its young birds screaming in terror at its downfall. Here and there the crust, as if unduly heated from the fires beneath, was puffed up, as a hot oven puffs a housewife's baking loaf. When these solid bubbles happened to be blown under a cocoa-nut grove, the tree-trunks were thereby cast from their natural perpendiculars into various angles- sometimes of eighty or sixty degrees; and sometimes their heavy tufts were toppled over so far out of the centre of gravity that the roots would break from the ground, and the tree fall with a crash. Here and there a great boulder was lifted into the air and set rolling down a new-made hillside. A little bubbling spring which Jezebel had discovered near the house, and from which she daily filled her household pitcher, was emptied of its cold water,-the shallow bottom having been pushed up through the top, as when the finger of a glove is turned inside out. A chasm or fissure about three inches wide, and of fathomless depth, ran in a straight line through that portion of the soil covered by the wild cinnamon and lignum-vite trees. Franqois Garcelon's dwelling-house, which was small and low, and built of the short, hard timbers of the most iron-like of woods, had floated up and down on the swelling and sinking wave of the earth without suffering fracture or damage, yet shaking the Virgin's image to the floor, and jarring open the un- locked doors. The Hermnit's Chapel where the dead lay, page: 292-293[View Page 292-293] 292 - TEMPEST-TOSSED. felt a shock sufficient to jostle two of the skulls from their pedestals, and to set them rolling on the trembling ground. The flag-staff still retained its grip in the soil, but the soil itself had so changed its curve that the slender staff now seemed bent from its first erectness by the weight of the drooping emblem that hung from its top. But none of these strange events were of such awful im- poit to the afflicted women on board the Coromandel as were two other incidents of the earthquake ;-one, the upheaval of the ship by a new-made shoal, whereon she was now fast imbedded, lying careened on her beam-ends; and the other, the casting up of the ship's master from the angry sea to a green hillside, where his body now lay out-stretched as if in death, while his family were ignorant of his situation and fate. The earthquake lasted two-and-a-half minutes. It was after the stupendous ruin which it wrought in this brief time that Barbara, having fled from the cabin, and clambered to the deck, discovered Nature's anger already spent, the upheaving storm already calmed, and one of the greatest rendings tha/had ever ripped the earth's crust already transmuted i]o an enchanting quietude and beauty. After Barbara had found this sudden solace on deck, and had joyfully communicated it to the distressed spirits in the cabin, Mary exclaimed, -"Now my dear daughter, climb up stairs again, and see whether there is any sign of your father's arrival." "Mother dear," replied Barbara, "father has not left the other island. He has found friends there, and why should he leave them so soon? Besides, he must have felt the shocks of this morning, and these have warned him against returning to-day in his gossamer boat." Barbara nevertheless re-ascended to the deck to look for some signs of her mother's truant. "The meek and holy moon," said the maiden to herself, "is climbing up between the trunks of the cocoa-palms- and must be now a half-hour out of the sea. ShQ is putting ( f OUT OF THE JAWS OF DEATH. 293 a halo on the rude world. How calm and hushed the air is! Not a breeze murmurs-not a branch rustles. Hark! I hear the distant breakers on the outer beach. There must be an unusual surf to-night-I never heard it so loud before." Just then another noise in the same direction, far off but distinctly recognizable, filled the air; it was the barking of a dog; and the sound seemed full of distress. "Beaver!" shouted Barbara, at the top of her voice; and she waited for him to obey her call; but he did not appear. "Beaver!" she cried again ; but he failed to approach. "Beaver!" she called a third time ; and the dog barked louder but still as far off as before. "My dog," thought Barbara, "must be in some misery- he howls pitifully as if hurt. What if some tree has fallen on him? What if some rock has rolled over him? Any little bruise or accident would now almost kill him-he is so old. I must go after him at once." Hastening then into the cabin for her shawl and hat-for the air was cool-she anounced Beaver's distress, and her determination to go to his rescue. Her mother attempted to dissuade her, but Barbara would listen to no expostulation. "No," said she, "my dog would never bark and moan in that sorrowful way unless he were suffering. He is appealing to me to come to him, and I am going. My dog leaped after me when I was drowning, and I must haste to my dog now that he is hurt." "Do you see any sign of your father?" asked Mary. "No," replied Barbara, "and I am sure that he has not returned." At that moment the thought crossed Barbara's mind- How should she get ashore? Was not the ferry destroyed? Or, if not, would the ropes and pulleys still work? Could she pull herself along in the basket? Barbara made an examination. Yes; the ferry-ropes were still there. Nothing had been page: 294-295[View Page 294-295] 294 TEMPEST-TOSSED. injured. The ferry was easier than ever-at least, easier from ship to shore, for the ship now lay so high in the air that the ferry-basket, in going shoreward, ran down hill. Barbara ferried herself without difficulty to the accus- tomed stepping-stone, which was still in its place, only canted from its former level so as to partake of the angle of the ship's deck. The moment she landed and set out on her journey, her heart failed her. She was daunted and shrank from going forward. Nevertheless she was distressed concerning her flog :-her life-long companion-her rescuer from drowning -and now, in his age, her daily care. Nothing but some strong impulse of duty, like that which now animated Barbara in Beaver's behalf, could have over- come the fear which struck its chills and tremors into her soul. She was alone-at night-walking over ground that had just been rent asunder-picking her dismal way among proud trees that had fallen in her path and were lying like prostrate monuments of the ruin which had cast them down -her timid heart all the while quaking within her as the great earth's had just done in its own quivering breast. She stopped two or three times to turn back, but always compelled herself forward. Her fears multiplied with her efforts to repress them. Her vagaries of fancy were fasci- nating and horrible. What if the earth should roll and heave again? What if it should open at the next moment under her feet? What if other trees should fall and crush her to instant death? Her life, she felt, was in jeopardy in that treacherous place. Was it not her real duty, therefore, to turn back- her duty to herself and to her mother? No, she must go forward. Everybody was now safe but Beaver-he too must be saved. She knew her duty and must obey it. These thoughts were chased from her mind by others which were not of the earthquake, but were of equal terror -making her shudder from head to foot; thoughts of hei ^ \ first night's wandering about the island, and of her sleeping and waking in the charnel-house among the skulls. The path which Barbara was pursuing toward the barking of the dog-for the sound of Beaver's voice was her only guide- was now leading her directly through the same sepulchral grove of lignum-vite trees; and she could see in her fancy the skulls, the fire-flies, the green lizard, the musty mice, the centipedes, the beetles, and all the ghastly and lurid spec- tacle in that house of corruption. Even Beaver's howl seemed to fill her with terror, for she could not help adding the dog's distress to her own. "O what has happened to him," thought she, " and why did he go so far away?" On she went, still guided by the dog's pathetic cry-past the great cactus on the rock, past the mango-tree, past the plantains, past the wild cinnamons-straight toward the sensitive mimosas that lay outspread before her in-the moonlight. She expected to see them shrink again at her touch; but a ruder touch than hers had already smitten them into abjectness ; and their leaves, as she drew nigh, lay crouching together, paralyzed with mortal fear. "O I hope," exclaimed the trembling maid, " that I shall not lose my way." The moonlight kept bewildering her. It makes the most familiar region a strange land. It changed to Barbara's eyes the whole face of the island. She half persuaded herself that she must be in some other quarter of the earth. Familiar trees, which she had already learned to know and admire, wore an unfamiliar look. Strange plants had unac- countably burst into bloom about her, with colors that she had never noticed by day :-plants of the tribe of moon- flowers or yuccas which in the daylight are dull white, but in the moonshine are of transparent green. Barbara, as she passed along, thought it a miracle that so much anger and destruction-so much beauty and bloom- could exist side by side, in the same place, at the same time. page: 296-297[View Page 296-297] 296 TEMPEST-TOSSED. 'What a long walk! said she. "It never seemed to me jl so long before. How far Beaver must have strayed! O I1 wish he had gone with my father to keep him company to the other island. Dear father, the seas for the first time roll between us to-night. We are separated as never before i Heaven bless you among your new friends." Barbara, more hopeful than her mother, still dwelt in the unshaken conviction of her father's safe arrival at the other- island, where she pictured his warm welcome by the glad inhabitants who had answered his signal, and among whom he was tarrying till a safer time for return. Reasoning in this way, the daughter had suffered no anxiety on account of her father's absence. What then was her surprise, her dismay, her anguish, when, in approaching a high bank from which the dog's bark seemed to proceed, Barbara now ', suddenly caught a glimpse of Beaver, standing there in the clear moonlight over her father's prostrate and deathly form I O O heaven!" cried the girl, leaping forward and bending down to the senseless man, who lay stark and stiff, with pallid face, closed eyes, and clenched hands. "Can it be? i No,-no,-no! Dead? What, my father dead?-O God! O God t 'I The sweet, soft, tropical dew-which was falling plenti- fully, as if heaven were making haste to shed its healing on the bruised and broken earth-had already moistened his upturned face and brow. "These are cold beads of sweat,' she cried, noticing the wet drops on his forehead: " they are death-damps-I have heard how they settle on dead men's faces ; they are death- dews; O he is dead!-he is dead!" One loud cry of agony burst from her lips, and she threw herself on his lifeless body. "No!" she exclaimed, feeling the movement of his heav- ing chest, '; he breathes!-he is not dead!-he is alive! 0O God! thanks, praise, glory be to Thy great goodness-Thy loving-kindness-Thy tender mercy! ' Barbara's heart leaped-her pulse danced-her face shone with sudden love, joys and gratitude, "O my father!" she exclaimed, "my sweet, dear, darling father, speak to me! I am your daughter. Say just one word. Let me know of a truth that you are alive. 0 speak, speak!" But finding herself unable to evoke from him a single word, she was seized with an apprehension that though he might be alive, yet his life was perhaps ebbing away, and he would never again speak. "( O how can I restore him?" she cried, what will bring back the light and life into his dear, closed eyes?" First of all she deftly released from his grasp the clenched oar, and laid it down beside him in the grass-Beaver straightway running his wise nose up and down the length of it, as if wondering whether he had heretofore failed to detect in this piece of wood some living enemy that ought to be now bitten to death. Barbara then rubbed her father's hands, stroked his fore- head, kissed his cheeks, and called his name-but all for nought; for although he lay breathing more and more vitally, as if some tormenting pain were increasing in his sleep, yet he did not wake. He moaned and sighed as if in secret conflict with some great grief. Barbara bent her ear low to his lips, trying to catch his muttered words, but they were indistinguishable. And yet he seemed trying to say something. Again and again he renewed the effort, drawing his brows together as if thinking some horrid thought, and clasping his hands in an anguish so dumb that its very speechlessness was itself a speech. The moon was shining full upon him, and revealed on his countenance an expression pitiful in the extreme-so full of misery that Barbara wept to behold it. She was powerless to relieve her father's mute. and writh- ing agony, and this produced an agony of her own. At lengths he -opened his lips and uttered the word- page: 298-299[View Page 298-299] 298 TEMPEST-TOSSED,. "Mary!" *(- "Thank heaven," cried Barbara, "-he speaks at last-he E calls my mother's name.", "O Mary!" said the struggling voice, with a moan, " the ship is-on fire-struck by, lightning-arise-I-will save you-0 God, dead?-no, Mary, darling, do not die-wake, live-0 Mary, Mary-my wife, my wife!"D His paroxysm of feeling then overcame him, and he, awoke. "O my dear father," cried Barbara, flinging her arms about him, kissing him with rapture, and placing his head on herg lap, " you are yourself again, Heaven be praised." Recovering in some measure his consciousness, he gazedi about him with an eager stare, gave a look of faint recogni- jj tion to Barbara and Beavers scrutinized his own half-prostrate, form, and fell to a perusal of his empty hands as if he had jj lost something out of them, but knew not exactly what. "Where am I?" he asked in a soft voice, like a sick man's. "And my boat -where is it? Barbara, where is your mother? Is she hurt? Tell me." There was something so plaintive and appealing in his tone that Barbara's eyes re-filled with tears, but beforejE she could summon words to reply, his awakened faculties J sprang into their complete intelligence, and he rose to his feet. "Am I able to stand? 'I he asked. "Have I any broken bones? Look at me-do you see any gash? any bruise? J any trickling blood?" "No, dear darling father, you are safe and sound."' "My child," said he, clasping her to his breast, "I now understand my plight. Yes, I have been fainting. Have I not? I was overboard-in the angry sea-nearly drowned. O it was a fearful wave! How have I escaped alive'? I gave myself up for dead. What brings you here, my daughter?- Has any calamity befallen the family? Your mother-she is-alive?-and-not harmed?" "O yes, yes," cried Barbara. "We are all saved." VJU up anS LLm JAVVO Vr JLJrAXAIII "Saved? Saved from what?" he asked, with alarm. "Has there been danger? Not to Mary? Saved? Tell me all., "There has been a fearful earthquake," she replied, "but we have all escaped-not a hair of our heads harmed." Dr. Vail now for the first moment comprehended the convulsion which had caught him in its whirling wave and swept him as through a maelstrom to the shore. "God be thanked for the deliverance of us all," he cried; and the fulness of his feelings following the exhaustion of his strength, made him tremble. a Father dear, do not try to walk yet," said Barbara. "Sit here on this low stone. Recover your strength." He obeyed, taking a seat, while the old dog expressed many dog-like congratulations on his master's recovery, and Barbara sat on the stone beside her father, stroking his hand. "Where is your hat?" she asked for when she found him lying on the grass his head was bare. "Has the angry sea," he cried, putting his hand to the top of his head, " only unbonneted nie? I felt it tearing away my boat-dragging my clothes-clutching at my oar-and clawing my body with a hundred fingers, striving to rend me asunder. Ah, Barbara, I thought the great wave would swallow everything -yes, the -whole island!the whole earth! the whole heaven! It seemed to fill the whole universe with sudden doom! -as if God's dominion had come to an end, and things were going out in chaos!" "1 My dear father, what are you speaking of? You must still be dreaming some horrid dream. You are not now on the sea, but on the shore. You are not in your boat. You are on this green hill. There are no waves here. We are many long steps from the sea-beach. Look yonder-the breakers are beating far below us-on the other side of the cocoa- trees." Barbara thought that her father' mind was still vagrant, -reverting, perhaps, to some scene connected with the great shipwreck nearly seventeen years before; and under this page: 300-301[View Page 300-301] -800, TEMPEST-TOSSED. supposition she had refrained from asking him, as yet, any question concerning his day's voyage and discoveries, and especially concerning his strange mishap. Dr. Vail had now sufficiently recovered to recall more vividly the peril through which he had just passed. "Barbara," said he, '"I have escaped as by a miracle. O such a wave-such a lashing of the waters! I never saw such a boiling caldron before! I thought myself lost-and yet by heaven's pity I am saved. And you, too-and Mary." "What l" exclaimed Barbara, with dismay, "have you been overboard?-not dreaming?-really?-in the wet sea? -in the white surf?" She then for the first time noticed that her father's gar- ments were dripping-as if he had just dragged himself ashore out of the ocean's depths. "I was rowing homeward in the kayak," said he. "The sun had set, and I was making all speed toward the cove. My course lay along the shore just outside the breakers- those same breakers yonder. I was keeping so near to the beach that when the first upper rim of the full moon sud- denly peeped like a star above the sea, I discovered Beaver running along the rocks and sand, trying to keep pace with me, and barking because he. could not travel at my swift speed. Then a terrible sound rolled through the air as of a discharge of cannon. I thought it a man-of-war's broad- side. I looked about me expecting to see a fleet of ships. "But instead of such a wetcome spectacle, I saw a sight that set me wild-making me feel under some hallucination that distorted all my thoughts :--for the breakers, instead of running from the sea to the shore, as you see them now- started altogether in a white pack and fled from the shore to the sea I They made directly toward my boat, threatening to swamp it. They rushed at me like howling wolves-only clothed in the snowy fleece of a thousand flocks of sheep. "But before those unnatural billows could reach me, they all melted into one great swelling wave without a foam-crest -which rolled toward me, lifted my kayak, passed under it, let it down into a deep and yawning trough, and then went sweeping with awful might and grandeur furiously out to sea. It seemed going to meet the distant moon, that was lying full and round just incthe ocean's far edge, yonder in the east. The moon, you seeS now higher-she must have been up a whole hour or more. So all this catastrophe must have happened to me an hour ago. Have I been lying here so long? It seems only a moment since I was in my boat. "Well, when the great wave had run out a mile or more toward the sea-drawing with it all the water away from the shore-the moving flood stopped, stood still a moment, gath- ered itself up like a wall, and built itself to a majestic height covering the moon's disc :-but not out of sight, for the bright orb-a thousand times magnified-gleamed through the clear water as through a monstrous prism. Then the watery column began to return. At first it was in no haste, but slow and stately in its movement. Then it came faster and faster, mounting higher and higher, gathering a gradual crest which curled over shoreward' and threatened to bury me under it as under an approaching Niagara. The mag- nified moon appeared to be inside of the gigantic wave, illuminating it as if the whole world had been turned into one emerald. How it happened that the rushing flood dashed me out of my boat, I do not know, for it was done in a surge of foam-white water, in which the moon was eclipsed, and I saw only a mass of feathery spray about me as if I were enveloped in fine snow. A great noise shook my temples as if two monstrous sea-shells were roaring in my ears. My boat was ripped to shreds like the tearing of cloth. I was left in the water clasping my oar with both hands. I found myself spinning round the handle-and was so overcome with dizziness and faintness that I grew uncon- scious of being in the water until I opened my eyes and found my head above it. I then knew that the surge was whirlffing me up among some trees whose branches were just over me-almost within reach of my hand. Their trunks were quivering in the water-and I could hear them hum- page: 302-303[View Page 302-303] 302 TPMPEST-TOSSED. ming as they vibrated in the rushing flood. I thought the ancient deluge had revisited the world. Suddenly my oar, which I was still clasping, seemed to rise like an armed man and strike me across the forehead. A sheet of flame went flashing past my eyes. I fancied that my eye-balls had been stung by wasps, and that I was searching for a cool green leaf to bind over them to quench the pain. I saw a thousand visions in a moment-cities, fields and gardens-houses, gravestones, and troops of children-the Coromandel with Jezebel leaning on the rail-a myriad of familiar sights, all mocking me in my one moment of mortal woe. I then seemed to be suddenlysetting out on a long voyage which was never to end, and I could see you and Mary on the hill- top bidding me farewell. I felt my eyes filling with tender tears at the thought of parting forever with those whom I held dearest on-earth, but a great maelstrom seemed await- ing me through which I must piss to the nethermost parts of the spa. The last that I remember is, I was plunging after mj own dead body, down through the vortex, into the fathomless abyss. Then I saw you and Beaver-and the moonlight. O my daughter, my darling, God be thanked for our preserved lives-Mary's, yours, BeFl's, Beaver's, and mine." After this recital, Dr. Vail rose from his stony seat, picked up his oar-blade, and holding it in one hand for a sta/ff of support while Barbara clasped the other to lead him for- ward, set out on a slow walk toward the ship. "I wonder if any trace is left of my kayak?" said he, looking about him for some shred of his shipwrecked Esqui- mau that had met so strange a fate in a tropical sea. To Dr. Vail's astonishment, instead of finding any frag- ment of his Greenland cockle-shell, he came upon a ship's pinnace--lying bottom upward-high and dry on a green hill-keel and planks badly broken-and evidently a wreck of that day and night. "What is this?" exclaimed Barbara, starting back from the strange, black object as if it were some living animal- jr OUT OF THE JAWS OF DEATH. 8Q3 for she had never seen a ship's boat except the canvas-clad shell whichi her father had used at sea. "It is a pinnace," said he-" broken loose from some passing ship, and drifted ashore. During the twilight I thought I saw a steamer passing behind the northern end of the island to the westward, but as I then lost sight of her, I felt that my eyes had been once more deceived by my hopes, and that I was simply seeing in fancy what I yearned for in fact. But this boat must have actually belonged-to that steamer." Dr. Vail drew a long breath, such as accompanies a deep thought. "Look!" exclaimed Barbara, here are letters on the boat-they are upside down-half hid in the grass." Dr. Vail, with Barbara's assistance, took hold of the gunwale, and turned the raven-colored wreck right side up, so that her name, which was in small gilt letters on her bow, now caught a sudden silvering from the moon, and revealed the burnished and prophetic words- GOOD HOPE. or be page: 304-305[View Page 304-305] 4 CHAPTER XVII. HOPE DEFERRED. "'THS unforseen calamity to the Coromandel," e- claimed her master, feeling a pang in his heartis core as he surveyed the deck in the mournful moonlight, "is like a sudden death in the family." Dr. Vail had just crept up the distorted stairway; for after joyfully rejoining his family on board about an hour before, he had immediately set about examining the ship's condition, inside and out; and having already, in pursuance of this purpose, groped darkly through the cabin, hold, and forecastle-replacing here and there some dislodged portions of the furniture and stores-he now found himself on the steep deck, gazing sadly at his good ship on her beam-ends. Barbara remained in the cabin with her mother; and Dr. Vail was now alone. "No," he sighed, " there is no hope of the old hulk float- ing again. One fathom less of water, and she would be high and dry. Even now it would take the engines that drew the stones for the pyramids to pull her down through this shallow cove to where she could swim once more. Here she must lie-grounded in this brook forever. These rpcks that have uprisen beneath her will cling to her like Titanic barnacles, never to let go. It makes me ache to think how this solid ship, strong as a frigate, must perish here-thrown up like a stranded water-cask to split in the sun and rot in the rain. How often, on the wide ocean, I used to think that my little family would die within thef wooden walls, and their bodies be borne about in this drifting sepulchre! But the Coromandel has found her own grave before making HOPE DEFERRED. 305 ours. O strange caprice of fate, that a ship which has outlived the lightnings and tempests of the sea, should be wrecked in a quiet harbor at last! Every other possible disaster have I imagined for the Coromandel save this alone. Is Nature, then, so jealous at man's defiance of her elements, that after the devouring ocean has tried in vain for years to engulph our ship, the solid earth must be set quaking beneath her to shipwreck her by treachery? Is this deck never again to move under my feet to the rise and swell of the tide? Is no pulse of life ever hereafter to quiver through this unbruised, unwounded, yet death-struck frame? Then let this island-now the ship's tomb-be evermore the ship's monument. O solitary coast, shaken of earthquakes and lashed by the waves-whether you are named or unnamed in the world, I know not; but henceforth bear the ship's name for your own! Be called among flie islands of the sea the Isle of Coromandel. Let my brave craft, that borrowed her name from the East Indies, bequeath it to the West; -and hereafter, from the Indies to the Indies, ronnd the world, let the everlasting tropic summer keep green she memory of a ship whose oak-ribbed dauntlessness was con- quered, not by the surging sea, but by the quaking earth!" Barbara then joined her father on deck. "My daughter," said he, "I am going ashore." "But why, dear father, at this night hour? you need rest-you will exhaust your strength and fall ill." Dr. Vail's discovery of the wrecked pinnace had strangely animated him with the Good Hope which glittered in her gilded name, and he answered, ' I must go ashore to light a signal-fire on the hill; for the broken boat may have had a crew, and some of the castaways may be wandering about on the islands." This thought had occurred to Dr. Vail at the moment of finding the pinnace, but he had refrained from then express- ing it to Barbara. "What!" said she, " is it possible that anybody was cast out of the boat-as you were flung from the kayak?" page: 306-307[View Page 306-307] 306 TEMPEST-TOSSED. This apprehension shot a spasm of pain through Barbara's tender breast. "What if," said she, "there was somebody in the boat whom we knew!" ' Who?" asked her father. "Perhaps," she replied, hesitatingly-" perhaps Lucy Wilmerding." "No," said he, "Lucy Wilmerding could not have be- longed toboat's crew." "I did nit-mean-merely Lucy Wilmerding," said she, "but what i what if Oliver Chantilly was on board!" "Ah," responded Dr. Vail, thoughtfully, "how my heart leaps at the mention of that man's name! I doubt not that he is searching the seas for us still; he may have picked up one of our glass jars; he may be close upon our track; he may have followed us here. One thing I know-he will never give up the search." After returning to the shore, Dr. Vail, accompanied by Barbara and the dog, ascended the hill Awhereon the flag- staff maintained its ungainly angle, drooping its head like an unfaithful sentinel drowsing on the watch. "This moon," said Barbara, looking up at it-her golden hair silvered by its rays, and her fair head haloed like a rare old picture of the Holy Virgin, "this wonderful moon is more beautiful in this climate than in any other part of the world where we have sojourned." "Yes," said her father, "it pales all the stars of heaven, but beautifies every object on eaith. See how, like a gentle silversmith, it tips and bun r'wi'is every leaf on these trees!" Dr. Vail lighted a fire-having carried with him for this purpose some of the ship's coke, such as he used at sea, made from the sea-weed. The fuel had been saturated with fish-oil, and now burned like a torch. The birds, many of which had been distrained from their nests by the earth- quake (and their nests shaken down from the trees), flocked wildly about the dangerous flame. HOPE DEFERRED. U07 -Take care, O beautiful birds," cried Barbara, "or you will burn your wings!" Their tropical plumage, as they went wheeling back and forth between the firelight and the moonlight, flashed many strange splendors, varying, vanishing, and returning at each moment. Barbara had brought her father's carbine. "I will now fire a signal-gun," said he; whereupon he discharged his piece three times in succession-the noise frightening the birds away, and the noisy echoes following the screaming creatures in their swift flight, as if joining in a chase to drive them off the perilous isle. Beaver, who judged the scene by the gun and the birds, thought it a kind of new hunt in which he was to take part; and he made desperate dashes at the winged creatures as fast as they came flying back to the brilliant light. . Dr. Vail, after waiting an hour by the beacon-blaze in hope that it would attract some shipwrecked straggler of the pinnace-but waiting in vain-at last returned to the ship; comforting himself with the subtle prophecy con- tained in the broken boat's unshattered name; accepting the little wreck as a foretoken that human companionship could not be far away; and reasoning with himself that since death had so strangely struck the Coromandel-the arch destroyer, having now destroyed the ship, would be content to spare the ship's company. Early the next morning, the family-since they could not dwell in the capsized craft, any more than they could have dwelt on the side of a precipitous rock-returned to the house on the shore.. "This house," said Mary, "which we thought to be un- safe, has not been harmed; and yet the ship, which was to have been our refuge, has gone to wreck." After the family's removal to the house, Dr. Vail and Barbara made a hasty tour of observation through the stricken island. The great sea-wave, caused by the earthquake, had risen page: 308-309[View Page 308-309] 308 TEMPEST-TOSSED. in various places to unequal heights along the banks and beach, wreathing the whole sea-front with an irregular winrow of such waifs and fragments as ordinarily mark the water-line of a sea-coast. The old fringe of bleaching sea- weeds had changed its place and risen higher. Fishes had been cast up into the holes of high rocks; and here and there a frightened fin was still splashing in some accidental basin left full of water by the retiring flood. The sand, in spots, had been swept away, disclosing unsuspected rocks beneath. The skeleton of the century-old wreck, instead of being further unearthed, was buried deeper than ever in its sandy grave. Fallen cocoa-nuts, pods of mimosas, plantain- leaves, wilted orchids, and many broken branches and blooms, of all kinds and colors, strewed the ground with a prodigality of havoc. 'Stubborn trees and shrubs, over' whose tops the last night's briny flood had passed, now showed their leaves sprinkled with salt, through the alchemy of the morning sun. - Pebbles, shells, and fish-bones glittered everywhere along the drenched coast. Coral reefs had sprung up like mushrooms in the night. Here and there, through new-made gullies, little cascades of imprisoned sea-water were trickling their way back to the great deep. Hardly had the sun risen, drying the dew and stiffening the soil, than faint snappings and crackings were heard in the ground-not the opening of new fissures, but the closing of old. Wherever the crust had been thrown up beyond its former level, and wherever the dip of the rocks had been changed- there a slow, steady, murmurous progress of Nature had begun for the recovery of her former planes and angles. The upheaved coral-reefs, unable to maintain their heavy weight at their now unnatural height, were already (though imperceptibly) sinking to their yesterday's foundations. The half-toppled tree-trunks were striving to regain their lost rectitude. The bottom of the cove was stealthily gravitating to its original depth. This motion pervaded the whole island, and had been several hours in HOPE DEFERRED. - lW progress before Dr. Vail detected it, for it was like the creeping of a shadow on a dial. This tendency of the earth to restore its disturbed crust to its previous form has had many precedents in Nature. It was by just such a motjon that the Isle of Sabrina, after being thrown up volcanically in the open sea off the Azores in 1811, gradually went down again, and disappeared in the deep whence it came. It was by'a similar evanishment that Graham's Island, which reared itself suddenly in the Mediterranean in 1832, took a slow and silent way out of existence. It was by the same process that several new coral-reefs, sand-shoals, and dangerous banks, which arose to vex the Caribbean Sea during the recent earthquake, were immediately bidden by Nature to draw their audacious heads down again under the" waves. It was by this same retrogression that Dr. Vail's island, after swelling upward into a partial distortion of its surface, had already begun, without a moment's delay, to reqsume its normal shape;- the upheaved coast settling toward its ancient level; the unseated rocks blindly groping downward into their former beds; the slanting cocoa-palms straightening to their primeval perpendiculars; the channel of the cove deepening again to navigable fathoms; and the careened Coromandel leisurely resuming her even keel and level deck. The ship, which on Tuesday night Dr. Vail thought to be stranded forever, was on the following Saturday morning as freely afloat as if she had never been aground. Meanwhile, for three'nights in succession, the signal-fire was lighted on the hill-top; but, as no'shipwrecked sailor reported himself in response to it, and as a number of foolish little snipe every night flew like midges into the flames, and left their tiny charred bodies to draw tears from Barbara's eyes the next morning--the tender-hearted maiden begged her father to desist from re-kindling a blaze which thus, in- stead of succoring the distressed, only martyred the innocent. Day after day passed, bringing no claimants for the Good Hope; and though an occasional ship flashed through the "b ' / page: 310-311[View Page 310-311] 810 - TEMPEST-TOSSED. blue distance, yet these hurrying merchantmen, taking the shortest road to market, never approached near enough to this out-of-the-way island to see Rodney Vail's signaller at least to understand its petition and appeal. Nature quickly recovers from a great shock, and so does Human Nature. The island quickly rallied from the earth' quake, and so did the little family who now dwelt in calm repost on its recently perturbed soil. The human heart has a strange knack of making its past perils augment its present peace. An unwonted cheeriness pervaded this little family, who, having been miraculously preserved from death, now more than ever appreciated the blessing of life. Jezebel, who was the calmest of all, felt no little dis- appointment that the earthquake had not fulfilled her prediction and proved to be the end of the world. She still believed it to be a forerunner of that end. She could not help thinking that the recent convulsion- so unlike anything in her former experience; so utterly (as she sup- posed) out of the course of nature; and so wonderfully in the line of Scriptural prophecies,-was in very truth the great and terrible day of the Lord, wherein the framework of the world would be consumed by " the spirit of His breath." The good book, as she interpreted it, vividly foreshadowed a fiery dissolution of all sublunary things. Hour after hour she would picture to her imagination how the "elements would melt with fervent heat ;" how "the earth and the works that are therein would be burned up ;" and how the Lord would come " in clouds and with great glory."' Furthermore, not only Jezebel's picturesque interpretation of the Scripture but her extreme age led her now to ponder on the Great Hereafter. One's own life is apt to be, to one's own thought, the measure also of the world's appointed spanr Jezebel, in drawing nigh to four-score years, fancied not only that she herself was near the end of her mortal course, but that the great world was approaching its own dissolution. At least she knew that the world was soon to end, if not for others, at least for her. HOPE DEFERRED. 3" "Yes, my chilien," said she, "de time is short. What's de good book say? ' Yet once more.' Now dis word-' yet once more signifieth de removal ob dew tings which are shaken, dat de tings which cannot be shaken may remain. Now what tings hab been shaken? Why, de wilderness ob dis world-wid all its trees and rocks ; dese hab been wofully shaken. But what place cannot be shaken? Why, de lan' what floweth wid milk and honey. Dat lan' cannot be shaken. 'Cause why? 'Cause de milk and honey would be spilt. So dat lan', like de word of de Lord, abides for- ever. Let de chillen of dis world redeem de time because de days are evil. 'Set not your 'fections on tings ob de earth, but on tings above de earth."' A strange quickening of the spiritual nature is oftentimes vouchsafed to the aged, as if to prepare them right royally for their exchange of worlds. Such an experience was given to Jezebel-falling on her like the dew on Mount Hermon. Her spirit was daily growing more solemn and serene; chast- ening her habitual jocularity into a quiet fervor of thought and word; quickening her diligence in all duties great and small; pervading her affection for Barbara with an inexpres- sible tenderness; and even mitigating toward Beaver the buzzing criticisms which, on the mid-ocean, she formerly furnished to that dog as his only swarm of flies. Dr. Vail in his outlook toward the future took a less ' mystical and more practical view-including a plan for a new kayak, and a series of voyages from island to island throughout the group, in search of an inhabited coast. But this project was suddenly frustrated by an unfore- seen event. The energetic man, partly through the shock occasioned by his fearful experience in the raging flood, and partly by the humid atmosphere occasioned by the steady rains which were now fulfilling the watery almanac for June and July, fell ill of a fever, and was bound a captive to his bed. "Mary," he murmured, "of all times in my life when I least could be patient under sickness, that time is now. Our page: 312-313[View Page 312-313] 312 -TEMPEST-TOSSED. fellow-men dwell only a few leagues from us-just a day's sail!-I know it, I feel it-and yet I am now suddenly prevented from going forward to clasp their hands. How pitiable it is that after our long years of exile from mankind, at last after reaching the very threshold of the world's open door, I should now be denied just the little needful strength to crawl a few steps further to enter in. This fate comes like a second Paradise Lost, saying, 'To be weak is to be miserable.'" Dr. Vail's illness, which he could not conquer but was compelled to endure, drove from the minds of the family all immediate hope of escape from the lonely island. "At least," said Barbara, " we must expect to stay here while these rainy months becloud the passing ships-if any ships pass." X Her father, on his sick-bed, endeavored to minister to Barbara's mind the cheerful medicine of hope. "After the clear weather returns," said he, " bringing my health with it, we will go forth and find the world-it cannot be far off. Prepare your feet to dance on it." Barbara, during Dr. Vail's tedious illness, became the master-spirit of the family. She took her father's place in all out-door duties :-visiting the ship daily; watching the cans of provisions for signs of mildew, and oiling the rusty spots; trying the pumps as regularly as at sea; airing the cabin, forecastle, and hold; mending every breakage in the ferry-basket; and supervising the whole ship as an admiral his frigate. Every morning she hoisted the flag on the hill top, and with her weather-glass scanned the horizon. She gathered fresh fruits for the family daily. Moreover, she took constant care of Beaver, who sometimes needed as much nursing as her prostrate father. And in doing all these duties, she rapidly showed how care and responsibility, when laid heavily on a young woman, contribute to discipline her mind, to develop her character, and to beautify her face. Jezebel, who believed that Barbara was the Lord's chief HOPE DEFERRED. 313 creature on earth, gazed with loving adoration on this min- istering angel, and exclaimed: "Yes, our dear lamb is de Lord's own. What's de good book say? 'A roe upon de mountains ob Bether, growin' in grace, and de knowledge ob de truf! '" Jezebel had always been content with Barbara's long exile at sea. The old sybil's faith had never wavered that Divine Providence had planned this strange life for the pure maiden to a holy end ;-that is, had secluded her from the world in order to keep her untainted by its blots and blights. The pious nurse, in watching the increasing sweetness of the dear girl's spirit, particularly under the double refinement of her inward yearnings and outward cares, was satisfied that Heaven had, seen the end from the beginning, and had chosen for Barbara better than her parents themselves could have chosen for their child. "Yes," thought Bel, "de great commandment ob de Lord am fulfilled. ' Little chillen keep yourselves unspotted ob de world.' Dat's de beginnin'-now what's de endin'? What's de good book say? ' Dou art all fair, my love, dar is no spot in dee!' Yes, dat's Barbara- fair and widout spot! Dat's de dear lamb, white as wool! De old ship went wanderin' round de sea dat de word ob de Lord might be fulfilled, and de dear lamb be kep unspotted ob de world. Praise de Lord." Barbara, meanwhile, was quite unconscious of her saint- hood, but appeared to herself a restless, yearning, wistful prisoner,- whose partial contentment with her dungeon was based on her lively hope of a speedy deliverance from it. "My daughter," inquired her father one day, as he lay on his sick-bed, looking at the stained-glass windows-which the rainy weather kept dim and weird,-" how do you like this strange old hut?" . "How fortunate,? replied Barbara, " how very fortunate I have always been!-for neither at sea nor on shore have I ever been homeless. I loved my-home on the ship-1I love " page: 314-315[View Page 314-315] 314 TEMPEST-TOSSED. my home in this cot. I have always, always had a home, and dear parents in it." Since Barbara's transfer of residence from the ship to the land, which was an event bringing great perils, but also greater hopes, the buoyant maid persuaded herself that she was almost happy. "My dear child," said her father, "happiness depends on the mind, not on the estate. It is an inward quality, not an outward condition. The Arab dwells in his wretched tent in the desert, yet is happy; but the king in his palace, carousing at his banquet-table, is often the most miserable of men. My darling, you are restless, but I hope not wretched." "Father dear," replied Barbara, "I am grateful to have escaped the sea, and found the shore. True, our little island is not the Happy Valley which Rasselas sought, and which I i fondly hoped to find. Hours of misery I have had in this place. Can I ever forget my first horrible night in the sepulchre? Can I ever forget the earthquake, and the anguish it brought to us all? Nevertheless, the land is more beautiful than the sea, and a house is better than a ship. So, except for my longings to see the world-longings which I cannot repress-longings which will take no content -yes, except for these longings I am happy. So are we all. We are neither parched with the heat nor frozen with the cold; we suffer neither hunger nor thirst. Nor are we chained like Prometheus to our few little rocks to be de- voured here by vultures. We are comfortable prisoners, who have learned how to endure captivity. Of course, we want liberty-for I think it must be the nature of the human soul to scorn bondage of any kind-but we have no cause to weep or pine, hardly even to murmur or sigh, perhaps only "to rejoice and laugh. Then, too, my dear father, you have been ill, but are getting weli-and this is gladness enough for e.. -n Barbara's spirit was bright, yet not without a shade; her sky had ceased to be full of tempests, yet carried clouds; she no longer despaired, yet remained dissatisfied. 4 , D HOPE DEFERRED. 315 She sometimes 'peered eagerly into the mirage of the horizon, fancying that the cloud-rim was just ready to roll away its mists from the long-hidden world of mankind; and when this hope was repeatedly disappointed, she permitted to herself, if not a tear in her eye, at least a rainy season in her soul. Nevertheless, for the most part, she showed once more the gayety of her earlier years. For, by nature, Bar- bara was a creature of light, not of gloom-of hope, not of despair. She was too warm-blooded and vital to permit her life to engender blights and mildews. "What she suffered she shook off In the sunshine." As fast as her hopes turned to disappointments, she replaced them with others that were more surely to be fulfilled. "What if," asked her father, testing her fortitude, " what if circumstances should compel us to remain here for the rest of our lives, and grow old like Frangois Garcelon? Does it not sadden you to think of the old hermit wastingaway here in this wilderness? He has left us heirs of his goods- what if he should leave us heirs also of his fate?" "Father," observed Barbara, thoughtfully, "I have made a discovery. I have discovered an eighth day of the week. I used to have only seven days in my week, but I have added a new one-the best of all. The whole seven may be evil, but the eighth will always be good. The eighth day of the week is To-Morrow. It out-Sabbaths the Sabbath. It is the day of our redemption." Barbara, who inherited her father's hopefulness, filled him with daily joy at the increasing brightness of her eyes, and the abiding cheeriness of her spirit. Dr. Vail, even in his prostration, was a man in whom the steel-spring had not snapped. There are wise master- builders of life, and architects of hope, who can throw solid arches from the present forward into the future, and can transmute the rainbow itself into iron and stone. Rodney Vail was among these cunning masons. He never once, even /i page: 316-317[View Page 316-317] 816 - TEMPEST-TOSSED. to his own secret thoughts, admitted that an unbridged gulf could exist forever between his little family and the world. t-ie believed that Barbara would yet proudly enter the society of the human race, like a beautiful princess restored to her royal realm. Whenever her spirits drooped-as they sometimes did- though not through weak supineness, but through the over- fatigue of perpetual unrest-her father deftly touched her nerve of courage and hope ; sometimes by one device, some- times by another; generally by some poetic appeal to her quick imagination. Thus he said to her one day, "Barbara, Kirke White sings of a lark that 'Soars till the unrisen- sun Is shining on his breast.' So a benighted soul may spread its wings and quit its shadows-yes, even at midnight it may fly to meet the morning-and long before the dawn, it may already find the day." Barbara, roused by such a suggestion, would instantly spread her weary wings and go soaring after the tireless lark. Under the stimulus of her father's courageous mind, the heroic girl strove to adjust herself bravely to her open-air dungeon like some flower growing up between its stones- with sweet and blooming patience. \ It was just here that Barbara's increased duties and respon- sibilities supplied to her the elixir of life. Toil, study, care, vigilbusiness,- something to do; this is the mind's surest panacea for peace. A sorrowing heart, lying at rest in its own languor and ennui, will corrode inwardly from an accumulated rust of unshed tears. Barbara wisely plunged into self-forgetful toils. These toils were not confined to her duties in the house and on the ship; she began to make studies of the island and its tropic treasures. She fell in love with the sea-girt --spot, as if she had been born on it. Indeed, her birth-place was on it, for she was born on the ship, and the ship was now part of the isle. As Barbara knew every plank of the 1urc ui r sHis sKKLZ. 0 i ship, so she soon knew every rood of the isle. She traversed every hill and dale, and became familiar with every rock and tree. She soon dropped all her first awkwardness of step, and \ trod the virgin soil with virgin feet as blithely as a Highland lassie trips along her native moors. The rain was no hindrance to Barbara's expeditions, for out of some thin water-proof fabrics on the ship, after a shapely pattern cut by her mother, she made for herself a cloak that no water-drop could trickle through. Clothed with this armor against the arrowy rain, it was her delight to go out and be pelted by the showers. "The gray gulls and I," she gayly exclaimed, " are birds of a feather." But even in the rainy season, it did not rain every hour- hardly every day. There was sunshine frequently, even though not long at a time. Both in rain and sunshine, Barbara was out of doors, roaming like one of the dwarfed wild goats of which a few still remained among the rocks at the north end of the isle. "I am a shepherdess without sheep,"' she said, "but have a little flock of kids instead." Barbara's love of natural history grew swiftly into an absorbing passion; and with the assistance which her father could render her in interpreting the strange flora and fauna, and with an insect-world which was in itself a fairy-land, she often beguiled her mind into forgetting her former heart- sick yearnings for escape. During her father's illness, she frequently brought an armful of flowers and strewed them on his bed, to be told their names and pretty tricks of growth and bloom. "Murmur as I may," said she, " sigh as I cannot help doing for the realm of civilization, yet I never take a step on this island without finding that this little world, too, is full of inhabitants, even if not of my own race." So while her father was a prisoner in the house, Barbara roamed in freedom over the isle, finding it inexhaustible in page: 318-319[View Page 318-319] 8 318 TEMPEST-TOSSED. its resources, fascinating to her mind, and almost satisfying to her heart. The little wild garden gave so much scope to her restless- ness ; it spread so rich a rambling-ground under her feet; it accosted her with so many appeals to her eyes and ears; it yielded her so delicious a fatigue by day, and- so sweet a sleep at night-that she gradually expelled her previous bad opinion of the world as a place of skulls. After Barbara had thus become familiar with the island; after she knew its sequestered haunts and winding paths; after she could come and go anywhere and everywhere ;- all which familiarity she acquired by braving the pelting stoms ;-it was noticed by her parents that the watery tmosphere had taken off the sunburn from her cheeks, so0 that she ceased to be any longer a nut-brown maid. The northern flush-the Aurora Borealis of her native New England blood-began to overspread and beautify her face. She was a rich and ripening rose of the tropics-the fairest flower in all her zone. This bonny lass, with a figure just above the medium L height, lithe, compact, and sinewy, was as agile as a squirrel, and could leap, climb, chase down her frolicsome flock of pigmy goats, wrestle with them in gay gambols, and catch up the licking kids in her conquering arms. She was a true blonde. Her hair had the color of bearded wheat, and looked at a distance as if she were a reaper carrying her sheaves twisted about her head and trailing down her back. These tresses, thick and wavy, constantly changed their tint from bright to brighter, according as she passed from shade to sunshine. Under the sun's actual rays this hair gave back gold for gold. A few stray fringes, escaping from the band, went gadding, like }Milton's vine, all the way down her temples. Whenever she let loose her hair over her shoulders, it covered her back like a gay cloak, or like the pontiff's gilded vestment when he kneels at the altar of St. Peter's. The ends of the tresses were bleached HOPE DEFERRED. 319 into a lighter hue than in the thicker mass-like a Venetian woman's under an Italian sky. Her face was partially Greek in outline; the forehead and nose making but slight departure from one continuous mould. Her eyes were large and dark-blue, as if borrowing their deep color from the double azure of sea and sky. Her neck was a comely column. Her head was loftily poised, indicating sphited behavior and native pride; and when she ran a race in the wind's eye, the light-fingered breezes would pick open her hair-braids, shake them loose, and set them flying backward like flames from a torch. This lovely maid, as full of beauty as a flower is of morning dew, knew but one ache or pain; and this Wras the restless beating of a heart baffled in its quest for life, love, and peace. The effect of climate on human beings is as striking as on plants and flowers. The mountains become part, of the mountaineer's mind; the sea, part of the sailor's soul. How could the earth be our mother if she failed to transmit her peculiarities to her children? Barbara, as a child of Nature, derived from this nativity all that could come to her from sea and sky, wind and wave, star and dew, rock and flower. Her spirit, therefore, grew to be full of alternate calms and storms, of contrasting gentleness and impetuosity, of stable foundations and volcanic eruptions, of halcyon peace and passionate unrest. Moreover, she had now arrived at those years which bring the most chaotic upheavals of the human heart-the most bewildering conflicts that shake the breast of man or woman. The narrow belt between sixteen and twenty is the tropical z e, if not of human life, at least of human love. During tiis period the heart's most tumultuous emotions arise. Everything before this, is temperate and need not be curbed; everything after it, is comparatively safe, through the warnings of past experience. Barbara, like a shining sun, was now crossing this zone of earthquake and hurri- K page: 320-321[View Page 320-321] 320 TEMPEST-TOSSED. cane; and her tropical nature was daily putting forth some new luxuriance and bloom. More than ever before, she was now an unsolved riddle to herself. One day, sitting in a favorite haunt among the rocks, reading the life of Zenobia, she flung down the old magazine that contained it, and said to herself, "I am always reading about other women. But am not I also a woman? What woman, then, am I? Who shall tell me something of my own self?" ( She laid her finger suddenly against her forehead, as if questioning the subtile auto-biographer within for informna- tion concerning her own identity. Never had the problem of life presented itself so vividly to her mind as since she could sequester herself for hours together from the familiar faces which, on the ship, she had never been separated from for many minutes at a time. Barbara found that the human heart needs not only society, but solitude. The land, in denying her the first, gave her the last. "How I enjoy my lonely hours on this island!" thought she; "they are a luxury which I never experienced on the Coromandel; there, I had no solitude ;A but here, I can roam beyond the sound of a human voice." This solitude, Barbara filled with self-questionings. "Who am I? What am I? Where am I? Why do l live? What is to be my fate?" These were Barbara's incessant inquiries, to which her only answer was, Alas, I know not: I, who am a stranger to the world, am a stranger also to myself." The eager-minded maid one day trailed her tresses through her hands, and after pensively surveying them for a moment, exclaimed, "Here is a yellow-winged insect that happens to be myself instead of some other moth. If it were another, I should know it better. Being myself, it is a puzzle to me. ,Is there any such thing as self-knowledge? Then from what book may I learn it?" Barbara, in finding daily novelties in Nature, found none so marvelous ok mysterious as herself. She knew how to cut the rind of the milk-tree for the white secret of its juice; she taught the tiny fishes in the cove to eat sweet morsels from her hands; she lured the crabs to confess the process of their bursting shells; she questioned the beetles how they rolled the stone of Sysiphus without letting it tumble down; she permitted the little spiteful scorpions to snap at the chiding forefinger which she pointed at them in rebuke of their ill-nature; she hung over the humming-birds as these did over the cactus-flowers; she held discourse with the smooth-necked iguana; she caught the papilio butterfly and let him go again for the joy of beholding him regain his liberty;-all these living creatures Barbara saw and studied; -and she then reflected that she herself was simply one additional creature among them, perhaps a good deal like them, and must be put into the same category with them- all being equal parts of Nature's common plan, and busy figures in her general scene. In proportion as she sharpened her scrutiny into the earth's outward pageant, she deepened her probings into her inner- most soul. The proper study of womankind is woman. In this sweet lore of loveliness and love, Barbara now found her chief teacher and pupil, her best problem and ex- ample-all in her simple and ignorant self. "This little book," said she, picking up again the dropped magazine, "tells me that Zeno, when asked, 'What is life? replied, ' Inquire of the dead.' But he gave that answer to those who dwelt in the living world, and who might well appeal from life to death. But I have not yet lived among the living. When I ask, What is life?-I want to go first to the living before I am sent to the dead. But, O, is it possible that I am to catch my first glimpse of mankind, not among their living faces, but among their departed shades? page: 322-323[View Page 322-323] 822 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Am I to make my exit from the world before I have made my entrance into it? No, it cannot be,-I invoke heaven's justice! If Divine Providence, and not chance, or fate, rules the world, how can I be left banished forever from the human family? No, my captivity must one day end-my chain shall surely be broken-my liberty is yet to come. 0 Father in Heaven, grant me patience to endure my burden- some self until that free hour!" * " * A. CHAPTER XVIII. NARCISSA. T ARBARA sometimes resorted to a cunning stratagem as a means of escape from her self-consciousness, and from the morbid misery that attended it. She would borrow her mother's hand-glass-a little oval piece of French plate, bound in a black-walnut rim. Carrying this glass with her into the woods, or by the sea, or among the rocks, the beau- tiful maid would sit and scrutinize herself in the magical mirror-a mirror made magical by the face reflected in it. But Barbara consulted this glass not from vanity---a desire to see her own face ; but fr6a sympathy-a desire to see another's. Vanity is not a wild-flower, but a garden-vine; it grows not to please God, but men; it plants itself where there are eyes to gaze at it; and as Barbara's world was devoid of the common multitude of human spectators, her heart had not yet ripened its native seeds (and weeds) of vain display. Barbara went to the glass to find in it, not herself, but a companion. The fair creature who dwelt in the mirror was invested with a personality distinct from the gazer's own. The glass-holder's fancy had long ago pretended that this other person was her sister. Barbara had conferred on this evanescent twin the name Narcissa-borrowed from the fable of Narcissus, who contemplated his image in a glassy brook. Barbara studied the magical mirror not to watch herself but Narcissa. Nature's craving for the society of one's equals in years is strong; and when this came upon Barbara, she resorted affectionately to Narcissa. page: 324-325[View Page 324-325] 324 TEMPEST-TOSSED. If, therefore, the intimacy between Barbara and Narcissa 'should appear suspiciously great, let no cynical critic of human nature assign it to the vain weakness of a beautiful woman's misplaced devotion to her own looks. It is-simple justice to Barbara to say that she admired her sister more than she loved herself. Barbara needs no defence against an aspersion of vanity: it is only the aspersion that can be proven vain. Gazing modestly into her innocent hand-glass, Barbara was altogether too ignorant of life to know or sus- pect how completely "One good custom could corrupt the world," and that in the lady-mirroring and corrupted world for which she breathed forth sighing breaths against her little glass, no fair woman ever escapes the suspicion of a little idolatry toward her sister Narcissa. Barbara, to make the counterfeit presentment fair and fascinating, would sometimes prepare for her interviews with Narcissa by decorating herself with chaplets of leaves, grasses, and flowers. By these devices she would change the looks of her bewitching companion, giving her at each successive interview a novel beauty peculiar to that special hour. Barbara would then talk to Narcissa with varying expressions of countenance-now smiling, now frowning, now making grotesque faces like a coy actress feigning a part; in every way rendering her twin companion-her other self-as charming and winsome as possible. The more beautiful Narcissa appeared, the better Barbara liked her society. Sometimes the image-making maiden would pretend to be neither herself nor Narcissa; but, putting herself outside of both, would question one concerning the other. "Narcissa, my darling," she would say, "when have you seen Barbara?" "O, I see her every day." "What does she look like?" "She looks like you." % - \ NARCISSA. 325 "O, dear! I am no wiser now thatn before. Tell me something else about her. What is her temper?" "Well, my dear, I should call it peevish and fretful." ' No, Narcissa, that is not true." "Yes, darling, it Jis perfectly true; she is frowning and pouting at this very moment." "Narcissa, what can be the trouble on Barbara's mind?" "Would you like very much to know?" "Yes." "Well, it is easily told." "Then please tell me, Narcissa." "No, I must not." "Why not?" "Because it is a great secret." "O, Narcissa, you may tell it to me--just to me-only to mne." "Will you promise me, dearest, if I tell it to you, that you will never mention it to anybody else?" "Yes, Narcissa, I promise." "Truly?" , Yes." "Well, then, listen,-Barbara is in love!" "O, Narcissa! how dare you say such a thing? ' "Because it is the truth." i "But, dear Narcissa, is not love a happy,^ thing? If, then, Barbara is in love, why should she not be appy? But you know she is wretched." "Ah, my dearl; that also is easily explained." "How, Narcissa? tell me how." "Why, Barbara is in love, but has no lover. And that is enough to make any woman miserable. Is it not?" 't Ah, yes, Narcissa, I think it must be so, for it drives Barbara almost mad-perfectly distracted. But tell me, Narcissa, are you in love?" "Alas, yes!" "And are you, too, without a lover?" "Yes, even so,-and pity 'tis 'tis true." page: 326-327[View Page 326-327] 326 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Then, my darling Narcissa, listen to me. You and Barbara must kiss each other here in this glass-this way- so-and vow to be each other's faithful and everlasting com- panions in love and misery." In this strain, or some other like it, Barbara would run on by the hour, in talks with Narcissa. Barbara continued also her girlish habit of writing letters to real or imaginary persons, and of receiving answers from them. In this way she held quaint exchanges with supposed correspondents in all parts of the world. The most frequent of these feigned and far-off writers was Lucy Wilmerding, to whom Barbara would address a brief letter of inquiry concerning the sights to be seen in Paris or Rome, and for a reply would take one of Lucy's old letters and read it as if just received by foreign mail. "My dear Narcissa," said she, one day, "Barbara has a question for you." "What is it?" "Narcissa, Barbara wants to know if you think she could ever possibly be a princess?" "Well," replied Narcissa, "she might be ; that is, if the Prince should come to offer her his hand and a coronet." "But, Narcissa, will he ever come?" "Ah, my dear, I don't know." "Dear Narcissa, how can Barbara wait forever? She will 4ose lher patience and break her heart." "Tell Barbara," replied Narcissa, " to take warning by the two proud sisters in the story. Let her put the glass mirror down from her face and sit in Cinderella's humble ashes until the glass slipped shall be brought to her foot." "Alas, dear Narcissa, they who expect to walk in glass slippers may find themselves shod with brittle hopes." "All hopes," responded Narcissa, "must be of glass, I think; for they are easily-0, so easily shivered and shattered." "Dear Narcissa, is it so?-then what is to become of poor Barbara's hopes, that are all afloat on the sea in little fragile glass ships? For you know that though Barbara herself has come to land, yet all her hopes are still tempest-tossed on the fathomless deep, and may never, never reach the shore." "Sometimes," replied Narcissa, " when we cannot follow our hopes, our hopes follow us." "Ah, my sweet Narcissa, poor Barbara's hopes have little power to go whither she sends them, or to seek out a course of their own; they are all helplessly adrift on the sea-all at the risk of frangible glass, perishable as themselves; yes, a blow or touch would break and sink them; perhaps they have all sunk long ago-or, even though they still float about, yet if any of them should return to her, they could come only as wrecks to the shore; yes, even if by miracle or fate they should be cast up at her very feet, it would only be to break to pieces before her very eyes." "My dear," exclaimed Narcissa, " what a foolish creature Barbara has grown to be! Age does not improve her. When she was a child, she was a sunbeam all the day long. Now she is full of clouds and gloom. Her bosom seems to be filled with nothing but heart-ache. Why does she prick herself with so many useless griefs?" "Useless, did you say, Narcissa?" "Yes, my dear, useless ; for of what use are all Barbara's sorrows and sighs?" "Ah, Narcissa, did you ever see a young man?" "No." "Do you know of one?-somewhere?" "Yes!" " "Who is he?" . "O don't ask me-ask Barbara." "Where does he live?" "O far, far away." "What is he like?" "He has dark hair and brave black eyes." "How do you know?" "I have it from Barbara's mother-she knew him when page: 328-329[View Page 328-329] 328 TEMPEST-TOSSED. he was a child-0, such a beautiful child!-and he had a tame squirrel in a cage." - "How old is this young man now?" "Twenty-four." "Does Barbara think about him often?" "Yes." "Very, very often?" "Yes, all the time." "And about any other hero?" "No-one is enough; how would it be possible for her to think of any other?" "Has Barbara spoken to her mother or father about this young prince?" "O, no!" "Why not?" "O, not for the world!" "What is his name?" "Hush!-I shall not tell anybody his name." "Why not, Narcissa?" "Because Barbara forbids me ever to mention it." "Is it the same name which that forlorn girl once wrote on a piece of paper and set adrift in a plum-jar?" "Yes."' "And then again in a marmalade cup?" "Yes." "And then in a white-honey glass?" "Yes." "And then in a Spanish-olive jar?" "Yes." "And in how many other little glass jars, and vases, and jelly-cups, and wine-bottles- making a whole flotilla of ships, all sent forth over the sea on love's search for its one lover?" "O, Narcissa, it would be impossible to tell." "Look," said Narcissa, " the rose-buds which Barbara has just been fixing in her hair are shaking off their dew-drwps against her face." NARCISSA. 329 "No, Narcissa, that cannot be-for their dews were dry an hour ago." \ "What drops then," asked Narcissa, "are those now trickling down Barbara's cheeks?" "Narcissa," exclaimed Barbara, discontinuing the third person, and answering directly, " you never comfort me- you only remind me of my misery." "Ah, Barbara it is useless to talk to you-it is love's labor lost." "Do you think," asked Barbara, "that my heart will be forever bowed down?" "Yes." "O how can you say so?" "Because," replied Narcissa, " a woman's heart must always be bowed down so long as she has an idol to whom she kneels." "Narcissa, you are a gypsy-how much shall I pay you for all this fortune-telling?" "O my dear, anything you please." "Narcissa, if I make yoysomething that will just fit you, will you promise to wear it?" Yes. "Then I will make you a fool's-cap." Barbara's numerous interviews with Narcissa were beguil- ing while they:lasted, but did not greatly contribute to her much-coveted knowledge of herself. "Narcissa," said she, "I award you a fool's-cap because, you tell me nothing that I do not know already; you only mock me ; I mean never to talk with you again." Barbara then, in turning away from Narcissa, would yearn for some real and living companion of her own age with whom to compare herself, in order to gain a more satis- fying self-knowledge; but, having no such companion out- side of herself, she would bravely question her own mind, thus: "Can I sing? Yes, I can sing," She would even ace page: 330-331[View Page 330-331] 330 TEMPEST-TOSSED. i knowledge that she could give back to the birds song for song; that she could j; " Murmur by the water-brooks A sweeter music than their own;" but her perplexity ras, though she could do all this, yet as compared with other maidens far away, was her voice harsh or sweet? This she could not ascertain. "O," she ex- claimed, "how vexatious it is, not to be sure whether I am a crow or a nightingale." In like manner she inquired of herself whether she was homely or fair.- But on this point, too, she had no chance to make judgment by comparison. "I do not know whether I am a beauty or a fright," she sighed. And what problem could have been more tormenting to a woma/% mind? "Am I educated and intelligent, or only a poor little fool?" She could not guess which; for, having never been a scholar in a class with competitors, she had never measured her own proficiency with theirs. "I might be a dunce or a savanl," she said, "and yet never be sure whether I was the one or the other." Was she good or bad? Here too she was equally per- plexed. Her heart was such an uncertain sea-now in quiet, now in tempest- that sometimes she imagined herself a saint, more often a sinner; "for how can I tell," thought she, "whether I am one of the wise or foolish virgins?-and my father says that even the wise are foolish enough." Was she a filial daughter, or a grief to her parents? Ever since she had experienced her quickened love for them, she frequently chid herself for imaginary shortcomings, now toward her mother, now toward her father. "Suppose," said she, " that my parents had other children-would my brothers and sisters have caused such trouble and anxiety as I have done "But the more she pondered this query, the less she could answer it. Was she rich or poor? She was not consciously either; for as riches and poverty are comparative conditions, she 1 NARCISSA. 331 was unable to say whether she was of high station or low. "I do not know," she sighed, " whether I am a peasant or a' queen." Barbara constantly plied herself with these, and with a great multitude of other anxious inquiries, which she could easily ask to her bewilderment, but could never answer to her satisfaction. "Who am I? what am I? where am I? what is to become of me?" This was Barbara's unanswered catechism, and however often she propounded it to herself, its high-sounding ques- tions elicited only faint-sounding echoes of themselves. The fair forehead on which her meditative forefinger was laid with a pensive touch of inward inquiry-as a curious pilgrim rests his staff against the sphinx- kept its secret to itself, and was willing that the anxious ques- tioner, though- abundantly alive, should remain ignorant of life. The great reason why Barbara was such a perplexity to her own mind, was not owing to her peculiar seclusion, so different from that of other young women, but to the natural enigma which every young, gifted and restless human soul," even amid the most fortunate surroundings, must always be to its ever-aspiring and ever-baffled self. If Barbara could not tell whether she was one thing or another; whether her mind was educated or ignorant; whether her character was lovely or vicious; whether her soul was pure or wayward; all this was because her faculties were still in their formative process, and had not yet precip- itated themselves into the permanent crystal of their final mould. On the one hand, as to her intellectual education, it had gone much farther than that of most young women (or young men) of her years; for her parents were rare instruc- tors; but their fair pupil was unaware of the superior advantage which she had always possessed over most others of her own age in the crowded world. page: 332-333[View Page 332-333] - 3 32TEMPEST-TOSSED. On the other hand, as to her moral development, although this had been of the highest order possible in the circum- stances, yet the circumstances themselves-notwithstanding Jezebel's theory to the contrary-were not propitious to Barbara's best moral and spiritual discipline. The secluded maid had dwelt remotely aloof from the world's common temptations to evil, and was therefore deprived of the wholesome opportunity of resisting these insidious but salutary enemies of the soul. This resistance is a holy war which all must wage who hope to win a true victory of life. In a great degree, Barbara's life had consisted in doing neither wrong nor right. Her moral stalwartness had never yet stiffened under the buffet and brunt of the world's rude blows. She now dwelt like Eve in a secluded garden, but without Eve's two instructors- the tempting serpent and the flaming sword. The serpent that crept into Paradise, and the sword that flashed over its gates, have ever since been twin guardian angels of man, kind. The one brings temptation-the other, punishment. Temptation and punishment are the chief aids to virtue; they yield a brave culture to the soul; they are earthly forms of heavenly discipline. The young self-examiner, sitting with her finger on her forehead, was conscious of the great capacities for good or evil which existed within her, and which, like sealed fount- ains, exist in all strong natures, ready to burst forth when- ever the rod shall strike the rock. She felt herself dowered with " the scorn of scorn, the hate of hate, the love of love." She saw herself, at times, uncontrollable in her energies, aspirations, and agonies ; but, at others, gentle, and obedient to the least law which she chose to impose on her mind and heart. She believed herself fighting the battle of life with fearful earnestness-but could not foresee whether to victory or defeat. "Alas!" exclaimed the troubled catechist-who always began her questionings with pride only to end them with humility-" it is only too plain, the more I look into myself, NARCISSA. 333 that I am nothing but a poor, half-savage creature, shut out from the civilized world because I am not fitted to enter into it." But amid all the tempest-tossings that rolled their floods of bitter waters through Barbara's soul, she had one perpetual, fathomless, and halcyon refuge; one pure, serene, abiding sense which no breath of passion could ruffle into unrest; one feeling which, being always calm itself, could often calm all others; and this was her love of beauty. To every aspect of Nature, Barbara's eyes were open, and her soul was reverent. She delighted in the pretty story told of Linnvous who, whenever he discovered a new flower, thanked heaven for the sight. She worshipped at the holy altar of a religion that lifts its homage "From Nature up to Nature's God." In studying the divine handiwork of creation, she sought not only for outward signs but inward significations. She held mystical communion with the flowers, the trees, the birds, the winds, and the waves. : In this way she made the land as completely her own as she had made the sea; she was the fair mistress of both ;" and sometimes as she walked with bare and shining feet along the sea-sandsfollowing the foamy edge of "The league-long roller thundering on the reef," or as she went trailing tHirough the dewy grass with cool, moist, morning tread, she seemed like some stray goddess wandering from a celestial realm. Indeed she might have personated the divine Venus herself, who once walked this earthly globe with so celestial a tread that under her foot- falls the sea feathered into foam, and the land blossomed into flowers. "Mary," asked Dr. Vail one day, "when you lived in the world did you ever see a fairer or nobler creature than our daughter Barbara?" page: 334-335[View Page 334-335] 334 TEMPEST- TOSSED. "No," said hr manother proudly, as many mothers have said before, an will say again. Even to an unprejudiced judgment, unwarped by parental bias, Barbara must have seemed to all the world-could its millions of admiring eyes have beheld her-nothing less than one of its chiefest wonders and sweetest delights. Whatever she did, whether taming the goats, mocking the birds, gathering the fire-flies, defying the rains, answer- in1 the winds, or invading the floods-Barbara did every- thing with such a splendid, restless, niad-cap energy that her father exclaimed one day, struck with her exuberance of spirits, "Barbara, you are a wild Diana, outwilding the wil- derness.' Dr. Vail's illness and convalescence continued nearly three months-through June, July, and August. The weather, during the first two months, was daily drenched with the outpourings of the rainy season; but, during the third, was perfumed with the same fragrant airs which Columbus found so balmy, and which his companions mistook for the breath that blew through Eden. Having been fever-smitten and almost death-struck, the physician was still his own patient-pale-and haggard. He now took advantage of the fine weather to walk a little every day in the cool mornings, leaning on his daughter's arm. At first these walks were very short-not farther than from the house to Jezebel's fresh-water spring and back again. This spring, after the earthquake had emptied it of water, gradually regained its former cooling depths. Dr. Vail now imagined that the water possessed a medicinal tincture of iron. He drank from this fountain of life with daily invigoration. At length, still leaning on the same beauteous arm that had never been pressed against another man, he walked to the cove to set his glad eye once more on the Coromandel. ; "Ah, Barbara," said he jubilantly, "this is a welcome, happy sight. When I last saw the old ship, she was on her beam-ends. Nature has plucked her back by miracle from her grave-restored her like a wilted water-lily to the living stream. I can now believe that Hercules rescued Alcestis from the tomb. The brave old ship rallied from the earth- quake many weeks sooner than her master has done, who is not recovered yet. I am almost as glad to see yonder stranded hulk once again in her native element as to see my own bodily frame creeping back to my former health and strength. Barbara, if you and I are spared to enter the world, the old ship must enter with us. And once there, she must never be put to any sordid or common use, but only to some sweet charity-to some humane function of civiliza- tion-perhaps to be a merciful hospital for weather-beaten sailors like ourselves." Barbara, who had for several weeks been preparing a sur- prise for her father, led him one morning, under pretence of varying their walks, to the little boat Good-Hope. The maiden had planted it round about with vines and flowers which she had dug up by the roots from various parts of the island and had massed together about the strange wreck in brilliant profusion. The rain had touched them with a magic of swift and luxuriant growth. Their stems and tendrils interlaced each other. Their leaves almost buried the wooden frame-work out of sight. They grew up be- tween the broken planks, gently hiding all signs of the disaster-just as on the field of Waterloo, immediately after the battle, the midsummer vines trailed their green way up through the rents and holes which the cannon-shots had made in the fences and walls. "You see, dear father," said Barbara, "that our Good- Hope is every day budding into fuller bloom." Among the flowers which Barbara had transplanted to grace the pinnace, was a black-rose-its petals resembling flakes of soft black satin. It was like a common rose in stalk thorn, calyx, shape, fragrance, and all; only, instead of being red, pink, or whites it was black as jet. (& page: 336-337[View Page 336-337] 336 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Barbara, to whom all flowers were an equal novelty, saw nothing singular in this rare vagary of Nature. But her father, who had once heard a half-fabulous tale that such an ebony rose existed somewhere in the tropics, but who had never credited the report, was as pleased with this new glory as if he had shaken diamonds from it, instead of dews. "This," said he, "is 'Helen's beauty in the brow of Egypt.' It is Solomon's canticle, and says, ' I am black but comely. It is Jezebel's own flower-her young wild sister of the wilderness; pluck it and take it to her." Barbara carried it carefully in her left hand, while her right arm was her father's prop during the return walk. "Jezebel," asked Rodney, after reaching the house,- Barbara concealing the strange flower behind her,--"did you ever see a coal-black rose?" "Law, yes, Massa Vail," replied Bel,-a pleased air of reminiscence glowing in her face. "Coal Black Rose? Law, yes; she was de ole buttermilk woman ob Salem; she went round in de mornins, ringin' her bell, anx cryin', ' Want any buttermilk?' Yes, dat was her name-Coal Black Rose." ' " , no," replied Barbara, "my father means this rose- look at it," and she gave it into Jezebel's hand. "Well, I declar'!" exclaimed the elder of the Ethiops, as much pleased as if gazing at a new-born babe of that race. "What's de Lord agwine to do nex'! He keeps a-workin' in de garden all de time. Jist as like as not, if He was agwine to 'stroy de world to-morrow, He would be makin' new roses in it to-day. Well, what's de good book say? -' Cometh up like de flower.' Now, dat's been de way de white folks hab come up-for dey are like de flowers. Look at dis yer girl's rosy cheeks and blue eyes- jist like de flowers; and look at dis yer har', jist de color ob de marigold"-stroking Barbara's flowing tresses,-" Yes dis lamb, she's always been a comin' up like a flower, because NARCISSA. 887 I she is all de flowers put into one. But how could ole Bel ever 'spec to come ftp like a flower, when dar nebber was no flower black enough for her to come up like? Dis black rose would a' done once, but de springtime is over for ole Bel. It's too late now for dis ole woman to be a comin' up like any kind ob a flower." Just then her clumsy hand jarred the ripe rose, so that the rose-leaves fell in a pretty rain at her feet. o "Look dar!" she exclaimed, beholding what she thought an emblem full of moral meaning, "^what's de good book say? ' De grass withereth-de flower fadeth.' Yes, de flower fadetlh-see, here de leaves hab dropped off-jist as black as if dey was all dressed 'gwine to a funeral. Lawks a massy, if de time hab passed for ole Bel to come up like dis black rose, de time 'hab jist come for ole Bel to drop off like dese dyin' leaves. Yes, my chillen, ole Bel" is jist in time, not to come up but only to drop off like a flower." Dr. Vail, as soon as he grew strong enough to swing an axe, cut open a vista among the trees surrounding the house, in order to command from its threshold a view of the ocean; a narrow strip of whose broad expanse he could now survey to the southeast. A few days afterward, he was rewarded for this labor with a sight that shot a thrill through his soul. "Great heaven! he exclaimed, "a sail in sight!- a steamer hovering near the coast!-sending a boat ashore! For what? For us? No, it must be for water. But the crew shall take us too! I must meet them - at the south beach! God be praised for deliverance at last!" He made this glad discovery just at daybreak. The family were all asleep. He roused no one but Mary, to whom he briefly announced the news.-- Then, without waiting another moment, he started with mAd speed for the southern end of the island. Did he run like a sick man? Not he. He might have been mistaken on the way for Apollo or lithe Diomed. The 15 page: 338-339[View Page 338-339] 33gg TEMPEST-TOSSED., fable gives wings to Mercury's feet. With flying footsteps Rodney Vail sped toward the sea-beach-toward the strange ship-toward the open gate of the great world-toward the outstretched hands of the human race-toward all the goals of life at once :-,-as if they all were to be rushed at, panted for, and overtaken at one leap and bound, by one supreme endeavor of the soul CHAPTER XIX. FACE TO FACE. "MY dear Barbara," said her mother, "I wonder why your father stays so long? I hope it is good news that detains him. O, to think of hailing a rescuing ship!- of going on board!-of returning to our own land!" All that Mary knew of the present prospect of such a deliverance was simply that at daybreak her husband had discovered a steamer hovering off the coast, sending a boat's crew ashore to fill water-casks. Since Dr. Vail's departure from the house, more than an hour had now elapsed, and he had not returned. Barbara stood on the stony threshold of Franqois Garce- lon's old house, and gazed through the vista in the trees southeasterly toward the ocean; but she could see no steamer or-other vessel, and imagined that her father had been de- ceived once again, as too often before. "My dear mother," said she, "no ship is there. Father is always seeing some approaching vessel where none is in sight. But there is one old hulk always within hailing dis- tance; that is the Coromandel. I will go and look for my father at the cove; he is probably fixing the ferry-basket; he took it off yesterday to mend it." Dr. Vail, in hurrying to the south beach to reconnoitre the strange boat's crew, was not aware that eastward of his little green solitude, about seventy miles distant, lay the English island of Barbados-hiding its hills just below the horizon, and hiding among them the mimic city of Bridge- town and the quiet roadstead of Carlisle Bay. page: 340-341[View Page 340-341] 30 . TEMPEST-TOSSED. The earthquake which, three months before, ran with such violence between Trinidad and St. Kitts, touched Bar- bados with the faint pulse of a spent wave. Nevertheless, the houses in Bridgetown experienced from it an ominous rattling of window-paues; and the shipping in the harbor received some damage, including two or three accidents to sailors; so that the Marine Hospital had a few broken bones for the government's surgeons to set, and for the Sisters of Mercy to bind. A, quarter of a year having slipped away since then, the earthquake-which in Barbados was only a nine-days' won- der at the time-had now become a forgotten event in Bridgetown, giving place to the next topic of town-talk, which was the arrival of the British frigate Tantalus of the coast survey-the same ship that, seventeen years before, had re-charted the harbor of Cape Town, just as she had now come to. do for Carlisle Bay. Admiral Gillingham was still her commander-now a white-haired veteran who had long served his country with- out entailing on it a cost of gunpowder, except for friendly salutes. On the hot afternoon previous to Rodney Vail's discpovery of the strange steamer, the aged admiral sat on board the Tantalus in Carlisle Bay, under an awning on the quarter- deck, smoking a friendly pipe with a bluff companion still older than himself. As the two puffed together, the veteran coast-surveyor looked less like a great commander than did his robust, gigantic, and antique guest; for this venerable fellow-smoker -who out-smoked as well as out-admiraled the admiral- was Capt. John Scarborough, otherwise Scawherry, other- wise Scaw. There he sat-the same old son of thunder; the same uneasy Hercules, too heavy for his chair; the same massive face and fresty figure-head; the same crisp, snappy, kind- hearted curmudgeon who used to toss up the lad Philip Chantilly .in his grandfatherly arms. E1 FACE TO FACE. 341 The ancient mariner was now temporarily out of his lati- tude. During the fifty-three preceding years of his active life, he had never gone a day's distance from his nautical shop in Cape Town. He had at last, in his hale old age, sailed the unusual voyage from the Cape of Good Hope to the West Indies. When the dead cry from the ground, the living must hear and heed. Capt. Scarborough visited Barbados to settle the estate of his deceased twin-brother James; who, having a few years previously removed from London to Bridgetown, had there died, leaving his affairs to be administered by his brother John. This mournful task having now been fraternally executed, Capt. Scaw was waiting an opportunity to return to South Africa. Mean- while he enjoyed a daily pipe with his old acquaintance Ad- miral Gillingham. There had once been a tiff between them concerning the Coromandel, but this little breeze had long ago died away in their breasts, and the old men now met each other with unruffled and tobacco-quieted minds. "As a Briton," said Gillingham, "I do not give my sym- pathy to the Northern side in this American civil war; but if I were a Yankee, I think I could catch a certain Confed. erate privateer in a twinkling." "What ship are you intin' at?" asked Scaw, who still practised his old-time ill-usage of the letter H. "I don't know her name," answered Gillingham, "nor her armament, nor anything about her except only that she is a small steamer hiding away and fitting up not thirty leagues from this port." "Where his this cockatrice's den?" asked Scaw. "The ship is anchored in a shady cove among the Grena- dines," replied Gillingham. "Well," answered Scarborough, " she's then safe in Brit- ish waters, protected by hinternational law." "True," observed the admiral, "but she cannot stay there forever; and if I were a Northern cruiser, I would lie in wait for her as a cat for a mouse, and pounce on the plump little thing when she ventured fromr her hole." page: 342-343[View Page 342-343] '342- TEMPEST-TOSSED,. "'Ow did you git your hinformation?" "It was told me by Lieut. Spotswood, of the Calabria, lately from Trinidad. On his course hither he passed the Grenadines. Those rocks and bars all rise from one sub- merged bank, and so are all lumped together on the old charts-not marked down separately.-We are going to re- map those islands, and shall designate every separate bristle that rises from the hog's back.-Well, as Spotswood was passing one of those hundred little handfuls of rock and sand, he noticed that one of them was giving harbor to a steamer. He looked at the chart to identify the roadstead and fou that the island was not laid down. The night was moonht, and he could see distinctly with his glass. The secreted vessel was well-hidden among cocoa-palms- apparently undergoing repairs-masts out, smoke-stack down, and bowsprit gone. That, sir, was a Confederate privateer-I will wager a bottle of Madeira on it. Spots- wood gave me the latitude and longitude on this piece of paper." "'Ow," exclaimed Scaw, frowningly, " 'ow in the devil's name does a piece o' Hinglish coast, large or small, go bun- mentioned on a British chart?" "Because," replied Gillingham, "Britannia, that rules the waves, has never yet found time to count and chart all her multitudinous isles of the sea." The two old men then went into the chart-room and inspected the faulty chart. "Carelessness, demmit, criminal carelessness!" exclaimed Scaw, on finding that no island or bar or reef was indicated at the spot noted by the Calabria. Whereupon, like a loyal Briton, Scaw took a memoran- dum of the bearings with a view to communicate them to the British Admiralty :-a work of supererogation in which the public-spirited old man had already been preceded by the admiral. "I hear," said Gillingham, "that your old friend Oliver Chantilly now commands an American gunboat: at least, # FACE TO FACE. 343 O there's a Capt. Chantilly registered to the gunboat Tamaqua: is this the same man?" "Haye aye, sir," replied Scaw, " and what's more-and what hevery man can't say-leastwise whlat you and I can't say as bachelors-which the same no man bought to be-, Holiver Chantilly has got a son who's the better man o' the two. Those two men, sir,-father and son-why! demmit, they are hornaments to 'umanity." "Do they still chase the wild goose?" asked the admiral; do they still expect to find the Coromandel?" "Yes," answered Scaw. "Those two men keep paid look- outs to this day at St. 'Elena, the Faulklands, Rio Janeiro, and Cape St. Roque; they salary a shippin' clerk at Liver- pool to collect and file all reports o' wrecks and castaways; they 'ave spent guinea hafter guinea in gettin' transcripts of all the bottles and glass jars found at sea and reported at London, Paris and Washington ; they maintain communica- tion by mail with all the captains o' the Southern seas ; yes, and they 'ave likewise pushed their hobservations round the 'Orn-though there's no chance that the Coromandel could 'ave gone so low down as that." "She has gone," said Gillingham, " still lower down-she has gone to the bottom." rage, had not his attention just at that moment been diverted by the distant firing of a gun on the bay, "What ship is that?" asked the admiral of a midship- man; for an incoming c uiser was thus loudly announcing her arrival;-a war-vessel under steam and flying the American flag. "It is the American gunboat Tamaqua," was the mid- shipman's reply. "Speak of the devil," cried Gillingham, and he's always on the spot." Scarborough was smitten with sudden delight. The satis- action that gleamed in the old man's eyes was as manifest as daybreak in a clear sky. Could it be possible that his old page: 344-345[View Page 344-345] 344. TEMPEST-TOSSED. friend Oliver Chantilly-treading a war-deck-was peace. fully invading that friendly port-? "Hadmiral," said Scaw, "I beg a favor, sir ; I would like to be rowed to that wessel at once; for if that's Holiver Chantilly, here's a hand o' mine that wants a grip o' "is; and no delay, sir; for life's too short to lose many minutes before goin' to greet an old friend." Capt. Scaw was immediately set afloat in a jolly-boat with ! eight oars. The Tamaqua had anchored a mile from the Tantalus. As the English boat approached the American ship, a X young officer, who espied afar off the venerable visage of its stalwart passenger, stood at the gangway, waiting for the veteran's ascent to the deck. "Ship ahoy, Philip my lad, my brave lad, my own lad!" cried Scarborough, with a voice that could be heard all over the bay; after which the grandfatherly Hercules, without consulting the proprieties of naval etiquette, clasped his arms about the young man and threatened to toss him up in the air as in the olden time. "There does not live," said Philip, with quiet dignity, a another Englishman who would be more heartily welcome on this ship than you are-not though he were Oliver Crom- well, risen from the dust." "And where's your father, Philip?" inquired Scaw, his heart yearning toward his old friend. ' He is in the captain's cabin, sir. Come with me. We will give him what the enemy has tried to do and failed-a surprise.' It was a surprise indeed-and followed quickly by a com- memoration of it: for while Capt. Chantilly and his old friend were exchanging greetings, Philip whispered an order to a midshipman, who hurried with it to the deck, and in a few moments the ship shook with belching cannon. "What's that?" asked Scarborough, startled by the gunls. "That, sir," replied.. Philip, "is an American salute in honor of an Englishman who never uttered an insult to the American flag, and who in this respect is a grand old ex- ample to some of his countrymen." There was such a fine audacity in this American salute, fired in a British port, that it touched the old instrument- maker's pardonable pride, and set burning all his early affec- tion for his young prot6g6 of former days, grown up now and acting a hero's part under his country's flag. "Have you any news of the Coromandel?" asked Philip, who began at once to speak of the uppermost thought in his mind. "No, not a word-not a whimper since the bottle from Drosante," replied Scaw. "Poor Vail!" exclaimed Oliver. "I still believe him to be drifting about the sea. Philip is sure of it. My son and I still keep alive our old faith in that charmed ship." "Yes," said Philip, gravely. "The last thing a man should ever give up is his hope; and like the Vicar of Wakefield, no man has a greater knack at hoping than I." "By heaven," said his father to Scaw, "it sometimes almost crazes me to think how Rodney Vail must have suf- fered-yes, and still be suffering! -All the rest of us have fared well in life-better than we have deserved; but he- the noblest man I ever met-has had worse than a felon's fate!" "Philip, my lad," asked Scarborough, "do you think we shall ever see that hulk?" / "See it?" exclaimed Philip. "Why, sir, I see it all the time. It never is out of my mind's eye. At Savannah, in the midst of the fight, I saw it come floating between me and the enemy's guns to intercept their fire. I have seen it at daybreak, lying like a black bar across the sun. I have seen it at high noon, drifting athwart our bow, just within a trumpet's call.4 I have seen it at sunset, floating min the purple waters, burning again yet unconsumed. Go where I will, stay where I may, that ship goes with me, stays with me-never departs from me. See it? why, sir, never have page: 346-347[View Page 346-347] 846 TEMPEST-TOSSED. I seen any picture in art,' nor any spectacle in Nature, half so vividly as I sometimes see the drifting Coromandel and the moving figures of her wistful company--fair Barbara in the midst of them, imploring deliverance." Capt. Scarborough was struck with the deep-seated feeling which Philip evinced in these remarks; for the young man's face grew flushed, and his .hands unconsciously clenched themselves in token of the fire that was burning in his soul. "What has become of Lane?" asked Oliver. "Does that poltroon still make voyages to Cape Town? '" "No, he never once showed his white-livered himmage there after the news from Drosante. He is now in the Confederate navy." "Then," said Capt. Chantilly, "4 I would like to give him a threshing." "And so Lane," said Philip, musingly, " has gone over to the enemy?" This reminded Capt. Scarborough of Admiral Gillingham's suggestion as to catching a Confederate prize. "Philip!" exclaimed Scarborough, leaping from his chair with great eagerness, "I've got a chance for you!-yes, here in my wescot,-demmit, a hopportunity to show your mettle-yes, sir-fame, glory, promotion. I've got a Con- federate prize for you-it's somewhere in my waisebands, if I hever could find anything hafter I 'ave once put it in my pocket. Yes, here it is-look at this card. Demmit, that card will be your passport to promotion." Philip eagerly and ambitiously scanned the mysterious memorandum that promised him such unexpected renown. "What does this mean?" he inquired. The meaning was then made plain by Scarborough. "A moment lost," said Philip, quoting Napoleon's maxim, "is an opportunity for misfortune. Let us start to-night. To-morrow may be too late." Charts were then examined; plans discussed; a pro- gramme laid out; secrecy enjoined; and when Capt. Scar- borough returned to the Tantalus, it was with the expectation that the Tamaqua would silently at twilight proceed toward the supposed privateer, reconnoitre the situation, seize the occasion by the forelock, and possibly return the next day with a Confederate prize. "Prince," said his father (for in familiar intercourse, when others were not present, Oliver Chantilly still called his son by his boyish name), if that sly fox of the Grenadines can be lured far enough out of his den to be beyond the neutral line, we may spring a trap on him afore morning." At nightfall, the American gunboat got quietly under- weigh and went to sea under a soft starlight-steering S S. E. Not till after she had started, did the captain explain to his officers and men the undertaking. All were eager for it-some for fame, others for adven- ture, others for prize-money, and others for their country. It is fortunate that a great cause like one's country can appeal to so many varying emotions in one's countrymen; otherwise a national government might not always be able, out of the nettle danger, to pluck the flower safety. Toward morning, after having steamed about seventy miles, and being in the close neighborhood of the Grena- dines, the captain gave orders to lie to and wait for dawn. He and Philip went below for an hour's sleep, leaving the deck in charge of Lieut. Anthony Cammeyer. This was an ambitious young officer who, being somewhat older than Philip, and yet a grade lower in rank, bore a grudge against the two Chantillys on the groundless suppo- sition that they had interfered to prevent his promotion after the affair at Savannah. He was a keen-eyed, reticent, selfish man, covetous of prize-money. He had once thrown away a prize more precious than money. His earlier and lost treasure was nothing less than the hand of Lucy Wilmerding. After plighting his troth to her years ago, on the supposi- tion that she was to inherit her father's princely fortune, he page: 348-349[View Page 348-349] '48 TEMPEST-TOSSED. discovered that the eccentric millionaire meditated a different disposition of his estate; whereupon the young man ruth- lessly discarded the undowered woman, and thereby threw away "A pearl richer than all her tribe." The truth is that Lawrence Wilmerding, distrusting Anthony Cammeyer's motive in making love to Lucy, and suspecting that the crafty suitor was wooing not the daughter's heart but the father's wealth, resorted to a shrewd stratagem for testing the young financier's integrity of soul. "Anthony," said he, one day, "I have just been making my will; and as a large estate is involved, and as I prefer that no mere business friends should know my purpose, and as you are to stand in a nearer relation to me than any other man can hope to do,-I wish you, and you alone, to mknow the contents of my will and to witness my signature thereto." The rich man then showed to Cammeyer a copy of a pretended will, bequeathing all his estate to the founding of a National University of Science in America. '"What a dotard that Wilmerding is," exclaimed Cam- meyer. "Does he think I am fool enough to marry a beggar, simply because she has a pretty face? I will do with this man's daughter exactly as he has done with her himself-I will cut her off." And from that hour Cammeyer turned his back on the Wilmerdings and sought "Fresh woods and pastures new." Lieut. Cammeyer was a sphynx-like man, keeping his thoughts, and especially his purposes, to himself. - Often as he had heard the Chantillys speak of Lucy Wilmerding, of the Coromandel, and of the Vails, he never permitted either of his superior officers to imagine that he had ever known of the existence of Lucy except through their own allusions, nor of the Coromandel except in the same way. And yet Lucy had a hundred times, in her conversations and letters, mentioned to him the missing ship. ,i- * Moreover, in her later letters (just before her correspon. dence with her faithless lover came to an end) she had spoken of an important fact which her father had made known to her confidentially; namely, that both the Pritch- ard estate and the Vail property had each increased in value through railroad improvements, so as to make jointly a moderate but growing fortune for Dr. Vail's family, should they live to get on shore and enjoy it. This fact was long ago communicated by Lucy Wilmer- ding to Anthony Cammeyer, and was as well known to that gentleman as it was to the Chantillys. Dignified, silent, and cold, Lieut. Cammeyer had sailed with the Chantillys ever since the outhreak of the war, and had never apparently made their intimate acquaintance. No man did his official duty more intelligently than-he. Nevertheless, in social qualities, although there was some- thing elegant in his manner, he was haughty and forbid- ding, and had always been the most unpopular man on the ship. But whenever Lieut. Cammeyer was on deck, Capt. Chan- tilly could sleep in peace, for there was an eagle eye on the watch. "Sir," said Cammeyer to Philip, rousing him in his room, I " did you not ask to be wakened if there was a change in the barometer?" Y res." "Well, sir, it is at 29." "How is the wind?" "West." "I will speak at once to my father." Going to his father's room, Philip said, "There is a slight change in the weather, enough to show that a storm impends; the reconnoitering, I think, should be begun at once; by and by we may be blown off the coast." "My son, summon all hands to quarters and let us be ready for emergencies." page: 350-351[View Page 350-351] 850 TEMPEST-TOSSED. In order to find the whereabouts of the lurking privateer, the Tamaqua had gone southward of the uncharted island, and, putting herself where the Calabria had been, turned northward, following the Calabria's course toward the insig- nificant shore. Suddenly the same sight- that- had been seen from the British ship was seen from the American. "There can be no mistake about it," said Philip; "yes, Scarborough's description is correct. Neither smoke-stack, nor bowsprit. She seems a castaway, badly damaged. "'What makes the water so smooth there?" asked his father. "There should be breakers, or a rolling sea ; and yet the water-sheet is as still as a pond." "I detect" replied Philip, looking through his glass, " a low sand-bar-something, I judge, like the coral formations in the Pacific. The vessel is lying in a basin that seems walled round by one of nature's breakwaters. She's as quiet as a dove in a dove-cote." "Heave the lead," said Capt. Chantilly. "Thirty-four fathoms." "Again." "Thirty." "Once more." "Twenty." "Once again." "Seventeen." "Quick, again." "Eleven." All this shoaling took place in a few minutes, showing that the Tamaqua had suddenly come from deep water to a submerged bank which was rapidly running up to the sur- face. "Philip," said his father, "stop the engines-heave to- pick a boat's crew-take Cammeyer with you-row ashore -look out for torpedoes-feel your way like a weasel-and m.5ke a careful reconnoisance. But remember that you are in neutral waters. Commit no hostile act." FACE TO FACE. 351 The morning was delightful, and as the boat's crew sprang to their oars, the rowers enjoyed their task. If this delicious breeze," said Philip to Cammeyer, as they sat together in the boat's stern, " were from the east instead of the west, I should think it a whiff from the cool meadows of the Sargasso sea." There was now a strange energy in Philip. He rose and stood erect, glass in hand, as if gazing into unknown but sure glory. "The morning hour," said he to himself, quoting the proverb, "brings gold in its mouth ; I hope it brings to me a golden opportunity." A miniature compass hung on his watch-chain, shut in a locket. While holding his spy-glass to his eyes with his right hand, he used the fingers of his left to fumble open this locket for a glance at the needle. Looking down, he discovered that by mistake he had opened the wrong trinket; for his eyes fell, not on the magnetic toy, but on a still more magnetic attraction. This was the little picture of Mary Pritchard's face:-a face that he imagined to bear some resemblance to another face of which he had seen no pic- ture save in his mind's eye :-no, not only in his mind's eye, but also in his heart's core ;-the face of a sweet maiden on a wrecked ship, looking up with beauteous and pitiful eyes, pleading for some deliverer to come to her aid:-the face, the form, the ever-present image of the undiscovered mer- maid Barbara Vail. The accidental opening of this locket led Philip to say to himself, "Yes, once again. It is always so. Wherever I sail, the Coromandel seems to be lying across my course.. Which- ever way I look, I see Barbara shining on me like a guiding star. Does she not lead me whithersoever I go? Are not her eyes gazing at me here? Does she not inspire me to every task I undertake? Does she not environ me with an unseen safety against every peril I encounter? Yes, it seems as if her soul were now shedding itself on me in these page: 352-353[View Page 352-353] 352 TEMPEST-TOSSED. morning dews-it seems as if her breath were now wafting itself toward me in this fragrant wind. Is she on earth or in heaven? O elect lady, dear heavenly spirit--thrice heavenly if on earth -bend low to me to-day!-speak to my inmost soul once more. Other men have had emblems and omens-be'thy name my talisman. By this sign, I con- quer. O Barbara, thou art my victory." Philip's extravagant fancies must be pardoned to a young idealist in the imaginative years of life. "Cammeyer," said he, suddenly changing the key of his meditations, ; keep an eye against the devil-fish ; "-allud- ing to possible torpedoes at the entrance to the bay. Courageous by nature, Philip had the natural apprehen- siveness that belongs to true courage. "Silence!" he whispered, and motioned with his hands to the oarsmen to soften their stroke. His boat was now nearing a point of low sandy land on one side of which he saw long cream-white breakers ; on the other, a narrow strip of still water in which the reconnoi- tered ship lay at anchor. His first idea was to land on the outer sea-beach, and cross the sand on foot, for nearer obser- vation. But finding too great a surf along the sea-shore, he approached still nearer to the low point of land which divided the sea from the cove. The sandy soil bore- a few tufts of beach grass and a few clumps of wild plum-bushes. "I can see no sentinel on deck," he said, "and yet if there is one on duty, he must be able to see my boat plainly enough." Rowing then some distance up into the still water, he noted through his glass, in swift detail, the most striking features of the old ship, saying to himself as he passed them in review, "It is a rusty craft; dismantled; mouldy; green with sea-weed along the water's edge; chain-cable festooned with fungus ; bows flanked with barnacles; no side-wheel; no, nor any wheel at all; that's no steamer; no, nothing but an old wreck. The game is up. Masts? Nothing but a rem. FACE TO FACE. * 353 nant of an old jury-mast. That old craft is as hoary as Neptune's beard. I have had a wild-goose chase. How fortunate that I came here to reconnoitre, before lying in wait for this ancient snail to crawl outside the neutrality line. I might have waited till doomsday." Philip was disappointed. His sudden vision of glorious achievement vanished. His heart sank. The hero saw himself a common man. "I will take another look," said he. "She is not a prize. But she is a puzzle-a curiosity. What can she be? A Chinese junk?-a floating bethel?-a county jail?-I never saw longer sea-grass growing even from a rock." Closer inspection through the glass revealed to him, under the rust and mould, traces of a charred and black surface as from fire. "That ship," he argued, has been burned. But she did not burn here-this is no port. She must have taken refuge here after the disaster. She was probably towed to this safe roadstead that her cargo might be hoisted out. And it must have been years ago." Philip began to grow indignant at the rusty and tranquil hulk, because it was not a Confederate prize. It was no prize of any kind. It could have been of no value, thought he, to the owners themselves,- or they would not have allowed their rescued vessel to go to ruin at leisure in a place of safety. CNo," said he, muttering to himself, "this ship was never in the Confederate service; she is older than the war; she looks as old as the ark." Gazing again with his glass, while his men poised their oars,+ he said, "She is in English waters, but of American build." Philip's prostrated hopes of a naval action-a sudden sur- prise to the enemy-a brilliant trophy for his country--a proud distinction for himself-filled him with as much chagrin as Cammeyer now felt at the sudden loss of his expected prize-money. page: 354-355[View Page 354-355] 354 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Boys," said Lieut. Chantilly, "it is all a delusion. That rotten carcass has no life in her. She is a piece of carrion for crows. We have found a mare's nest." Looking for some neighboring human habitation, and noticing none, he exclaimed, "This island is a deserted place, and perhaps the old ship is a haunted craft But as we are not afraid of ghosts, especially after cock-crowing, let us go up and inspect this worm-eaten wonder-this mildewed cheat." Cammeyer suggested that the mouldy and silky-whiskered hulk might be the Flying Dutchman, laid up at last in port, too moss-grown to continue her voyage. The water in the cove was as smooth as glass. "Pull away, boys," ordered Philip, pointing toward the strange craft. The dipping oars threw up sea-grass on their glittering blades; multitudes of little fishes leaped out in fright; crabs sidled up leisurely to the surface and back again; chattering snipe ran with nimble legs along the water's edge ; rank vines overhung the verge of the basin, doubling their greenness downward in its depths ; and as soon as the land- locked boat shut out the sea, a sylvan and lake-like landscape, rich with cocoa-palms, presented itself to Philip's eyes. Looking down into the water, he saw variegated marine foliage growing at the bottom, as if a garden were in full bloom under a lake. The stillness was unbroken save by the musical roar of the surf outside, and by the songs of strange birds that had not yet ended their morning chant. The great hulk, as Philip approached it, grew in hugeness, not so much in length as in height; for the wooden walls, like the shore-fringing vines, doubled themselves by reflection in the water. "Row slowly round the old ship," said Philip, who now became quite enchanted with the scene, notwithstanding his disappointment in the expedition. ' The boat's course was along the larboard side to the stern. FACE TO FACE. ooo "Hold," cried Philip, "I want to see her name ; it must be here if anywhere." The men stopped rowing, and he tried to decipher the letters, but they were greenly enameled with mould, and were illegible. "Cammeyer, can you make anything out of that name?" "It looks," said Cammeyer, " like Constantinople." "No," answered Philip, "yonder is the letter M, which don't belong to that word." Giving up the examination of this doubtful point, Philip exclaimed, "Now boys, pull slowly along the starboard side up to the bow." In went the oars again, making the little fishes jump away from these splashing invaders of their calm retreat. "How dim and cool this shadow is!" said Philip. "How it darkens the clear water between the ship and the bank! The sun is growing hot enough to make the shade pleasant. See how yonder sunbeams slant past the ship's bow." Just then, slowly approaching the figure-head, Philip noticed on it some letters which, though greatly dimmed with time, were sufficiently illumined by the sunlight to reveal to him the ship's name. "O God!" cried Philip Chantilly, smiting his forehead, "is it so?" The oarsmen, whose faces were toward Philip, and who did not see the magic word on the ship's bow, wondered what had happened to their sober-minded young leader. "Are you struck?" asked Cammeyer, who saw the whole case at a glance, yet who hid his surprise. "Yes," replied Philip, "I am thunderstruck;" and he leveled his forefinger at the figure-head. The men all turned and saw the name Coromandel. Philip took off his cap-passed his handkerchief across his brow as if to collect his thoughts-put his cap on again -thrust his handkerchief into his pocket- and, having page: 356-357[View Page 356-357] 356 TEMPEST-TOSSED. recovered his self-possession, turned to his men, and with a preternatural quietude and a strikingly pale face, spoke as follows: "My lads, for years past my father and I have searched for a missing ship, burnt at sea. She did not go down, but drifted in the South Atlantic with a little company of human beings on board, kept alive on a cargo of provisions. Once, and once only, we heard from this wreck-and that was years ago. We have since repeatedly written to all the maritime governments of Europe and America-to mer- chantmen-to whalers-to custom-house officers-to consuls -to mission-stations-to every likely spot round the whole Atlantic coast-to get further tidings of the wrecked ship- some token either of her life or death. The one message which we received from her came in a glass-jar thrown over- board after she had been three years adrift. That was enough to show that she still survived and might at last make her way back to the world. I always believed that she would be found somewhere- somehow- sometime! And here she is at last!" At this point, the men burst forth with a loud and ringing cheer, in which Lieut. Cammeyer joined with exterior com- pliance, but without hearty participation. "My father," continued Philip, " will weep for joy at this sight. He must come here at once. Cammeyer! set me ashore here, and then go to the Tamaqua and report this discovery to the captain. Tell him that the Coromandel is rotting here in the sun, waiting for his eyes to behold her before she falls to dust. The barometer threatens; my father must come at once. Boys! row as if you would break the blades! Let the boat go like an antelope, and come like a deer!" Saying which, Philip stepped ashore, and at the next moment sixteen oar-blades went flashing down the cove and out to sea. Lieut. Chantilly stood for a few moments waving his cap, not merely as a courtesy toward his men, but as an uncon- FAUCE U O FACEJ. 0'i scious bodily motion to give some freedom and relief to his beating heart. Never in his life had his pulse danced as now. "And this!" he exclaimed, speaking no longer with measured moderation, but with hot eagerness, " this is the Coromandel!-this the day-dream of my life!-this the Holy Grael of my father's search and mine!-nothing but this old piece of mildew and mould I And where is the ship's company? Whither have they fled from this ruin? Have they, too, gone to decay, like the ship? What land is this? Yes, there must be inhabitants. Perhaps they are fishermen who found this wreck adrift and brought her here. What fate, then, has befallen Rodney Vail? Where is the living original of the face that I carry with me in the picture? And O where is the unknown maid who was born in that black hulk? That was her cradle, then? That was the dingy mansion in which she dwelt! That was the prison- house and black barrier that kept her from the world-and from me! O, to think that a few thin and rotten planks- a mere dank wall of decayed timber-should have been per- mitted by heaven to incarcerate the fairest of maidens from the sight of all earthly eyes for a lifetime! Burn!-rot!- sink!-0O dismal dungeon that has so long kept me from my love-from my soul's self! Why does my heart beat so? Why this mist in my eyes? Why do I tremble? O Barbara, sweet image, luring me ever, desert me not at last! Now that I have discovered your nest, fly not away from it as a bird! Have I, after long search, found the shell,-only to be denied the pearl? O Barbara Vail, wherever you are, in whatever quarter of the earth, whether on the land or the sea, whether under the sod or above the sky, my soul goes forth to seek and find you this day." Philip hardly knew what he said, for he had long culti- vated a habit of talking extravagantly to himself about the wrecked Coromandel, and especially about the sea-nymph whom in his fancy he saw on the lonely deck, dancing like a nereid to the dancing sea. page: 358-359[View Page 358-359] 858 .TEMPEST-TOSSED. Looking about him eagerly at the tropical landscape, he exclaimed, "What a beautiful solitude!" The place seemed to him an antique world; for the outward scene, though fresh and young, like the new day, was nevertheless made venerable by a rusty and floating figure-piece which had already led him to think of Noah's Ark; while the water which lay about it seemed as calm as if it had been in perennial quiet since the original flood first washed the world away. "I burn to know the story of that ship," he exclaimed, and he started to search for some human being to whom he could put questions to solve the enigma. Strange to say, Philip had not yet thought of finding Rodney Vail or his family on this island; for the young day-dreamer had always looked upon these personages as having an ideal rather than an actual existence, and espe- cially as never being in the same place where he was himself, but always a thousand miles off; and so he now instinctively removed them in his mind to the same familiar distance- pushing them away, as heretofore, to some far quarter of the world. "But I shall get some traces of them here," he thought. "I shall find how they got away from the ship; who took them off; where they went; whether any of them are dead, and Barbara-yes, I shall know whether to seek for her any longer on earth, or hereafter only to aspire to her in heaven." Climbing then a rocky bank overhung with vines and shaded by cocoa-palms, he sat down'on a great stone whereon he saw chiseled the figure of a cross, and under it in rude letters the words Ave Maria. "A Catholic country," he observed, "and yet an English island." About to proceed to a still higher eminence, that promised to show him at a glance the whole topography of the place, he suddenly heard amid the songs of the birds a woman's voice in the near distance. "Hark!" he whispered, shutting the gates of all his other senses and opening only his entranced ears. It was an air of Mozart's set to English words, beginning, "You who know what love is, Tell me, Do I love?" "That strain!" thought Philip, " where have I heard it? Why, it is Cherubino's song in the Marriage of Figaro." The singer's voice saluted the morning as the nightingale's cheers the night. Philip could not see her, but could hear that she sang with a wild and weird outpouring, not only from the throat, but from the heart-as if her life, her hope, her fate were all in her song. The melody went through him like some remembered thought or dream. His pulses stood still. The place seemed like a hallowed temple, and the sound a chanted prayer. The air was charmed. The listener stood filled with a sweet awe. "It is dream-land!" he whispered, not daring to speak aloud lest he should break the spell. On second thought, he stepped quickly through the bushes, and caught sight of the singer. She was a young maiden rosier than-Aurora and fresher than the morning; her blue eyes full of the love that filled her song; her golden hair coiled in a loose band about her beautiful head; her face shaded by a wide-rimmed straw hat; her figure draped in a blue dress, loose and flowing like a morning robe; and her whole presence showing some- thing of the vitality through which the nymphs and graces of the elder world-none fairer than she-were endowed with immortal youth. This maiden beheld at the same time a real a parition, clad in navy blue, with gold straps on his shoulders and a gold band round his cap. There is an overfulness of astonishment that shows itself in simple blankness on the face: expression loses its power- dies in the effort-and the motionless frame becomes a life- less mass of flesh entombing a soul stricken dumb. The maiden whom Philip thus suddenly encountered, and t page: 360-361[View Page 360-361] 360 TEMPEST-TOSSED. who had at the first moment seemed so full of warm life and motion, seemed to pass immediatel afterward into a sudden petrification before him, as if the story of Pygmalion were reversed and a living goddess had been changed into sculp- tured stone. "Who is she?" thought Philip, ,ting the question in sacred silence to his inmost soul. As when a fawn is startled, but is too young to take fright or flight, and stands in innocent and glad surprise, looking at the hunter,-so this maid then stood: and gazed on this man. "Who can this be?" thought she. "He is of my father's race. But why is his beard so black?-my father's is gray; and why are his eyes so dark?-my father's are light. This must be a much younger man than my father. But this man too is proud-looking and noble-lihe is just like my father, only more graceful, being young; yes, he is taller too; no, he is not better in any way. That could not be- for my mother has always said that my father was the best of men. What a strange dress and cap!-my father never had any such. How much gold there is onl this young man! lHe must be very rich. He is a soldier--he is like the pictures of the generals ; but where is his sword? his banner? his war- horse? He looks like some prince---but where is his crown? O, I have seen this very face, or one like it, in my dreams. Whenever I think of Philip, I think of some such counte- nance, only this is more noble than I could paint it myself. I wonder if this young traveler has ever met Philip. Ah, though I may never see Philip in this world, yet to hear of him from some one who has actually seen his face-who has taken his hand-who has spoken to him-who has walked with him-who knows him-who loves him-0O this would be happiness indeed!" All these thoughts passed swiftly through the maiden's mind; and while thus pondering she stood without moving. The fawn did not flee, but looked the hunter straight in tho face. FACE TO FACE. 361 Philip, coming to his senses, and bethinking himself of his gentlemanly duty to the fair shepherdess, straightway lifted his cap; and as he bowed his uncovered head, he blushed and seemed as if about to say, "Mademoiselle, I am a wandering pilgrim, strolling with- out permission through your grounds; and if I have com- mitted an offence by my intrusion, I humbly crave your gracious pardon." This is what Philip seemed to say by his manner, but what he actually said by his words was merely, "Good morning." To which, with sudden return to life, the speaking statue made answer in the same words, "Good morning." Philip, who had not detected her English wording of Mozart's air, was now surprised to hear his own English speech; for at first he fancied that the maid was a fair citi- zen of some ideal realm, born to some language different from the common tongues which make up the Babel and babble of this world. The lady, noticing the example of Philip's doffed cap, excitedly took off her straw hat-an action which she supposed good usage required of her, since this well-bred gentleman had uncovered his head. In her haste, she pulled down her hair so that it fell in a loose torrent, streaming about her shoulders and reaching nearly to the ground. Abashed and mute at this spectacle, Philip looked with dazzled eyes at the strange and beautiful nymph. "Perhaps," thought he, " this is the daughter of the gov- ernor of the island." It did not occur to the wise and sedate fool that as the island was not laid down on the chart, it probably had not yet attained to the dignity of a governor. Evidently she is some lady of rank," argued Philip to himself, "for there is a stamp of superiority on her brow and face; perhaps she is a native princess." L 16 page: 362-363[View Page 362-363] 362 TEMPEST-TOSSED. If Philip's fancy had not been so completely bewildered by the beauteous sylph, his sober common sense would have led him straight to the whole truth atonce; but now in broad daylight he had enveloped himself with mist and moonshine; and he went on stumbling through the delight- ful darkness of his self-clouded thought. "Can you tell me," he asked, " something about the old ship that lies anchored yonder-?" "Her name," she replied, "is the Coromandel." "Yes, I know her name; I want to know her story-her career, her " "Her what?" asked Barbara, putting an unnecessary question, in order to gain time for making an answer. "I wish to know of her shipwreck," said Philip, " and of her drifting about the sea." Although Barbara's breast was a tumult of emotions, and although she seldom put any restraint on these, yet -she was now conscious of a new instinct awaking within her: -a desire to control these feelings so as not to betray them to a stranger. Gazing for the first time in her life on a young man, her woman's wit whispered to her that she must not confess herself a wild woman of the woods or isles, but must meet this gallant guest with a virginal and shy welcome. Prompted by the native diplomacy of womankind, she managed to become at once the questioner rather than the questioned. "Where are your companions?" she asked. "I am alone," he replied. Barbara, who knew that a boat's crew had come ashore, felt that this reply was not ingenuous. "But you could not have come alone," said she. "I am alone," said he, "but I did not come alone: I came with my boat's crew, who landed me here and then went back to the ship." This reply immediately restored Philip in her esteem as a speaker of the truth. FACE TO FACE. 363 "Is the Coromandel your ship?" she inquired carelessly, and with an attempt at shrewdness of cross-examination. "No," said he, "but I could have made her mine this morning had I chosen to capture her with my men." A swift shadow passed over her shining face, and she asked him fiercely, i "Where is my father? Have you done him any harm?" "No, I have never seen him, nor have I seen anybody on this island save only yourself." There. was something in this young man's face for a maiden to trust, and she trusted it. "Do you imagine," said he, "that I have harmed your father?" "No, good sir," she said, "I forbid my fear. When I awoke this morning, my mother told me that my father had caught sight, at dawn, of a steamer near the island, and that he had gone to the south beach to meet a boat's crew. He has not returned. I cannot believe, kind sir, that you or your companions would harm so good a man." You do me honor," said he, " not to think ill of me; I entreat you to believe that I have come neither to kill, burn, nor destroy." "Indeed you do not look cruel," said she, who thought, on the contrary, that he looked full of nobility, knightliness, and grace. "Please tell me," he inquired, "how many inhabitants this island contains?" "It is a small population," said she, cautiously. "It had a larger number a century ago than now. It was once a hiding-place for the buccaneers. You will see memorials of their life, if you remain long enough-as I hope, good sir, you will." Barbara had read in story-books the frequent epithets, "good sir," "fair sir," and the like ; and she now put this elegant knowledge to a polite use. "I certainly shall not think of going," he replied, " till I have learned all about the ship, and all about her passengers." l - ,penes page: 364-365[View Page 364-365] 86 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Her passengers'?" she asked, with an incredulous air. "Why, the old ship-has--no passengers. There is nobody on board, good sir." She was now conscious that never in all the years of her past life, put, together, had she used so much woman's craft as on this diplomatic morning. "I will ask him," thought she, " about Philip." But just at that moment a powerful suspicion flashed like a flame through the heated fancy of Philip Chantilly, and he stood martyred at the stake between enkindled hopes and fears- burning alive with a consuming doubt as to whether th]exquisite creature before him was or was not the heroine of the Coromandel. There are some problems so full of delirious pleasure to the mind that rather than solve them at once by running the risk of disenchantment, the doubter prefers to linger awhile in doubt. Philip, who had stood without flinching before the cannon's mouth, now trembled like a coward, and dared not ask the young woman her name, lest the answer should suddenly frustrate his hope, and the fair stranger should prove to be some other than Barbara herself. "I have a friend, kind sir," she said, stammering, "a dear friend, living in the outside world-and-and perhaps you know him." This was a crushing question to Philip, for how could a young maid, who had been cabined for a lifetime in a lonely ship on the sea, ask after a friend, a dear friend, in the outside world--a man too, since she had used the pronoun "him"? "When have you seen your friend?-and where?-and who is he?" "O," she replied, with some confusion, "I- I never saw him in my life-nor do I know where he is." "But you know who he is?" "Yes, fair sir, at least my mother knows who he is." The wave of hope rushed back again and filled all the depth of Philip's heart, mind, and soul. FACE TO FACE. 365 He thought of a little stratagem. Detaching the locket from his chain, and opening it with a hand that slightly quivered (albeit he commonly possessed a steady nerve), he inquired, "Has anybody on this island lost this trinket? It seems to be a locket with a portrait in it. Perhaps the picture would be prized by the owner. If you know to whom it belongs, you will do me the favor to say that a stranger, who accidentally landed here, found the lost treasure, and was only too happy to meet such a messenger as yourself through whom to return it to its proper possessor." "Where did you find it?" asked Barbara. Without waiting to invent an answer, he immediately handed to her the charm, and begged her to look at the face inside. "Pray tell me," he asked, " do you recognize in this por- trait one of the ladies of this island?" "My mother,-it is my dear mother's face!" she ex- claimed, on opening it. This was enough for Philip, who bowed his reverential head as to a shrine of devotion, and stepping back for fear of intruding too closely upon the angelic presence, was about to speak at a worshipful distance, when suddenly Barbara burst forth with the question, "Good sir, if you please, what is your name?" "First," said he softly, " let me tell you yours." "Mine?" "Yes." "Ah," said she, "it is a rough, harsh name-you could not guess it." "Not harsh." he rejoined, "but a sweet and honeyed name, full of the hum of bees." This little pleasantry, based on the letters of her name, excited her curiosity as to the source of his information. "How did you know who I was?" she asked. "From, the picture," he replied. "Do I, then, resemble my mother?" page: 366-367[View Page 366-367] i S 366 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Yes, as a rose its bud, by outhlooming it." Barbara's mind now took fire with an electric hope that this might be the man of her fancy-the object of her soul's long search-the young hero of her visions and dreams. But at the next heart-sickening moment, she felt the awful hazard of destroying by a direct question her exquisite sus- picion, and so she asked with innocent duplicity, "Are you an Englishman, fair sir?" "No, I am an American." "Did you ever live at Cape-at Cape ?" and she hesi- tated to say the next word. "At Cape Cod?" he interposed. "No, I meant at Cape Town." * In answering this treacherous and betraying question, Barbara exhibited irrepressible emotion. It flashed in her eyes. It dilated in her nostrils. It bounded along her pulse. It flamed in her cheeks. She stood before the young officer like a creature of some other world. Before Philip could answer, she clasped her hands, and looking toward heaven-her eyes streaming with tears-all self-restraint abandoned-exclaimed passionately, "O, tell me who you are! Tell me if your name is ? Tell me if yui are-he indeed!" This was too much for Philip, who, with the little steadi- ness that he could summon to his trembling soul, gave one long look into her eyes, and spoke the word- "Barbara!" Whereupon the wonder-stricken maid-catching her breath-her color going and coming-her breast heaving- her tears falling-at last opened her speechless lips far enough to emit softly in response the one sufficient word - "Philip!" Overpowered then with her tumultuous feeling, she sank to the ground and lay buried under her yellow tresses-her soul as completely crushed as if all heaven had suddenly entered into it with an unendurable weight of joy. CHAPTER XX. HEART TO HEART. "I DECLAR'," said Jezebel to her mistress, "Massa Vail, he's gone to hunt for de strange ship; and de dear lam' she's gone to hunt for de massa. Dem two folks is like de mornin'-glories on de ole Pritchard porch-always out de fust ting in de mornin'. Now I was a calc'latin' on havin' de dear lam' go wid me to pick pine-apples. But no-off she strays, gaddin' after de wain hopes ob dis world. Why does de precious lam' sigh and pine for to go into de wicked world? De world? Fudge. De world is for de worldlings. We ain't dat kind. What's de good book say? 'When I can read my title clear To mansions in de sky.' Dat's de place for our hearts to lib in. We hab a house not made wid han's-eternal in de hebbens."' Aunt Bel-who, when she lived in the world, had never derived from it such peace of mind as she had enjoyed in her long sequestration from it-felt latterly a growing preju- dice against a return to its tumults and jargons. She was perfectly willing that the green remainder of her age should sweetly fade away in the same sunny isle where it was now slowly turning into the withered leaf. She shrank from being plucked up and transplanted back into that rougher clime in which she had suffered all she ever knew of the frosts of life. Above all, she contemplated with alarm, and almost with rage, the possible irruption into the island of a boat's crew of rude and boisterous men. Beaver, if he had looked for- page: 368-369[View Page 368-369] 368 TEMPEST-TOSSED. ward to a visit from the common crowd of spaniels, whelps, and mangy curs that constitute the world's race of dogs, would have prepared himself to greet them with a growl of disdain, or a wheeze of high-bred scorn. In like manner, Jezebel stood ready at a moment's notice to sniff haughtily at the whole intrusive pack of the human race. Barbara, on the contrary, who had just met one of the world's inhabitants, had thereby found a happiness so great, so sacred, and so absorbing, that she was overcome with rapture. She who for years had longed for the world and its attractions, now suddenly discovered all these summed up and embodied before her eyes in one beloved image. She who had gazed wistfully-from afar for a sight of her fellow- creatures, at last unexpectedly beheld the united comeliness of all mankind pictured in one man's radiant face. Accordingly, Barbara's welcome to the incoming world- extended by her to the chief citizen whom she believed to dwell in it-was very much like what she would have given to heaven itself, had its chief archangel come down accredited to her on earth. While, therefore, Jezebel was denouncing the world, Bar- bara was blessing it. Philip and Barbara remained sitting beside each other on the grass. These two strangers had become in a moment as well ac- quainted as if they had dwelt together from childhood. Barbara, in answer to Philip's swift questionings, had hurriedly told the strange story of the ship - hardly able, at first, to speak; for her tuneful throat was so untuned that it kept choking with superabundant feeling; and her eyes were still glittering like two violets overlaid with dew. After the tale was ended Philip, gazing worshipfully at her, said to himself, "It seems to me that I have known her all my life." Philip and Barbara were wholly ignorant that each had always been to the other an ideal character. They did not yet suspect that either had for yeaxs been the other's superior HEART TO HEART. - 869 self. They were still unconscious that during all their sun- dered lives they had nevertheless been, in a certain sense, indissoluble comrades. Their eyes were holden from the strange fact that, though they had never seen each other, yet they had never been out of one another's sight. They were not prepared to find that their having met at last was simply to demonstrate that they had never been parted at all. The most that Philip knew was that he had always dreamed of Barbara as the ideal woman. How could he have suspected that Barbara was at the same time enshrin- ing him in her pure soul as the ideal man? Not only were both unaware of having been each to the other an object of homage, but they had been wholly ignorant during all their lives that each knew of the other's existence. "Can it be possible," thought Barbara, "that I see him at last-Philip's own, true, sacred self?" They now sat in a sort of ethereal bewilderment, unable to make a solid reality of the scene. They were in a "house of clouds." They had sought each other from such far distances, and at such great heights, that now at last, in meeting, they met like heaven-traversing birds- in the upper air; not like human wanderers-on the lower earth. Moreover, since neither knew that the other's soul had been making this search for its far-off mate, their mutual ignorance now led them to restrain toward each other, thus far, the natural expression of those mutual emotions which otherwise would have burst into a fountain of sweet words or have uttered themselves in that other language of the lips which is richer than speech. "Barbara," exclaimed Philip, "have I indeed found you at last!" Philip still seemed a skeptic of his eyes, ears, and other senses, and could hardly credit the reality of his discovery of the actual and veritable Barbara Vail. "Found me?" said she, repeating his word interrogatively. Her face wore an expression of incredulity; for the idea that she had been "found" seemed to imply that. she had page: 370-371[View Page 370-371] 370 TEMPEST-TOSSED. been "searched for;" which she did not dream to have been possible. But at the next moment, a more plausible interpretation o2 Philip's question flashed through her- mind. - "O, yes," said she, c; I now understand your meaning; I have been lost and found. At first I thought you meant that I had been sought and found. But of course that could not be." "Ah, Barbara,"5 replied Philip, " you were lost, and there- fore searched for-you were searched for, and therefore found. It is written,' The lost shall be found.' It is written also, He that seeketh, findeth.' You were lost, and sought, and found." "But," said she, with an arch and bewitching smile, "you did not seek me; you sought the ship-you sought my father and mother-you could not have sought me!" "Yes, I sought you." "But, O Philip, that is not possible, for you did not even know that I was born!" "Yes, Barbara, years ago I knew of your birth, and ever afterward I dreamed of your face. My soul went out in search for you, day and night. My search was for you;- it was more than for the ship-more than for your father and mother-more than for all the world beside ;-it was for you alone!" "O how strange!" exclaimed Barbara, turning her puz- zled thoughts intently upon the sweet enigma, in a vain endeavor to solve it. "It is more true than strange," replied Philip. "Yes, Barbara, I knew of you through a little message cast up by the sea." Barbara blushed. "O Philip," she said shyly, "I was always throwing messages overboard in fruit-jars; but I never dreamed that any of them would ever reach the far-off land. Believe me, I did not mean them to get ashore. Which letter was it? I wrote so many, foolish ones that I tremble at the thought of any of them having ever been read. My father used to say that I never corked them tight enough to float, and so I felt quite sure they would -sink. O0 which one was it that stayed up perversely, to bear witness against me?" "It was a glass vase," replied Philip, " and was painted with two scarlet stripes like Saturn's rings. It gave the names of the ship's company, and said that you were three years old." "O," she exclaimed, drawing a breath of relief, "that must have been one of my father's records. That was con- cerning the ship, wus it not? Of course I cannot remember that one," she added, laughing-" it was so very, very long ago. O Philip, I was afraid you had picked up one of mine." "One of your what?" ;c I mean one of the letters that I sent." "Did you send letters?" "Yes." "How?" "I sent them in the smallest fruit-jars. You know we had fruits in little glass cups and jars. Whenever one of the small sizes was empty, and my father could spare it, I used to put a letter into it, to go by the ocean mail," she. added, in her laughing way. "You sent letters?-pray, to whom?" "To my friends." "Your friends?-who are they?" "One is Miss Wilmerdmng." "And who are the others?" "I have only one other." "And who is she " "She? it is not she." "Well then, who is he?" "Why, Philip! why do you look at me so fiercely?" "Barbara," said Philip, " you sent letters to two friends -one a woman, the other a man. The woman was Miss Wilmerding-who was the man?" "The man?" inquired Barbara, who was at a loss to understand a kind of resentful look on Philip's countenance. page: 372-373[View Page 372-373] ! 372 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Yes, the man-what is his name?" "His name?" she. repeated, evidently thinking that Philip, however good in other respects, was not good at guessing. "Yes, his name," said Philip, in an agonized manner. "One of your firiends was Miss Wilmerding, and the other was Mr. who?" I "Mr. Chantilly," she replied, innocently. "O, yes," exclaimed Philip, profoundly comforted. "What a fool I am! Of course it was Mr. Chantilly. I did not think at the moment who it could have been. You mean O my father." jt "No," said Barbara, with charming archness, "I never l sent any letters to your father." "What! do you mean that you sent them to me?" "Yes." "In heaven's name, Barbara," he cried, with majestic energy, " what knowledge had you of me?" "Why, Philip, I have known you all my life. My mother made me acquainted with you years and years ago. You were then called Prince. You had a tame squirrel named Juju. What has become of that creature?" "O, that squirrel! he lived to a good old age, and after he died, was buried in my mother's garden." "Are you called Prince now?" "Only by my father." "By no one else?" "No." "O yes, Philip, by one other person." "By whom?" ' By me-I very often call you Prince; for the name is noble, and makes me feel proud when I speak it." Philip leaped to his feet, and looked at her with amaze- ment. "And so, Barbara, you have thought of me?" "Yes." "And written to me? ) "Yes." This was an unexpected revelation to Philip, and shook him to the centre of his soul. " Barbara, do you mean that you wrote me actual letters ? -letters in English words ?-letters with pen and ink ? " "Yes, Philip, for I could not write them in any other words but English-except in a little bad French." "And you cast those letters adrift on the ocean?" " Yes." "Directed to me ?" "Yes." "At what place?" " At no place-just to you alone without any place-just to you in the wide world." " How often did you send those letters ? " "Oh ! very often." "Often ?-what is often ?" "Dear Philip,-a hundred times." "And during how long a period ?" "Why, for years-for weary years-ever since I could write. O how I used to yearn and pray to see your face! But I could not. So I tried to content myself with send- ing you messages and letters. But I never expected you to get them-no, and above all, I never expected to see you in this world." Philip was transfixed at the strange unison of souls which he thus discovered to have existed between Barbara and himself. This bond would not have been so surprising had the twain ever known, or meteor seen each other; or had they been conscious that they were known to each other. But such a union was peculiarly, mystical and weird in having created itself by virtue of its own inherent spiritual vitality, without the intervention of personal acquaintance- ship, or of social circumstance. Philip, looking down at the maid, who was now sitting at his feet, exclaimed, i " 0 Barbara, have you indeed sent me messages over the page: 374-375[View Page 374-375] 374 TEMPEST-TOSSED. pathless ocean? Are they still drifting over the wide waters? Then I will remain a sailor all my life, and go scouring the sea till I pick up every one! O Barbara, those little dancing, message-laden argosies are the most precious ships and cargoes that ever floated on the main." "O no, Philip," she cried, alarmed at the thought, "they are not worth minding--indeed they are not-they are only foolish little messages, and I would be ashamed to have you see a single one of them." Philip, looking reverently at her as she now rose and stood at his side, exclaimed, "And you have scattered my name up and down the sea?" "Yes," said she, bashfully, as if caught in taking too great a liberty. "Then, let the brittle ships," said he, "never sink--ltt them never be stranded-let them float forever! Let my name inside of them glitter in the sunlight, in the moonlight, in the starlight!-for, O Barbara, if you have set it where it sparkles under all the lights of heaven, then you have given it the chief lustre that it can ever wear. Nothing can hohor me henceforth. I have all there is of honor now." Barbara had never heard such admiring words before, and hardly comprehended their meaning. "Dear Barbara," continued Philip, "listen. I too have written your name ;-not on the sea, but higher; I have written it in the sky-where it shines down on mine; yes, Barbara, yours is the name by which I name heaven itself." With great bewilderment on her face, Barbara exclaimed, "What wild words are you saying?" "Not wild but true," he replied, quietly- speaking as from the depths. "After the joyful message reached my father and me that the Coromandel had not gone down in the storm, but was still afloat, and her passengers alive,- ever since that day, the ill-fated, good-fated ship has gone drifting like a phantom through my dreams; and I have seen on her lonely deck a sweet and beauteous figure-with hair streaming in the wind-with tears dropping from her eyes-and with white arms outstretched for help. That imperilled maiden I vainly sought year after year to rescue. But during all that time, she kept constantly rescuing me. Yes, Barbara, you have been my guardian angel from that day to this. You have gone with me into battle and turned away the balls. You have been with me in the tempest and hushed the howling wind. You have watched with me on lonely posts, and been my soul's companion in still hours. You have exorcised many an evil spirit from my breast. You have beein near me when pride and anger were in my heart, and have put these baleful passions to shame. You have inspired me to all the good ambitions of my life. You have been my life itself. It is for you, O Barbara, that I have lived. You are the fountain in which my soul washes itself clean of the dust of life. You are the temple in which my thoughts retire to pray. Thrice praised be heaven that I have followed your soul, and found its earthly paradise in your face!" As when a torrent is loosed from the hills in the spring- time% and goes rushing down to some low meadow, covering its verdure from sight, only to subside and leave the rich grass fresher than before, so this rushing speech went over Barbara's spirit, {drowning her for a moment in its over- whelming flood, only to exhibit her uplifted countenance vivified into an expression such as angelic spirits wear when they contemplate perfect bliss. "O Philip, Philip!" she at length said, "is it possible that this is you?-yourself?-your own very self?"-and she put her hand on his head as if to attest his real presence, half fearing to find the image a ghostly nothing-a phantom -a dream. !"I think," said Philip, in his earnest way, " there must be a golden chain, made of invisible links, hidden in the sun- light, reaching- round the world to bind each soul to its mate. From this captivity there is no escape. Heaven has page: 376-377[View Page 376-377] 376 TEMPEST-TOSSED. ordained that the strong yearnings of a soul for its othe self shall prove stronger than all obstacles that lie betwee -stronger than adverse winds and waves-stronger tha intervening time and space. You and I have sought eac other through distant Seas and lands. We were both thinli ing the same thoughts without knowing it. Yes, we dic know it. We knew each other, not by the mind, but by th - soul. We knew each other by a knowledge which is abov knowledge. There are people separated far and long, wh nevertheless are unconsciously approaching one another- through the darkness-through the wilderness-through th tempest-holding out to each other yearning hands whic are certain to clasp at last. The hemispheres divided yo ,1 and me, but could not keep us apart. The ocean rolle between us, and yet we drifted over it toward each othe like tides that go round the world to meet and cornmingl their floods. God, who made the human heart, respect its yearnings, for they are part of His own pulse. ' He give word to all His rude and boisterous elements to withdraw their forces and stand aside in order that severed souls man glide serenely through them, and be joined at last. So have always felt that you and I would meet-if not -o X earth, then in heaven; but now, having met here, earth an( heaven are made one."?' These pure and passionless words, spoken by Philip wit! a deep and half-mournful voice, seemed to Barbara like somc of the sweet celestial cadences heard in dreams. She did not stop to inquire whether such mysticism could be true, but simply replied, "'O Philip, I have felt that H poor wanderer! -was always to seek but never to find. I did not find; I wal found. It is you who have done everything-I nothing. ' was not even expecting you-I was only desiring you. ] never once thought of you as seeking for such a one as,1 How dared I harbor the presumptuous thought that you were going about the ocean looking for poor lost mne! Deal Philip, if I had fancied that you were peering over the S." AA!.AwA J.1 J AA^AA . I I e waters, through the days and nights, looking for me-I must have gone mad at the long separation." Philip looked at Barbara yet could not see her, for a mist clouded his sight. The greatest of all the oceans are the two drops of brine that can suddenly flood a human creature's wistful eyes, surging forward into them from the inward depths of the soul. Philip was now sweetly tempest-tossed on these two fathomless seas. "Is it not strange," asked Barbara, " that we should not have recognized each other at first?" "No," replied Philip, after a pause. "It often happens that people living side by side, life-long, in bodily contact, never obtain a familiar glimpse of each other's souls, and would not know each other's inner selves if disembodied. It is not more strange that other persons, who are drawn together by their souls, should not be quick to recognize each other by the flesh." "O Philip," she repeated, "I have not been content to know you by the spirit alone-I have wanted to see your face. If an angel from heaven had come to me and said, 'My daughter, among all men you shall have your choice to see one face, and one only before you die,'-I would have answered, ' Let it be Philip's and I am content.'" Philip was enraptured - spell-bound- oblivious of the solid land about him. If Barbara seemed a trifle more of the earth earthy, it was because the world with its fascinations was, to her, some- thing like that far-off Elysium which Philip associated with the idea, not of earth, but of heaven. "OO Philip," she asked, " what is the great world like, in which you have lived?" I have lived," he replied, 6 not in it, but out of it." "How?" - "Dear Barbara, ever since I thought of my life at all, I have spent it partly in a ship, and partly in a grave." In what ship?" page: 378-379[View Page 378-379] 378 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "The Coromandel." Barbara's blue eyes suddenly darkened with summer rainso "And in what grave?" "My mother's." O! your mother, then, is dead!" "Yes." "This news," said Barbara, with great emotion, "will break my mother's heart." Whereat, in quite an altered tone, she impetuously ex. claimed, "Philip, I have all this time forgotten my mother. You have put her out of my mind. O what an ungrateful child I am! I have thought only of my own selfish self. Come with me to my mother! Philip, let us go at once'!" At which, with an energy that seemed a pretty frenzy, she caught his hand, and led him hurriedly toward the house. A decrepit old dog crossed their path, and barked at Philip. "Beaver, hush!" said Barbara, "I am ashamed of your conduct. This is Philip. He has come to rescue you, and yet you bark at him. I am sure, Philip," said she, turning toward him, "you will receive a less snarlish greeting from all the rest of our household. Beaver," she added, lifting her finger in gentle admonition, " never bark at Philip again." Barbara left Philip at the door-step, while she entered the house to prepare her mother for his visit. As the young man sat on Frangois Garcelon's antique and moss-fringed stone, he said to himself, looking round at the blooming flowers that grew near by, "This is the Fortunate Isle; this is the Enchanted Land; this is the Gate of Paradise," Philip's soul swam in "The light that never was on sea or land." Barbara had hitherto been so full of intense earnestness and solemnity that in now approaching her mother she in- stinctively glided into another mood of mind for relief; and so, as she inherited her father's-playful temper, she burst in upon Mrs. Vail with a laughing and excited face as if she were about to play some childish prank. "Mother," said she, going up to that invalid, who was seated in her Chinese chair," I 'want to show you some- thing-look at this," handing her the locket containing the portrait. "What! more trinkets?" exclaimed Mrs. Vail, " the old ship has proved to' be a jeweler's bazaar. Every lady left her ornaments behind. You look as, pleased as if you had picked up another necklace." "Dear mother, before you open it," said Barbara, "tell me exactly how Madame D'Arblay looked; was she slen- der?" "No, quite plump." "Had she dark hair?" "No, light." "Side curls?" "No, none at all." "Then this cannot be Madame D'Arblay; see if you can tell who it is." Mrs. Vail fingered the snap of the locket, and before get- ting it open conjured up in her mind the faces of all the ladies who had been her fellow-passengers at the time of the disaster. At last, the locket flew open and disclosed her own image. She was shocked with a pleasure that was half a pain. The discovery filled her with unaccountable mys- tery, and therefore alarm. "My dear daughter, where did you find this?" "My dear mother, where did you lose it?" "I never lost it." "How then could I have found it?" "My child, what pleases you so? Are you and your father playing another of your merry games?" "My father has never seen this trinket." "My darling Barbara, you seem to be trembling with joy. page: 380-381[View Page 380-381] 380 TEMPEST-TOSSED. What has happened? Has your father signalled the strange ship and ght news?" "I have not seen my father since last night." A shadow passed over her mother's face at the disappoint- ment of another hope. "Where have you been? Speak, Barbara." "Darling mother," she exclaimed' laughing, "you are too dear a mouse not to be played with and tormented a little longer by such a wild kitten as I."' "Barbara, my dear, tell me-where have you'been? ' "I have been far away-yes, into a strange land, with a high mountain-and they call it the Cape of Good Hope," and she fell upon her mother's neck and smothered her with kisses; in the midst of which, Philip, who had been bidden to tarry outside only until Barbara could show her mother the locket, and who had heard the conversation through the door, made bold to enter unbidden, and stood in Mrs. Vail's presence, cap in hand, bowing.' If a ghost from some sepulchre of the long-buried past had at that moment flitted across Mrs. Vail's vision, that lady would not have been half so astonished as she was at the stately figure of this handsome young stranger clad in warlike and heroic blue. '"Sir,' said Mrs. Vail, rising from her chair and taking him by the hand, while her pale fac grew flushed and radiant with feeling, " who you are I know not-nor from what quarter of the world you have come-nor what chance has led you hither. But you are welcome, a thousand times welcome. We have not for many years seen a human face save only our own. My daughter here has never seen a human being except the little family into which she was born. Our friends have so long been strangers to us that we hail a stranger as a friend. Heaven be praised for bring- ing you here. In thls little house-which is not our own, but was found by us just as it has been found by you-I beg you, sir, to consider that you have the same rights as ourselves." HJAKR TU liiTAKRlT. "My dear mother," exclaimed Barbara, who could hardly repress the almost childish glee that had taken possession of her, " this kind gentleman has come to bring us news from Philip and Juju." "4 What? from Oliver Chantilly's family at the Cape of Good Hope?" "Yes, madame," replied Philip. "When, sir, have you seen that family? How recently? And where?" "Madame, I saw Oliver Chantilly's family-or what re- mains of it-this morning." Mrs. Vail started with alarm. "I beg of you," she said, imploringly, "explain yourself." "My dear madame, the broken family that you have named, consists now only of my father and myself." "You!" cried Mrs. Vail, scrutinizing him keenly. "Are you a' Chantilly? Then you must be Rosa's eldest son. No, it cannot be-he was but a child when I saw him. Pray, sir, tell me of Rosa-has she gone back to her own country?" "Yes, madame, for she came from heaven, and has re- turned to it." "O Rosa Chantilly," exclaimed MAlary, " are you dead and yet I live?" Mrs. Vail felt the exquisite bitterness of requiring for the absent only to be told that they had died. The news of Rosa's death fell upon Mary witha shock that made her forget at the moment that Rosa's son was present. "You were my mother's friend," said Philip; "she is in her grave; permit her son to salute you in his mother's name." Saying which, he knelt at her chair and reverently kissed her hand ;-an homage which he had thus far omitted to showto Barbara's rounder and fairer hand. "And you are Rosa's son! O Philip! then let me wel- come you as your mother herself would do if she were alive." page: 382-383[View Page 382-383] 382 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Mrs. Vail kissed Philip tenderly :-a proceeding that Bar. bara watched with profound curiosity. A few hurried explanations followed, first as to the accidental meeting of Philip and Barbara; then as to the expected arrival of Capt. Oliver Chantilly on shore shortly; and then as to a hundred things that had happened to the two families parted for seventeen years. "Only think," exclaimed Mrs. Vail, recurring to a thought that kept running through her mind, "only think that I, who have never been far from the grave, should be still above it, and yet your mother-dear, sweet Rosa Chantilly -who was like a young fawn for health and activity-should be mouldering in the ground!" A touch of sorrow in this glad interview served with Mrs. Vail all the more to enhance its joy. "This visit, Philip," said she, " is more than I ever dared to expect. Heaven blesses us more abundantly than we can ask or think. And so your dear mother has gone, while I tarry yet! O Philip, my motherless boy, you must let me be a mother to you in your dead mother's place," and she caressed him fondly, as if unconsciously making up for Bar- bara's lack of that affectionate demonstration. "How came you," she asked, "in possession of my portrait in this locket?" "It was sent," said he, " by Lucy Wilmerding from Europe to my mother, but did not arrive at Cape Town till after her death. I have worn it ever since. . The picture has led me like a loadstone to the original." "Dear Lucy!" said Mrs. Vail, " what a sweet girl she was! And where is she now? Philip, do you know her? i "No, I never saw her." "What!" interposed Barbara. "Never saw Lucy Wil- merding? How strange!" Barbara thought that people who had the opportunity of dwelling in the great world of mankind had no excuse for not making each other's acquaintance, so that everybody should know everybody else. "Philip, have you a brother?" asked Mrs. Vail. HEART TO -HEART. 383 "No.' "A sister?" "No." "Then Barbara must be your sister, as I your mother. But, O Philip, nothing can make up for a mother in her grave! What a blow to your poor father!" "Yes, it turned his hair white in a single night ; when he comes you will see his locks of snow." "Did Barbara tell you how long we drifted at sea?" "Yes." "And how at last we landed here?" "Yes." "And how my husband always felt sure that your father would never rest till he had found and rescued us?" "Yes, -she told me all." "Philip, is it not a strange tale?" "It makes me think," said he, " of Prospero and Miranda." Dr. Vail, who meanwhile was hastening homeward from his observations, met Jezebel gathering fruits, and said to her, "Bel, Providence has not left us alone in the world ; a steamer is lying off this island ; I have signaled her, and she has answered." "O Massa Vail!" cried Bel, "I hab seen de comin' ob de kingdom. Pete, he hab come. I seed him a walkin' over dese yer fields. He ain't black no more-he's white. He was dressed in blue like de slky, and covered all over wid gilt spots like de stars. Yes, my boy Pete, he's now white as de whitest-fair as de fairest. A little while ago he went a walkin' along dese yer bushes. He nebber stopped or turned round-nebber saw his mudder-nebber said a word to anybody-but went right tru dem dar trees, and was gone. O Massa Vail, somefin' good is agwine to happen. What's de good book say? I Lift up your heads for de day ob your redemption draweth nigh."' Dr. Vail did not wait for Jezebel to finish her harangue, but hastened forward to communicate to the house the glad news of a steamer hailed at sea. i page: 384-385[View Page 384-385] 384 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Leaping at a bound to the door-step, he put his hand on the door to push it open. "Mary," he exclaimed, and his piercing voice went ahead of him into the house, "I missed the little boat ;' her crew pulled back again to the steamer ; but I hailed the steamer, and received an answer ; the boat is returning; I have run hither to announce to you the news, and must return imme- diately to the south beach." Whereupon, without entering the house, he was about to turn away from the door-step. "Father, dear father," exclaimed Barbara, "step inside just a moment before you go." Dr. Vail then crossed the threshold and beheld the strange guest. Philip, without speaking, bowed with dignity and courtliness. The spectacle-seen, as it was, in the dim light of stained-glass windows-at first smote Rodney Vail as an illusion-as one of the many fancies or hallucinations that had given him a momentary pleasure and an after-bitterness of disappointment;-for he had often built an air-castle with nothing but a bubble for a foundation, and seen the whole fabric dissolve to a single moist drop in each of his eyes. "No," thought Rodney, glancing a second time at the princely young figure, " it is no delusion-it is he-just as I left him-the years have stamped no wrinkle on his brow- it is the friend of my youth-and all his youth is still in him -it is he indeed-the same as of old." This train of thought passed through Dr. Vail's mind with the swiftness of a ray of light-too swiftly for him to be entirely conscious that he had stopped to think at all-for at the next instant his arms were flung round the young man, and he exclaimed, "O Oliver Chantilly, my friend! my friend!-I knew you would search for us-I knew you would find us! O Oliver, my noble friend! Welcome to my house-my heart-my soul." Dr. Vail held Philip in the affectionate imprisonment of an embrace meant for his father. S "I am not Oliver Chantilly," replied Philip, "I am a less worthy man; I am his son." "What!" exclaimed Dr. Vail. "His son? O Philip, you are the heightened image of your father's self." "It is an honor," replied Philip, "ato be like my father in anfiy single respect-and an especial honor to be so like him in all respects as to be mistaken for him by his best beloved friend." "Philip, is your father with you? "He is not with me at this moment," replied Philip, quietly. "Where is he? ' "He is there!" and Philip pointed down through the vista in the trees to a boat just then approaching the shore. Dr. Vail adjusted his spy-glass and brought the scene close to his eyes. "Is your father among those men?" "Yes.5 Like an arrow from a bow, Rodney Vail fled away from the house toward the boat on the beach. Jezebel then entered, bringing a basket of fruit on her arm, and not at first perceiving the stranger, exclaimed, "Lambkin, what's got into Massa Vail? He's a runnin' down de hill like de Prodigal son when de swinfie was after him. His heels am kickin' up de dust, and his hat has agwine sailin' off his head and cotched on a pine-apple bush. Why-lawks a-massy!"-(noticing Philip in the room and holding up both her hands.) "Is it de angel ob de Lord? or is it my boy Pete? Which-? What's de good book say? 'Watch, for de kingdom ob hebben is at han'.' " Philip," said Barbara, "this is dear old Bel, who has taken care of me ever since I was born." Philip bowed in acknowledgment of that servant's faith- ful service. Jezebel would have accepted Philip on the spot as a veri- table angel, if he had proclaimed himself such; or she would have taken him for Pete, transfigured, if he had given 17 page: 386-387[View Page 386-387] 886 TiMPEST-TOSSED. I her his word for it; yet it was difficult for her to believe that he was neither the one nor the other, but only a com- mon man. Beaver was the only ungrateful member of the party; he greatly dishonored himself by a number of uncompanionable growls; but dogs, like children, never behave their best in company* Mary Vail, whom the great excitement had already pros- trated, reclined in her easy-chair, leaving Barbara and Philip on the door-step,-Barbara looking through the spy-glass at the distant scene on the beach, and Philip looking at Bar- bara from a nearer point of view. "OO Philip, is that old man in the boat your father?" asked Barbara. "He is not old," replied Philip, "only white-haired." Barbara, who still stood surveying the far-off spectacle through the glass, exclaimed, "Philip, your father has just jumped ashore. He and my father are locked in each other's arms-and all the men are waving their hats and cheering. Hark! Do you not hear their voices?" It was a shout three times repeated, and the pleasant noise came floating up through the autumnal air. "O the welcome sound of the voices of our fellow-men!" exclaimed Mary. "It is as sweet to me as the church music of the old choir. We have been so long-O so long-ac- customed to hearing only each other's tones and accents, that these new sounds go to my very soul. Philip, you say there is war. But it seems to me that if people knew, as we know, the preciousness of human fellowship by having been deprived of it, there never would be anything but brotherhood in the world." Barbara's interest was intense. Her eyes were riveted upon the new-comers. The world was at her feet. "They are drawing the boat's anchor up the beach," said she. "They are assembling in the shade of the trees. They are standing in a straight line." HEART TO HEART. 887 As Barbara watched them through the glass, their faces seemed to her like so many new stars in the sky-so many new flowers in the field. She worked the glass up and down, and brought them near or pushed them back at pleasure. "What beautiful blue shirts and white caps! she ex- claimed. "Mother, the sailors wear their collars folded down, just like Madame D'Arblay's morning dress." Barbara went from face to face. "What a difference in their expression," she cried. She had not dreamed that there could be such a variety They were old and young-bearded and smooth-comely and uncouth. Some looked happy and radiant; some care- worn and indifferent; some stolid and sluggish. This disappointed her, for she thought that the mere privilege which they enjoyed of living among human beings ought to irradiate every countenance with gratitude-ought to gild them outwardly with inward light. "O mother, the men have gathered in a circle about my father, and he is shaking hands with them all-each in turn. They are overjoyed to see him. He is taller than any of the rest-except Philip's father. Philip, who is that man in the blue coat?" "It is Lieut. Cammeyer. "What a noble man," said she, "how splendid! I am sure he must be brave and true." Philip pricked up his ears at this panegyric. Is it possible that these words just a little piqued his Royal Highness? He would not have acknowledged to himself the soft im- peachment. So it must be here acknowledged for him by a more impartial judgment. Barbara, watching Lieut. Cammeyer, said, "He is plucking a small white flower from a vine- and putting it into his button-hole. But I can give him more beautiful flowers than that. He shall have his choice of all that grow in the island." His Royal Highness, the Prince, pricked up his ears again. page: 388-389[View Page 388-389] 388 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "I suppose," said he, " that after Lieut. Cammeyer has made the first choice, I may have leave to make the second." Barbara caught his hand, pressed it, and looked into his eyes with a glance that shot a sunbeam down into the deep fountains of his heart. Philip," said she, ' you shall have more than you can carry in your hands--more than your arms can hold. You may fill your boat with them. And what a sweet and beauteous cargo that would be!" "But not half so sweet," he replied, as the sweet woman who bestows it." With frank and strong natures, love generally works its magic boldly and without delay. As yet, Philip and Bar- bara had done no love-making; at least, not in the ordinary sense of that word. They had not even kissed each other-- except as "Palm to pa1 is holy palmer's kiss." They had not whispered to each other the word love. Their thoughts had been too novel and mysterious to find expres- sion in love's common language. What is usually meant by love is the passion of two souls who sweetly barter with each other for mutual possession of their mortal tenements, to have and to hold. But the souls of Barbara and Philip were still flying too high in the clouds and were too near their native spiritual realm to think as yet of bringing their love to "A local habitation and a name." The first touch of ordinary love which Philip felt for Bar- bara was the tingling jealousy pricked into him by the little thorn on the rose which Lieut. Cammeyer plucked, and into which Barbara had shed a superfluous honey-dew from her prodigal lips. "What if she should fall in love with Cammeyer!" thought he; and the thought became a bitterness to him in a moment. HEART TO HEART. 389 Love at first sight is common; but love before any sight at all is rare. This strange, high, ethereal love-which had not hitherto thought of giving itself a name-not even love's own name -was thus far, until this jealous moment, the love that Philip had for Barbara. But if Philip's love for Barbara had hitherto resided in heaven with that angel, it was now preparing to come down to tarry on earth with that woman.- The starting-points from which each now approached the other in plain and simple love were not so widely-sundered as might at first be supposed. If a man passes among a multitude of fair women with- out bowing his heart in surrender to any one of them, be- cause of his supreme allegiance to some other image afar off,-which was the case with Philip ; and if a woman is hidden from all men's sight, and sweetly enchamed to a perpetual thought of one man's face,-which was the case with Barbara;-it is not singular that Philip and Barbara should meet, after all, on terms not greatly different, but essentially alike; and it was not only probable--it was in- evitable-that each should fall in love with the other; not only in poetic fancy, but in living reality; for their two hearts were fresh, whole, and virgin : and in such natures, under happy conditions, the instinct of love works like the lightnings of heaven--illumining the whole heart so that no nook or cranny of its realm escapes the electric gleam and heat. The young sailor, who that morning would have made any sacrifice to ambition, was now ready at noon to sacrifice even ambition itself to love. (Come, Barbara, show me your garden. I must have my flower before Cammeyer comes; and he must see that I have a sweeter one than his." "Dear Philip, the whole island is my garden; there are flowers enough in it to crown all the conquerors in the world, and to bestrew the paths of all maidens on their wedding- march to church." page: 390-391[View Page 390-391] 390 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "If," said Philip,- " you have lived all your life aloof from the world, how can you know so much about its wedded maids and other conquerors?" "I have read of them in romances." "Do you know," he asked, "the story of Proserpine gathering flowers?- ' Herself a fairer flower?'- You are Proserpine-fairer than your flowers." "Any woman," said Barbara, "is fairer than a flower. I don't know why that was written. Not any flower of this island is as fair as my mother's face." "Nor half so fair," he added, "as your own." Barbara did not treat this tribute as a piece of flattery, for she did not detect the gallantry that inspired it; and yet, at the same time, her desire for personal beauty was working within her, for she asked Philip frankly, "Have you seen many ladies?" "Thousands." "Am I like them?" He smiled at her directness, and was about to make a gay and gallant answer; but his sincere heart smote him into reverence for her simplicity, and he replied, "Barbara, you are a beautiful woman, worthy to walk in a king's palace." With a sudden tear in each eye, Barbara replied, "Then I am grateful to heaven for making me so. My mother and father call me fair. But then, I have read that parents are blind to their children's defects. If you think me comely-since you are disinterested-I shall have a true right to believe it." Philip's heart was now glowing with a less celestial but with a more human love than he had hitherto felt for his soul's idol. Never once had Philip, during the years of his image- worship, thought of Barbara as his wife; for this bright particular star and wandering spirit seemed to him to dwell HEART TO HEART. UV1 in a heaven where there was neither marrying nor giving in marriage. But ever since Barbara had complimented Cammeyer, Philip kept saying to himself, "What if this cold-blooded man should win this woman for his own? No, this shall never be. Barbara is mine- mine only-mine against all the world." The next step in love's argument was easily taken by Philip's logical brain. Barbara, to be his, must be what? "Why," said he to his listening and agitated heart, " she must be my wife." Strange as it may seem, this thought was so perfectly fresh and new to Philip that it gave to his blood a delightful wildness, and sent it coursing through his veins with an ecstatic joy. "I will take the first step now and here," thought he, recurring to his favorite Napoleonic maxim that a moment lost is an opportunity for misfortune-"I will tell her that I love her. But I will not appeal to her sense of obligation toward her rescuer, nor presume upon her gratitude for her restoration to the world. She shall have no other reason to love than love itself." Philip was full of the graciousness of high breeding, and had the courtly manners of a princely mind. "Barbara," said he, "this is the proudest day of my life." Philip chose a rather commonplace expression, but Bar- bara had never heard it before. "The proudest?" she repeated, feeling in herself a pride at hearing him say it; "you who have traveled through the world-you who have been in great cities-you who have seen illustrious works of art-you who have fought on battle- ships,-O Philip, how can you pass all other days by and call this the proudest of all?" "Barbara, let me speak my heart at once; I am a sailor, and that's a sailor's way. This is the day for which all other days were made ; for this day has brought me to the Coro. page: 392-393[View Page 392-393] $92 TEMPEST-TOSSED. mandel-and to you. Yes, Barbara, I have gone over the earth following a star until it has led me into heaven. Ever since I first knew of your existence, I have worshipped -you with all my soul ; now that I -have seen your face, I love you with all my heart." "Love?" exclaimed Barbara, with a palpitating incre- dulity. "Yes? said Philip. "Love. Suffer me to use that supreme word. I love you!" "O Philip!" she exclaimed, her eyes afire with light, "you love me O God, can this be possible? Philip, is it love?-no? it cannot be!-no, no, no! Have you come out of the world to bring your heart to me? No! Have you seen thousands of ladies and yet have saved your love for me? No, Philip, no. O if this were true, it would make me wild. Philip, why do I tremble?-I am dizzy-my head reels! She sank down on a mossy stone. Philip sat beside her, as before. A look beamed in his eyes which certified to every word that he had said. Barbara saw-felt-believed -knew that Philip had spoken the solemn truth. They were under a convolvulus vine ; Barbara trembled like one of its leaves, and blushed like one of its flowers. A dash of hot blood mounted up to the roots of her hair. She was covered with crimson-but neither from shame nor confusion-only from pride. The fever made her blood dance. She bowed her head between her hands as if to press her throbbing temples together to keep them from bursting. The flush went creeping round her white neck. Tears, which had no drop of grief to embitter them, trickled down her cheeks. All the love-tales that she had read and learned by heart went singing through her mind like sweetly- remembered tunes. "O Philip," she exclaimed, "is love such a fierce fever? Love is rest-but this is tumult. Love is peace -but this is tempest." Leaping then to her feet-her hair hanging down behind HEART TO HEART. 89 her back like an angelic wing ready to be lifted in flight she exclaimed, "Why have you disturbed-shaken-terrified me so?," She quivered from head to foot with unrestrained feeling; she kept nothing back ; she cloaked nothing with a polite disguise. Her manner was so wholly unconventional-so altogether natural-as to appear to Philip to be partly supernatural. It was as if Nature were outdoing herself and returning to her primitive ideal of beauty and truth. Philip met frankness with frankness. "Barbara," said he, with a half hush in his voice, and holding out his hand, "it is a sailor's hand. It has put itself to rough uses ;-it has steered ships-it has fired guns-it has begrimed itself with the smoke of battle. And it has also done gentle acts ;-it has patted the cheeks of children -it has planted flowers on graves-it has stroked the tresses of my mother, alive and dead. Yes, it has touched many things rough and soft-rough duties and soft delights;- but, O Barbara, this rude hand of mine holds the whole world now in its palm when it clasps yours to-day." This was all that Philip said, but he caught up Barbara's hand and kissed it as if he would never let it go from his lips. Just then Lieut. Cammeyer, with a rose-bud in his button- hole came upon the scene, and bowing politely to both, remarked; "I beg your pardon, Lieutenant, but I am sent to summon the lady and yourself to the house." \ page: 394-395[View Page 394-395] CHAPTER XXI. INTERCHANGE. HE summons to Philip and Barbara, which Cammeyer conveyed, was to a repast that Jezebel had provided in honor of the distinguished guests. It was spread on a rustic table under the trees in front of the Hermitage. A rich table-cloth-embroidered and antiques-a relic of Fran- gois Garcelon's household-gave to the frugal entertainment a sumptuous air. Mrs. Vail, fatigued by the morning's excitement, found herself unable to preside as hostess, and resigned that office and its honors to Barbara, who accepted the trust with blushing diffidence. It is the first time in my life," said the maiden, " that I have seen strange faces at our table. At such a company I feel abashed. I wish my mother could occupy her usual place, for she was bred to the arts of hospitality, and has not forgotten (I am sure) how to practise them toward such welcome guests." "Gentlemen," said Rodney, " beside the welcome which we give you-a welcome out of the fullest hearts that ever overflowed with joy and gratitude since the world began- we have little else to offer of - prime flavor except a taste of some rare wine that has the honor to be a hundred and fifty years old." Whereupon he opened a bottle of the old hermit's legacy of hospitality, and each quaffed the soft, pale, amber-like wine. Capt. Chantilly held up his glass so that the light shone through it. INTERCHANGE. 395 "This, said he, 'is as pure and gentle as a woman." "It is fit then," said Philip, "for pledging the health of pure and gentle women. Here's to the daughter, to the mother, and also"- looking at Jezebel - "to the grand- mother :-three generations of virtue and goodness." "Let it be my part," said Cammeyer, speaking in a formal tone, "since the ladies have been mentioned, to add the health of the gentlemen present-Dr. Vail and his two friends, Capt. and Lieut. Chantilly." The three gentlemen, thus honored, bowed their acknowl- edgments. "This must be the custom that I have so often read of," said Barbara, "the giving of toasts at banquets. Do women give any? Must I?" "Yes," replied Capt. Chantilly, " we wait for yours." Barbara, with natural dignity and fulness of feeling, said simply, "Dear friends, I do not understand these customs-but I hope it is proper for me to say,-for, O, I say it with my whole heart-May heaven's blessing sweetly reward our deliverers, one and all;"-and she turned toward Philip with a look that seemed to add, " and, Philip Chantilly in particular." At this moment Beaver showed a disposition to partake of the feast as one of the guests. For this purpose, he stub- bornly braved what he regarded as a severe expression on the countenance of Jezebel. But Jezebel's frown existed only in the dog's imagination, for to human eyes her face shone with smiles. She waited on the guests not like a servant but like a mother. "My boy Pete," said she, 'he's a man grown. Pete Bamley. Hab any ob you ebber seed him? He's one ob de sailor men. He shoots de big guns. Dunno how dat boy hab ebber got along-ain't had no mudder to look after his shirts and tend to de buttons. But I specs de Lord takes care o' Pete's clo's. De Lord, dat made man, knows how to do his washin' and mendin'. What's de good book page: 396-397[View Page 396-397] 396 TEMPEsT-TOSSED. say? When dy fader and mudder forsake dee, den de-Lord will take dee up.' Now Pete hab jist got to pin de Lord right down to His precious promise. Show me de promise --and I will show you de blessin'. Hab I promised and shall I not perform?' sef de Lord. Bless de Lord. His mercies am like dese yer dew-drops-new ebery mornin' and fresh ebery ebenin'." "On my ship," said Capt.' Chantilly, "is a young gunner whose name is Pete-but it is not Peter Bamley-'it is Peter Collins." "Dat's somebody else', Pete,-not mine," said Jezebel, looking toward heaven with a sigh of resignation-as much as to say that her motherly heart would like to beat against the breast of her only son once again, but not unless it should be the Lord's will. The little company while partaking of the lunch,-which consisted of potted meats from the Coromandel and fresh fruits from the island, together with Frangois Garcelon's rare-ripe wine-no mean repast,-asked each other a legion of questions. Rodney Vail inquired concerning the events that had happened in the great world during his exile from it. He opened the gates of his mind and allowed the new knowl- edge to rush in- upon him like a flood.- His interrogatories were quick and eager, showing his spirit on fire. Hardly was one question answered, before another was asked. He and his wife had previously made inquiries concerning their aged parents, whom they could hardly have expected to find alive, and who indeed, true to this sad expectation, had been laid at rest a number of years before. "Alas," thought Barbara, tenderly, (and this thought was like a shadow on all her joy) "I shall never see my grand- parents-only their graves." The conversation-wandering from family affairs-now touched on a hundred .different subjects. Tell me, Oliver," said Rodney, " what prompted you to go back to the naval service?" -; IsNTERCHANGE;S 397 Because," he answered, our country is at war." - What, have not the Mexicans been conquered by this time?" As Dr. Vail had left his country while it was at war with Mexico, he imagined that the same conflict was still in progress. He was astounded when told of a civil war in the United States. This intelligence, which had been pre- viously communicated to Mary and Barbara by Philip, was now for the first time made known to Dr. Vail. "Who is at the head of the government?" he asked. "President Lincoln," replied Capt. Chantilly. "Lincoln? That name is new among the statesmen of our country. Who commands the army?" "General Grant." "Grant? That name is new too. Who is chief in the Navy?" "Admiral Farragut." "Farragut? Still another new name! Is the country, then, given up to strangers? Do I know nobody who is left? What of Winfield Scott?" "He is dead." "Daniel Webster?" "Dead." "Henry Clay?" "Dead." "Ah, me," exclaimed Rodney, "time's scythe has cut a devastating swathe. Is everybody dead? Who then is married?" "Tom Thumb," ejaculated Philip. "Dat's do same ole way ob de world," exclaimed Jezebel, "de great men-dey is always a dyin'; and de little men- dey is always a marrying Dat's what makes it so hard for de women. Now dar was Bruno. Did you know my man Bruno? He was a lazybones-always a sleepin' in de sun. Now, Pete, he was proud and hard workin', and allers full ob fret and shame against Bruno. I allers b'liebed dat de Lord took away ole Bruno on puppug dat Pete might hole page: 398-399[View Page 398-399] -- 398 TEMPEST-TOSSED. his own head up high in de world and not hab eberybody a twittin' him 'bout de ole man." After Jezebel ended her eulogy of Pete, Rodney inquired concerning the state of things in Europe. "Europe," said Oliver, " has had a succession of bloody wars. First, Russia fought France and England-that was in the Crimea. Then France overthrew Austria-that was at Solferino. Then Prussia gave her a second whipping- that was at Sadowa. , Then England had a war in India and another in China. But our own civil war has outred- dened them all in human blood." "Have there been, then, no arts of peace during all these years?" - "Yes, you cannot guess what new telegraphic wire has been laid? Try." "Well, from Boston to Albany." "Ah, sir, from America to Europe-yes, a slender cord under the sea, giving instantaneous communication between New York and London." Rodney Tail's incredulity needed the honest look of Oliver Chantilly to confirm so astounding a statement. "Yes," said Oliver,"- no sooner was the Drosante message from the Coromandel received in London on the 31st of August, 1858, than it was immediately telegraphed to New York, and was published simultaneously in the next morning's journals of both continents." Dr. Vail's inquiries concerning the telegraph were numer- ous and eager, and led him forward into the realm of modern thought and philosophy. "What new ideas," he-asked, "are now exciting the world?" "Well, I'm not much of a scholar," said Oliver. "Let me see. Did the human race when you were acquainted with it, humbly trace its pedigree to the dust of the earth, -or did it proudly look higher to find its ancestor in a grinning ape on a tree? Then too, we used to have in college the great opinion of Socrates that the body is one , INTERCHANGE. 899 thing, the soul another-the one mortal the other immortal. But our modern wise men proclaim the body and soul one and the same, and argue that when- the one dies the other dies with it. Perhaps, since you are a philosopher yourself, if you had remained among these philosophers you would have walked in their ways. Who knows but that you owe to the wreck of your ship the saving of your soul?" "Who," inquired Rodney, "are the rising scholars and writers-the poets, for instance?" "You must ask Philip," said Oliver ; "he is a dreamer; he reads and muses hour by hour; he knows the poets. But the old Laureate- your old favorite-is dead. He died six or seven years ago." "What, dear old Wordsworth?" exclaimed Dr. Vail. "I saw him twice at Rydal Mount. He was then hale and well. He has been a physician to men's souls-he has left the world better than he found it." "One of your German professors has gone too." "Who?" "Carl Ritter, taking with him his art of geography to map the undiscovered country." "And Humboldt?" "He too-he went still earlier." "Is Europe," asked Rodney, "growing Republican, or Cossack?" "The Cossack himself," replied Oliver, " is the best Re- publican in it, for the Czar has set free the serfs, and been followed by the American President in setting free the slaves." "O Barbara," exclaimed Rodney, "how much of the history of the world we have missed!-Oliver, what of the water-works at Cape Town?" "Well, they give daily drink to the thirsty--they feed the canal-and they sprinkle the streets." "By the way," asked Dr. Vail, "when you spoke of Capt. Lane, you did not mention what had become of him?" page: 400-401[View Page 400-401] 400 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Lane! cried Oliver, t he has gone to the devil-if there is a devil-which, it is now said, there isn't." "What's datP" exclaimed Jezebel. "Ain't no devil? Den what's become ob him? He used to be in de world when I was dar. Guess he ain't dead yit." "What is Lane doing?" asked Rodney. "He is in the Confederate service - a traitor to his country, just as he had previously proved himself, a traitor to his other trusts." "What was done for the Arctic search," asked Rodney, Cc after the Coromandel was withdrawn from it? ' "Several expeditions," replied Oliver, " were sent thither each striving to fight its way a little further north than its predecessor." "What news from Sir John Franklin?" "As yet none." "When we go away from here," asked Barbara, " what is to become of -the Coromandel?" "I shall tow her to Barbados," replied Capt. Chantilly. "Will she tow safely?" inquired Rodney. "Yes. They are building in England the largest floating- dock in the world, and when it is finished it is to be towed by steamers all the way to Bermuda. The Coromandel will tow like a yawl." "After we get to Barbados," asked Barbara, "what shall we find? - Is the world there? I want to see the world." - I was never in Barbados but once," said Philip, "and that was when Forsyth and I were midshipmen on- the Fleet- wing. We had a half-day to see the whole island." "O tell me what you saw," exclaimed Barbara. "Is Bridgetown as beautiful as Paris? Lucy Wilmerding writes that Paris is paradise." "In Barbados," said Philip, "you will see Trafalgar Square, and Lord 'Nelson's monument-which we sailors envy; you will see St. Anne's castle-a frowning battle- ment like one of Nature's own rocks; you will see Codring- ton college, with a marble slab in it which an earthquake INTERCHANGE. 401 cracked 3ike a- pane of glass; you will see the little convent of St. Carliolaj with its Sisters of Mercy; you will see the Animal-Flower cave, which is a rocky basin of sea-water filled with marine plants that look like animals; you will see ants'-eggs or ground-pearls, which ladies work into purses, and string into necklaces; you will see green tar oozing from the rocks, and fire-damp exhaling from the ground; you will see sugar-mills and cane-flies ; you will see grou-grou worms and mosquitos ;-and then, after you are tired of all these sights, great and "small, you will see the Tamaqua weighing anchor- in the harbor to take you to your own land." "Now," exclaimed Barbara, "tell me of Cape Town;" for, to Barbara, Cape Town had always been one of the chief capitals of the earth-an ideal and sacred city to her worshipfulfthoughts. She had always pictured Philip as dwelling there. It was a Jerusalem or Mecca to which her nd had made many a pilgrimage-wandering up and down among its shadowy citizens in search of & dreamy glimpse of Philip's face. Philip Chantilly, though given to poetic feeling, and not averse to an exercise of the imagination, did not paint a brilliant picture of the ancient city of the Dutch boors in South Africa. But he told her how Table Mountain rose majestically behind it, with its flat top overspread by a cloud as with a- cloth; how the houses had strange angles and gables, such as she would see nowhere in her own country except where the old Knickerbockers had settled, as in Albany; how the streets were sometimes ankle-deep with dust, in the midst of which an occasional wagon, drawn by twelve or sixteen galloping mules, would go dashing past,- driven by a pic- turesque Hottentot with an ostrich feather in his cap, who tingled the ears of his foaming animals with a bamboo whip sixty feet long; how here and there a Caffir, six feet high, restored in living bronze the lost proportions of the Farnese Hercules; how the Malay women, with their black hair and page: 402-403[View Page 402-403] 402 TEMPEST-TOSSED. brown babies, formed a phalanx of clothes-washers who washed the -city's clothes in the neighboring mountain streams; how the Botanical Gardens blushed and bloomed with a thousand new beauties, every morning; how the time-ball of the Royal Observatory dropped, every noon; how the fashionable families thought it a handsome orna- ment of the dinner-table to put a live chameleon on the bread-tray to snap at the flies, how the English frigates and Dutch galliots rolled and tossed in the uneasy harbor which the Coromandel never reached; and how the scarlet heath and blue oxalis grew in the burial-ground where Rosa Chantilly lay. The discourse then took a sombre shade, and touched on Oliver's bereavement. "Ah, Rodney," said he, " what a contrast between your- family and mine! Your wife, never robust, always an inva- lid, has gone through trials enough to kill a ship's crew, and, yet she comes out alive and well; while Rosa-the very picture of health-always as fresh as the day-dawn-was suddenly broken off like a flower. Compare yourself with me. You are" full of nerve and hope. There is not in all my ship a man to full of will and wire as you seem to be at this moment. You are a hero in energy -and inflexibility. As for me, after Rosa left us, I was a sunken ship for days and months. Philip at last lifted me up to the dead level of -life once more-but I am a wreck, after all. Ah, Rodney, you know nothing of -miSfortune-you have never -tasted a drop of human bitterness-I mean of that bitterness which lasts forever on the tongue. But I have drained the cup to its dregs. I am a discrowned man. For me, there is no royalty left in life. All I have is my work, to keep me from my thoughts. If 'I stop long enough to think, I can only bury myself over and over again in that never-closed grave. Ah, my friend, my friend, there is but one love- one grief- one life. I have had all these already. You, in the middle of life, are just at thi beginning of it; but Ihave already passed through the beginning-the middle-the end-the all." INTERCHANGE. 403 "But, Oliver," interposed Dr. Vail, " you have Philip."5 "No, Rodney, we have nothing till we lose it. There is no sense of treasure like bankruptcy. I never knew what it was to have a wife until I lost her. If I should lose Philip-if a rebel cannon should carry him off-then I might understand what it was to have a son, but not till then." Barbara gave a - low cry at Capt. Chantilly's allusion to Philip's possible death. The startled maid turned notice- ably pale. Cannon-shots had been rather glorious to her faney until that moment, but she now instantly changed her good opinion of those fatal missiles. " I wish," said Barbara, changing the subject, "I wish I could learn something of Lucy Wilmerding." This remark made Lieut. Cammeyer wince a little in- wardly, but he maintained an- unsullied composure to out- ward view. "I have heard," said Philip, " that her father lost his fortune, and that his daughter in consequence lost her lover. That renegade lover, I understand, is in the navy. I should expect such a man to be a traitor to his flag." Cammeyer scowled, but did not otherwise betray himself. He had no reason to suppose that Philip meant to be per- sonal. Indeed the Chantillys were wholly ignorant of Cammeyer's relation to Lucy. cThis reminds me," said Oliver, us that seventeen years ago, on one stormy morning in Cape Town, when I was waiting for the Coromandel to arrive, there came a letter addressed to Mrs. Vail in my wife's care. I judged from the seal-for it had the letters L. W. on it-that it was from the Wilmerdings. That letter was laid away for you by Rosa; and Philip has it now on board the Tamaqua, inma box of souvenirs of his mother." "O how glad I shall be," exclaimed Barbara, u to read another letter from Lucy Wilmerding." As the feast progressed, Beaver took a more and more distinguished .participation in it, for not only did Jezebel relax her severity, but Philip fostered the dog's intrusion page: 404-405[View Page 404-405] X40'4 TEMPEST-TOSSED. by offering him ani occasional toothsome scrap. Barbara felt that every courtesy shown to Beaver was a grace to her- self. The dog never relished a lunch more in his life than on this proud occasion. But like all extreme happiness, it was too fleet to last. "Beaver," exclaimed Jezebel, pouncing upon him, "git away!-off wid you-! What's de good book say? 'De dogs shall eat ob de crumbs dat fall from de massa's table.' But it don't say dat dey shall eat all de meat in a whole tinl can." After the repast, Capt. Chantilly took a look at the weather. It did not betoken a storm, but only some ill- nature in the winds, with some answering fretfulness in the sea. But there was enough disquiet in the elements to mtiake the captain careful concerning the Tamaqua. "Philip," said he, "the men, or most of them, must re- turn. And either you or I must return with them. Per- haps, however, we can all go,-I mean our island friends too. Rodney, will you take your family on board now, or are you not yet ready?" "No, we are not yet ready." "Then will you leave your family for a day, and make a visit with me to the steamer--returning to-morrow?" Mrs. Vail, who had overheard all this conversation, de- murred at this suggestion. '; Dear Rodney," she exclaimed, c do not go until we can all arrange to go together. We have had one sorrowful separation-let us not have another. Ask Capt. Chantilly to stay behmd and let the young men instead go to the ship. Or they may stay too. Our poor little house has small accommodation for strangers, but the Coromandel will give shelter to few or many." "The sky," remarked Oliver, looks fickle, and may prove treacherous. Philip, if I stay, you must go back to the Tamaqua. Cammeyer, go6 with Philip-leave him on the steamer-and then bring back the boat with Robson and CQTter, to stay ashore to-night." It had long been agreed between Philip and his father that the lieutenant would never prefer any request to the captain, based on a presumed favoritism of father to son. But it was galling to Philip to go aboard and stay there, while Cammeyer was to come ashore. Not that Philip imagined Cammeyer capable of dispos- sessing him in Barbara's mind, but only that a shadow would be cast on the happiest day of his life. Had the father known or suspected what was passing in the son's heart, he would have gone to the ship him- self, leaving his son to be the sole arbiter of his own happiness. How often 'do those nearest to us inflict on us uncon- sciously the greatest wounds which we have to bear in life! Philip, after a ceremonious and unsatisfactory leave-taking of Barbara-which was vexatiously in the presence of the rest-went to the shore-whistled a shrill summons to the scattered men-called them together-stepped into the boat with Cammeyer--and hastened toward the ship. It was noticeable, as he sat in the boat's stern, that he was silent and moody. "I will send back," thought he, "a little packet to Bar- bara, which Cammeyer shall carry without knowing what it contains." "Cammeyer," said he, after the boat had reached the Tamaqua, "you may take on board some provisions for the night, and I will give you a trifling bundle to hand to my father- if you will do me that favor." " With pleasure," replied his -courteous colleague. Going into his quarters, Philip opened his writing-desk and wrote a letter to Barbara. He then prepared for her a little package, consisting of many safe wrappings round a little box containing a gold rng. This letter and this package he tied together, addressing the joint bundle to page: 406-407[View Page 406-407] 406 ., TEMPEST-TOSSED. Miss Barbara Vail, Fortunate Isle, West Indies. The little packet, thus superscribed, was enclosed i, another addressed to his father. Cammeyer now sat in the stern of the boat, waiting Philip's orders. "Here's the trifle which I asked you to carry to my father," said Philip, tossing it down to him with an assumed nonchalance. Cammeyer caught it, and the boat was off the next moment. No sooner had the oarsmen got under swift headway toward the shore, than the wind began to blow, and the sky seemed ready to fulfill the promise of the morning's barometer. The Tamaqua immediately weighed anchor and stood to sea. Cammeyer, on landing in the cove, was met by Capt. Chantilly, who ordered him to take his hamper of provisions to the Coromandel, and to make himself and his men com- fortable on board for the night,-as a storm was brewing. "Nevertheless," said--the captain, "I don't think it will be more than a little puff, bringing a dash of rain and end- ing in a fog." "It looks a little threatening," remarked Cammeyer, " and I am glad the Tamaqua has put to sea." But Cammeyer's gladness was not because the ship was putting herself beyond a lee shore, but because Philip was going into an enforced exile from Barbara. Philip's letter to his father was this MY DEAR FATHER- I would give ten years of my life to be with Barbara this evening. But you suspected no such desire on my part. So I shall do my duty without a murmur. The barometer is at 29, and I expect a blow. INTERCHANGE. 407 I shall go at once to Barbados for a harbor, and return when the gale is over. Commend me to the noblest woman that either you or I have met since we parted with her only equal--whom we lament with mutual tears. Your affectionate son, PHLIP CHtAILLY. The above letter was accompanied with one from Philip to Barbara-which Capt. Chantilly bore to that lady forthwith. She was standing on a high bank under a cocoa-palm, looking at the departing steamer that was bearing away her lover. "Miss Barbara," said Capt. Chantilly, "my neglectful son has forgotten to send you the letter from Lucy Wil merding, but has remembered to send you one from somebody else." Saying which, and making a polite bow, he handed her Philip's letter with a significant smile on his face which she did not understand; for Barbara was a simpleton in the ways of the world, and wholly ignorant of the merry mean- ings that sometimes glance from gentlemen's eyes. "A letter for me?" she exclaimed. Barbara had never received a letter before, except such as she had written to herself; and she now took this unex- pected and precious morsel as a bird takes a new-found grain of barley; that is, she fled away with it. Heretofore Barbara had never experienced any delight which she was not willing to share with her father and mother, particularly with her mother-except only some of her secret thoughts, and especially some image-worship which she had long carried on within the sacred temple of her inmost breast. This letter-addressed to herself and no other person- she regarded as a very special secret of her own, which she could not share with anybody else, any more than she could divide with a friend the beating of her pulse; and it was. page: 408-409[View Page 408-409] 408 TEMPEST-TOSSED. for this reason that, like a bird, she bore her treasure away on fluttering wing to her nest. A letter! It was superscribed in a strange hand : a hand strange, at least, to her; for she had never seen Philip's handwriting before. Letters are common things with most people, but a letter was a novelty to Barbara. In civilized countries, the post flies by day and night, carrying letters to rich and poor; but there had hitherto been nothing in civilization- or statesmanship-or the nineteenth century--or all combined -that had been able to deliver a letter to Barbara Vail. Next to the strangeness of her having seen a man other than her father, was the strangeness of her now receiving a letter from a writer other than herself. "I have a letter!" she whispered to her delighted mind, speaking in a hushed breath, as if otherwise all her charmed faculties might be in danger of betraying her secret with a loud chorus of joy. Barbara, on entering her chamber, shut the door, and sat at her small stained-glass window, holding the letter, un- opened, in her hand. "How strange to get a letter!" shed exclaimed. "What a curiosity!-what a delight!" She held it up--she turned it over-she reflected it in the looling-glass-she handled and dandled it-she caressed and kissed it- she scrutinized the seal and its emblem-she wondered how other ladies, felt on receiving letters- she speculated as to what might be its contents-she affected a sweet ignorance as to who could have sent it-in short, she was so full of conflicting fancies respecting it that she laid it down without opening it, purely in order to enjoy for a few moments longer the luxury of suspense. "Yes," said she, as with a child's glee over a gilded toy, "I have a letter, and it is mine; I, Barbara Vail, of this island-the Fortunate Isle; it is I who have it; the letter is my own-addressed to nobody but me; it is all for me- INTERCHANGE. 409 me alone; nobody else has had it first; it is a letter of which I do not know the contents-a letter which I have never read before; it is the first letter of this real kind that I have ever had in my life. O what a mystery I " Then it seemed to her that the unbroken envelope was sacred, and ought not to be torn; but she was puzzled to know how to get into a letter without opening it; so she stole out to her mother with a question: "Mother, if you should receive a letter sealed with wax, how would you open it?" "Why, my daughter, I would break the seal." "What! The pretty seal? Surely the seal ought not to be broken. There must be some other way." "You ignorant puss," said her mother smiling, 4 when I speak of breaking the seal, I do not mean taking a hammer and pounding the wax to powder. To say ' break the seal' is a figure of speech. If you should live to get a letter sealed with wax, you would not need to break the seal. You would need only to tear or cut the envelope around the edge of the wax. What innocence!" Barbara went to her room thinking, a letter such a precious thing that there ought to be some way of get- ting inside of it as into a human heart - without break- ing it. Then, with her scissors, she cut open the envelope deli- cately, and laid it away in a small box of keepsakes. This done, she turned from the envelope to the letter. She ceremoniously unfolded the paper-the stiff, creamy paper-the crisp, gilt-edged paper. She was now ready to read its contents, but before beginning she paused and drew an excited breath. She experienced the premonitory rapture of a delighted pilgrim who is about to enter an open garden of strange fruits. Before she caught a single word of the writing, her face already glowed with anticipation of the happiness which her heart was about to harvest. She then pronounced the written words in a low, mur- muring, and musical voice, as follows: - 18 page: 410-411[View Page 410-411] "O TEMPEST-TOSSED. ON BOARD THEr TAMAQUA, Sept. 19,1864,-5 P M. MY DEAR BARBARA- Hitherto I have loved no woman save my matchless mother, who lies in hallowed earth at Cape Town. Enclosed is a withered flower that I plucked in its bloom from her grave. You will find in the. little jewel-box, accompanying this note, a ring she wore. It has never been on any other woman's hand. If you will put it on yours,-in memory of this day's meeting,-you will render to her memory an homage which you alone are pure and beau- teous enough to pay. A storm impends, and the Tamaqua must quit the coast. I shall steam to Barbados, anid ride out the gale in Carlisle Bay. My return will be as soon as wind and wave will permit. It would be sooner- defying storm and sea-if I could follow my heart's wishes;-but I command a ship that commands mie. This absence pricks me as with a poniard and makes my heart bleed. Ever since I kissed your hand to-day, I have felt it at my lips-as if a rose-leaf had blown up against them and softly lodged there. So I dare to kiss it again and again, without fear and without rebuke. May heaven bless its fairest angel on earth I This is the prayer of Your true lover, . PHLIP CHANTILLY. If an arrow could enter a dove's breast carrying honey and balm instead of poison and pain, it would have been like this sweet dart that touched Barbara to her heart's core with delight. She read the letter over and over-a dozen times; she put it back into the envelope, and took it out again; she re-examined the seal with her most admiring glance; and she went through the process of receiving the letter afresh, pretending not to know its contents. At last, putting down the letter, she caught up her hand- glass, and, gazing at herself for a moment, threw away the little mirror with a proud scorn, and exclaimed, "Farewell, Narcissa, I have a new friend, I have Philip. X can do without you. Narcissa, farewell." . ' IN T1ERCHANGJE]3 4" Barbara did not stop to reflect that Narcissa would hardly be content to remain absent from her for a long time. Indeed, the probability was strong that notwithstanding this rather uncivil parting of two old friends under a tem- porary sense of mutual disparagement, they would speedily renew their old companionship, and the two beauties would again be smilingly comparing their rival charms in the same glass. Barbara fell to kissing the letter, which kissed her in return. "I may kiss Philip's letter," she said, "and yet I have never kissed Philip. But Philip kissed my hand-so I will kiss his handwriting. What is his handwriting but his hand? I will kiss his name-his name is his very self." And she pressed her lips to Philip's autograph, making the bold black letters firagrant with the sweet breathings of her happy soul. A thrill passed through her frame, and for a moment she was almost faint from excess of feeling. She sat in her griffin-clawed chair gazing at the streaming and changing lights that came from a lurid and storm- threatening sunset. The thoughtful maid, mindful how the Coromandel had once been wrecked, now sent up her heart to heaven in a passionate prayer that no harm would come to the great- hearted sailor-the dauntless hero-the princely lover who then was rolling about in his rocking ship, and whose enshrined image was heaving still more tumultuously in her tempest-tossed heart. In a few moments this maidenly heart was set to beating still faster by a knock at her door. 6' Lambkin I " said Jezebel's kindly voice, outside. "Yes, Aunt Bel," replied Barbara, opening the door and admitting her life-long guardian and ever-welcome guest. "My dear lamb," said Jezebel, " dat young man hab come back agin from de ship.') page: 412-413[View Page 412-413] "2 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Who? Philip?" exclaimed Barbara, with a cry of delight. "No, not Philip, but de udder man-de man what dey call Camphire." "O, you mean Lieut. Cammeyer," said Barbara, with a sigh of disappointment. "Yes, dat's de man. He has come yer. And he wants you for to come for to see him. Dat's de way wid de men. Dey is always dancin' about de women. Lambkin, look sharp aginst all sich jumpin'-jacks. What's de good book say? 'De Lord taketh no delight in de legs ob a man.' - Why don't he take no delight in deir legs? 'Cause, I suppose, deir ways is bad." i Some wind and rain, -but neither violent,-had given Lieut. Cammeyer a pretext for calling at the house ;- ostensibly to consult-Capt. Chantilly, but really to see Barbara Vail. After her first flush of disappointment, Barbara w s rejoiced to see him. If she could not have Philip's own society, she could find a secondary pleasure in conversing with one of Philip's companions. Gratitude toward all the Tamaqua's company overbrimmed her heart with happiness. She was ready to pour out its uncontainable fulness on every one who came near. So, in meeting Cammeyer, Barbara clasped his hand warmly. She looked into his face winsomely. She answered his apologies for intrusion by assuring him, with ringing frankness and music in her voice, that she was delighted to see him. "No words," said she, " can express the joyful tribute of thanks which I owe to all the deliverers whom Providence sent to find us in our island home." Lieut. Cammeyer, who on his way to the house had studied how to address himself to Barbara, and who tried to recall from the limited range of his elegant readings some choice quotation from Shakespeare or Byron such as would fitly describe and flatter her,-could think of nothing suitable ;-and, having nothing to say, he said nothing. INTERCHANGE. 418 "Mr. Cammeyer," she remarked, as they sat on the stony door-step, "my father will never get through talking with his old friend Capt. Chantilly; and so you must talk to me. Tell me something about the world. O I am so eager to hear all about it! You have visited many countries. Tel: me something about my own. Perhaps you smile at my country, and think it is the ocean. But America is my country-and yet I have never seen it. Picture it to me. And then tell me about other countries too-and their great cities-London and Paris-and all their famous structures and monuments. O what a privilege you have had in seeing the whole world and all that it contains. And tell me of the music you have heard-the great operas and dramas. How ennobling it must be to listen to an orches- tra! My mother says that Beethoven's ninth symphony- when all the instruments combine in it-melts the listener's soul. And tell me how the fairies are represented in the Midsummer Night's Dream. I once dressed Beaver as Puck, but he behaved badly in his part. And tell me of the great temples and cathedrals that you have seen. My father delights to recall his visits to their solemn piles.; And the Pyramids-did you ever climb them? And please tell me also of the shops and bazaars where things are sold. How strange it must seem to go to a market-place, and get great stores of beautiful goods by paying out some small coins. And tell me about the famous paintings and statues, which my father is always sighing to see. I never saw one. What a delight it must be to gaze at the Apollo Belvidere? And what is the Greek Pysche like? O you will think me so ignorant that you will be ashamed to talk to me! But remember how much I have missed by being kept away from life. So please, Mr. Cammeyer, tell me all about all these wonderful things." Barbara poured out this speech with a swift vehemence of utterance, making the words sparkle as they fell. Her cool and calculating auditor was astonished at the brilliancy of her manner. This young woman's enthusiasmr, vh'acity, page: 414-415[View Page 414-415] "4 TEMPEST-TOSSED. and impetuosity were beyond his comprehension. She was electric and captivating. He said to himself, "What an actress she would make!-she storms like Mrs. Siddons." Barbara's questions were for the most part beyond her listener's ability to answer. They were too scholastic and ideal for that practical man. This young lady seemed to him a sort of animated universal catechism. Professing to know nothing, she evidently knew something of everything. This caged bird had been fed for a lifetime on crumbs of learning. Cammeyer-had heard of the maxim to beware of the man of one book, but he now thought it a more perilous thing to encounter in this lone spot a woman of many books. The truth is, Barbara was not poverty-stricken of book- knowledge. The books that she possessed she knew by heart. Moreover her father and mother had each been a living book to her. But Barbara took for granted that she was very ignorant. And so she was-of the ways of life and society ;-but, for all that, Cammeyer found her better educated than most young wqmen of her age who have been to academies and schools. This discovery abashed the crafty young lieutenant; for nothing slaughters a man's pride so mercilessly as to find that the woman who fascinates him is his intellectual supe- rior. Cammeyer, in his confusion, now for the first time in his life underrated himself; and he shrivelled to conscious insignificance in presence of Barbara's more brilliant man- ner and mind. He instantly suspected that she saw through him, and therefore that she ranked him unerringly as a boor and charlatan. If Barbara had questioned him concerning business and profits-rates of exchange-wages and cargoes-tariffs and harbors-ships and armaments ;-if she had asked him con- cerning these or similar things, he could have given praise- INTERCHANGE. 415 worthy answers; but she had unexpectedly swooped upon him as the eagle upon the tortoise, and lifted him to such a height of Aesthetic and perilous questioning that he had nothing to do but to fall and be dashed to confu- sion. Nevertheless, in many respects Cammeyer was a strong man and he knew it; and he knew also that if he could only get a chance to exhibit his strong qualities, he would retrieve himself and make a better appearance. He had a powerful reason why he wished to appear at his best. Anthony Cammeyer-with his neat, trim, officer-like man- ner-with his cool, shrewd, and ambitious mind-with his long-practised and stringent economy, resulting in a bank account in New York-and with a number of general quali- fications and endowments, which, until just now, had always satisfied his own sense of self-appreciation;--this gentle- man-thus equipped for enjoying life and making a career -had always meant to marry; provided he could marry well; that is, to marry for enough beside love to make life respectable. Barbara was an heiress, and Cammeyer knew it. That is, he knew that Mary Pritchard (whose parents had died in her childhood) had been brought up by her grand- father, and had become his sole heir; he knew that Dr. Vail, on his father's death, had become his sole heir; he knew that the two old men-Joshua Pritchard and Wilbra- ham Vail-had both lived long enough to hear the news from Drosante, and had both died in the belief that the wanderers would one day come to land; he knew that the two estates were now in the hands of safe trustees, awaiting reclamation by the lawful inheritors; he knew that this joint property would one day be the sole possession of Bar- bara Vail; and, knowing all this, he conceived the brilliant idea that this fine fortune should become the prize of An. thony Cammeyer. Then, too, besides Barbara's long-waiting wealth, the page: 416-417[View Page 416-417] "6 TEMPEST-TOSSED. young lady (as Cammeyer's eyes delightfully told him) had unparalleled personal beauty. "Yes," said he, "she is a diamond of the first water." Cammeyer, who had his way to make in the world, here discovered an unexpected chance to make it. Since the reign of Lucy Wilmerding, he had seen no such princess as Barbara Vail. Hle had thrown away one golden opportunity; he would seize and hold fast the other. Hav- ing squandered Lucy, he would economize Barbara. Anthony Cammeyer reasoned the case deliberately, and resolved that Lucy's loss should be Barbara's gain. But how should he begin to conquer his conqueror? It must be by some other mode than ignorantly answering her wise questions-for in this way he would certainly be con- quered himself. Barbara knew too much of literature, history, and various learning to make it possible for him to cope with her on this field of challenge. He must change his tactics. But to what? There are two qualifications for entering into paradise. One is, to be an archangel; the other, to be. a serpent. If Cammeyer lacked the graces of the one, he possessed the subtlety of the other. / T CHAPTER XXII. A SAILOR'S YARN. I' SHALL we sit under these cocoa-trees?" asked Rodney Vail of Oliver Chantilly. "No," replied Capt. Chantilly, " for if you are now going to tell me of the Coromandel, let us go on board the ship." The two friends walked to the water's brink, stepped from a rough rock into the ferry-basket, and pulled them- selves to the floating hulk. The sunny afternoon sky, the wild landscape, the placid basin, the ancient wreck, the distant roar of the outside breakers, and the cool breath of the salted wind,-all com- bined to make a charming scene. In stepping on the deck of the Coromandel, Capt. Chan- tilly looked round him like an admiral surveying some scarred line-of-battle ship that had gone through the wars. Meanwhile Rodney, leaving him for a few moments in this mute contemplation, descended into the cabin, and carried up two old willow chairs, bleached and weather- stained. "If you find that these rickety chairs," said he, " cannot help groaning a little under their human burdens, it is because they have kept company so long with the people who have sat in them-on this bare deck-under this open sky-for weary years-that time, weather, and misfortune have at last smitten the sitters and the seats alike." "Let us not sit," said Oliver, "but go at once below decks-I am impatient to peer into your dungeon." page: 418-419[View Page 418-419] "8 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Dungeon!" exclaimed Rodney, "no, I cannot call the Coromandel by that name. What though she be black as a collier!-smutty as a chimney-sweep!-nevertheless to me this rusty deck is holy ground. There is not a plank of it but has stood between me and death a hundred times. Always-through all weathers-the staunch old ship was our citadel of safety. In every hour of our fear, her heart was of oak, and she was braver than all her inmates. My dear Oliver, for the protection that she gave us, for the home that she kept walled up around us, for the wise intel- ligence that she showed against twisting her timbers awry into a leak, for the blind instinct that led her finally to the land ;-for all this,-yes, and because the ship was Barbara's birth-place - cradle- play-ground-school-house-home - country--everything,-I love this old craft as if she were my own flesh and blood. So long as she and I remain in the same world, I shall never think of her ,as a mere struc- ture of timbers and planks-never as an inanimate thing- but always as a living creature-a member of the family that she saved." In saying this, Rodney gently patted the deck with his foot as he would have patted his dog with his hand. Oliver Chantilly, before going below, espied near the foremast a complex mechanical contrivance, ponderous with heavy timbers, and armed with long levers like capstan- bars; and he inquired, "What is yonder strange machine?" "That," replied Rodney, " is the press with which I man- ufactured the ship's fuel from sea-weed. I gathered the floating grass-dried it on the deck like hay-bound it into bales-and crushed each bale between the jaws of this press into a solid block of coke, shaped like a bar of pig-iron. These coke-blocks I stored away for the cook's galley. Come down with me into the forecastle, and I will show you a dozen cords of this grass-wood, piled up there as in a woodshed.", Lifting a hatch, they descended into the Plutonian region A SAILOR'S YARN. 419 from which the ship's fires were thus strangely fed out of the water. "Does this stuff burn well?" asked Oliver, examining it in the dim forecastle. "Yes, for I larded it with blubber, or sprinkled it with oil." "Is it the same sea-weed of our North Atlantic?-the drifting grass of the Sargasso sea?" "Well," replied Rodney, " you know the yarns which the Salem sailors used to tell of an immense green meadow of floating grass, between the latitudes of the Canaries and the Cape de Verdes. They made the map-drawers believe in a Sargasso sea. But the Sargasso sea is everywhere. It covers all oceans. Wherever an ocean current flows, there the sea-grass drifts upon it. Had the Sargasso sea monop- olized all the floating weeds of the two Atlantics, collecting the whole ocean's grass-crop into one place-and that place a thousand leagues from the Coromandel-our kitchen-fire could never have been kindled, and our breakfast would always have been cold. "We were never so pinched for food as for fuel. Fortu- nately we needed fire, not to warm our cabin, but only to cook our meals. Most of our provisions had been cooked on being first put into the cans. A little fuel, therefore, would go a great way. I might have kept the pot boiling with fagots of the ship's interior woodwork-such as bulkheads, and the like-but as the old craft had been burned on the outside, I spared her within. "I had a few casks of alcohol, and rigged a spirit-lamp; but I knew that these casks, once empty, would need, like the widow's cruise, Elijah's magic to fill them again ; so I hoarded my alcohol as Father Pimlico of Marblehead did his leather sacks of water from Jacob's well. Oil I had-of my own manufacture-for I pricked open many a fountain of it with my harpoon from the fat of the porpoise. That's a barrel of it on your left, yonder. And I have only to tap that bung, fill my lamp from it, and trim my flannel wick, page: 420-421[View Page 420-421] 420 TEMPEST-TOSSED. to show you at night the smokiest lamp-light you ever saw. Still this oil, bad as it was, kept darkness out of our cabin, and rust away from our cans. So, for these uses, it became loo precious to be squandered lavishy for fuel. The sea- weed was all I could afford to cram plentifully into the maw of our cook's galley. "To collect the sea-weed, I constructed large rakes, which I kept constantly in tow, and reaped the ocean's surface of its grass for thousands of square miles. I have harvested the largest meadows in the world. Possessing not an acre of land, I was probably the largest farmer among all man- kind-and, like the austere man in the parable, I reaped where I had not sown, and gathered where I had not strown. On many a midsummer's day, this deck has been knee-deep with sea-grass outspread to sun and wind. Barbara and Beaver would romp and frolic in it as in a hay-mow, and birds of passage would stop in their flight to perch upon it for a moment's rest, mistaking it for an island. "You would hardly think that these solid coke-blocks -as you see them piled up here-were once loose grass, disheveled along the waves like a mermaid's hair. Our forefathers never suspected that fern-leaves could be com- pressed into coal-beds, nor that sea-grass could be turned into cord-wood. Pick up a piece of this grass-coke; it is as hard as hickory. Sometimes the levers of my press produced a condensing power of twelve thousand pounds. When the strain was greatest, the condensation worked to such a charm that I used to imagine, if I could heap together the right proportions of charcoal, lamp-black, graphite, and plumbago, I could have pressed them into a diamond. But- not even the diamond could have sparkled in my eyes with so cheery a light as when I first saw the sea-weed burn in Jezebel's fire." "Have you ever eaten this sea-grass?" asked Oliver. "Our boys on the Tamaqua sometimes relish it as a novelty. It is not a bad spinach." "Yes" said Rodney, "we have not only put our sea- M CM I Li %J a, 01sx Ll"Ll weeds under the pot, to boil it, but into the pot, to be boiled. Take them fresh from the water, dripping and unwilted, and they are then two-thirds sugar and starch; they vie with oatmeal and Indian corn. If, in Ireland, the virtues of sea-weed as food could be made known, the people would never again suffer a famine. The Hebrews had a manna of the desert; the sea-weed is a manna in the sea. How often I have relished it with sweet oil, pepper, and vinegar! It must have been Neptune's salad." "Did the ship ever spring a leak?" "No, never; her frame, you see, is bony as a giant's- her shell strong as a helmet. Are you surprised at her iron-like strength? You know she was planned for an Arctic voyage. But a smaller ship was wanted for that service. The Coromandel is over four hundred tons; too large for ploughing the ice. Baffin's flag-ship was only eighty tons- Frobisher's three vessels made altogether only seventy-five. But the mistake in the Coromandel's size was a happy mis- take for me and mine. It kept us afloat in an ark of safety -in a tower of refuge. "Yes, the ship is staunchness itself. Step this way toward the bow. You are now as far forward as you can get below deck, but you are still nine feet from the cut-water. All the space between you and the stem is solid wood. The ship's frame- from keel to deck-and from cut-water for nine feet aft-is clamped and dove-tailed into one solid bastion of wooden masonry. An iceberg might break half the bow off, and still not break into the hollow hull. "Now look overhead. To protect the ship's sides from the ice, extra beams were built across the deck at intervals of three feet. Notice this Samson-post-how the timbers radiate from it in every direction. The same arrangement is repeated throughout the ship's whole length. See how these heavy oak knees-hanging or oblique- are wedged into every nook, corner, and angle. "Furthermore, over the ship's whole framework there is a double planking, composing two complete sheathings- page: 422-423[View Page 422-423] 422 TEMPEST-TOSSED making a ship within a ship, like a shell within a shell. Each of these wooden walls is of three-inch plank. Between the two walls is an intervening space of a hand's-breadth, packed water-tight with tarred felt. You might pull off the outer ship like the rind of a nut, and the inner shell would still remain a perfect hull-as stout as any East Indiaman that ever braved a storm. "Then, too, the whole interior is lined throughout with cork, as you see. This was put on because, in the Arctic climate, cork would have a low conducting power, and would prevent the condensation of moisture inside the ship. Knock your knuckles against the ceiling or sides anywhere-thus-- there is no hollow sound. Take this handspike and strike as hard as you can-you will get no reverberation. Would *you expect such a vessel to spring a leak? How many years could the Club of Hercules, if cast afloat on the high seas, drift about without going to pieces? Remember, too, that though the Coromandel was built for the wintriest region of the globe, yet her lot has been cast in continuous summer and perpetual calm." "What a freak of fate," exclaime4 Oliver, "that a ship, built to battle with Arctic icebergs, should have dozed away a lazy life on a midsummer sea!" "You remember," said Rodney, " that the Coromandel's original name was the North Star. But the strange-fated ship has seen so little of the North that she has never yet grazed a field of ice, nor felt a flake of snow. I often sighed, yearned, longed for a whiff of winter. Sometimes when the thermometer was at 90 on deck, I used to come down into the cool cabin, stretch my weary limbs on our white wolf- skin, and imagine myself in a snow drift. I used to medi- tate on Ross and Parry and their polar voyages-on the Esquimaux and their ice-sledges- on Greenland auks and grizzly bears. If Jack Frost had made an occasional visit to the Coromandel he would have been a welcome guest; but he never blew his breath against our window-panes." "Barbara, child of the summer, has a profound curiosity -.0 A bAlLUKl'-b x Ado IN to see ice and snow. I have told her how Arctic sailors have had to out their frozen beards loose from their bed-blankets when awaking in the morning, and how their eyelids dur- ing sleep have been glued together with frost, and had to be melted open with rubbings by the warm fingers. We all used to wonder what would have been the ship's fate if she had followed her original purpose, and taken us where the touch of a ramrod would go through a woolen mitten, and sting the hand inside like scalding water on the flesh. Just suppose that Mary and Barbara had been carried where a barrel of lamp-oil-like this one-might have its staves knocked off, and still leave the oil frozen and erect, so that when wanted for use it would have to be cut with a saw, or cracked with a crow-bar. Heaven be thanked that my Arctic ship never bore my delicate flowers to perish in an Arctic clime." The two comrades then passed from the forecastle through a bulkhead into the hold, where the canned provisions were stored. There was more room here to walk About; for hunger, which eats through stone walls, eats also through tin cans. Three-quarters of the original cargo had been consumed, leaving wide and vacant spaces among the once closely- packed stores. "Did any of your provisions mildew and spoil?" "Yes, a few did, years ago-particularly the cans of corn, tomatoes, and plums, This was during the prolonged rainy weather, when the dampness struck the cans with rust, and the rust ate through the tin. But I then invited the por- poises to come on board and oil my cans; after which the rust ceased altogether, and the mildew with it." "What a merciful device," exclaimed Oliver, " is this art of preserving food! It conquers time-it cheats fate-it defies death." "I remember," said Rodney, "that some seed-wheat from an Egyptian mummy was brought to Boston by some mis- sionaries, and planted by Grandfather Pritchard in his page: 424-425[View Page 424-425] 424 TEMPEST-TOSSED. garden. Those seed-grains-older than the Christian Era-- had not lost their vitality, but grew and bore heavy heads. Now, among these cans of my cargo are meats which, if left undisturbed, would probably last just as long. Our ship at this moment-here in this dark hold-has all the hanging gardens of Babylon!-all the orchards of Shiraz! If some intrusive sunbeam could steal its way down here, and with its Ithuriel spear prick these fruits to their native germina- tion, what gardens, orchards, vineyards would burst into bloom! We would be in a summer bower of apple-trees, grape-vines, blackberry-bushes, strawherry-plants, cornstalks, pea-blossoms, melon vines, and all the mouth-watering fruits that refresh the soul of man." "Rodney," said Oliver, "if you had sailed five years be- fore you did, you could not have carried with you such per- fectly-cured provisions. This simple art-so full of mercy to the castaway--is even now best known only to ship- masters; for they have most need of it. There is so slight occasion to use such provisions on land, particularly in settled communities, that when you return to Salem, and carry with you the story of your voyage, half the people of New England will be -surprised to learn that a shipwrecked family could maintain their lives at sea on a drifting wreck for seventeen years, subsisting on a cargo of canned pro- visions. I once made a visit to the Harmony Factory where the Willistons packed and preserved your cargo. I saw a farmer drive his load of green corn into the factory in the morning, and before noon it was husked, cut, cooked, canned, sealed, and ready to go to sea, with promise to retain its soundness and vitality longer than the ship that was to carry it, or the crew who were to eat it. It is now easy to can and seal good and wholesome food so as to hold fast its pal- atable properties until our children's children shall thereby know, generations hence, exactly how their grandfather's fruits tasted. There is no reason why a can of meat or a jar of plums should not last as long as the Pyramids. What is this?" A SAILOR'S YARN. 425 "It is a water-tank." "In your sunshiny clime, did you not often suffer from thirst?" "No, we were spared that pang. Before the fire, the ship had five tanks. One of these was broken to pieces by a falling spar. The other four were left unharmed. All these I kept like so many traps to catch every shower. In ad- dition to these water-butts, I emptied the six hogsheads that you see in this row-transferring the cans which hey once contained to the state-rooms in the cabin-andfhen strength- ened the hoops, made -the staves water-tight with tar, and filled these reservoirs from the clouds. - I had thus ten water vessels-containing in all, when full, thirteen hundred gal- lons; which was about three and a half gallons a day for a year in advance. "To catch the rain, I stretched out between four posts, amid-ships, a clean white bed-sheet like a fiat roof or can- opy, and putting a small weight in the centre of the sheet, filtered the water through this strainer, and conducted it by troughs to the tanks. "In a shower we frequently hung out our clothes to be freshened. In the sultry season we washed them in salt water, and rinsed them in fresh. Our sheets, pillow-cases, pocket-handkerchiefs, were thus kept, all the year round, like lavendered linen, sweet and pure." "Did you ever try distilling the salt water?" "Yes, I bethought me of Capt. Cazneau, who used to sail from Boston in the Polly. My father told me of that brig. She was dismasted at sea. The captain, when almost per- ishing with thirst, boiled the sea water in a tea-kettle, and passed the steam through a pistol barrel, which he kept cold by wet cloths, so that it condensed the steam into drink- able fresh water. My contrivance was more extensive : in- stead of a tea-kettle, I used an iron pot,-and instead of a pistol, a double-barreled gun. We called the distillation from this warlike instrument our ' gunpowder tea.' But we always had rain-water enough without our Cazueau teapot." page: 426-427[View Page 426-427] 426 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "To grope under this deck," said Oliver, "is like explor- ing the Catacombs."' "Follow me!" said Rodney, who then led his friend through a dark passage, into the cabin. A mild light was streaming through the plate glass in the ceiling, and through the two windows at the stern ;-afford- ing enough illumination to show the inlaid floor with its dark and light woods-the state-room doors, with their panels of bird's-eye maple-the frescoed ceiling, with here and there a gilt moulding running through it-the lean- ing-tower of the mizzen-mast-the plush cushions around its foot-the scarlet and orange mats-the solid walnut furniture-the terra-cotta flower-pot, holding up- its with- ered skeleton of the dead geranium ;-just sufficient day- light to reveal these objects, and at the same time to hide X he worn, weather-stained, and faded look which a brighter r y would have exposed in them all. "By Jupiter!" exclaimed Oliver,--who was struck with e cheeriness and elegance of the interior;-"this is not shipwreck!-this is luxury!-this is a king's palace! Bless my soul!-a piano-a writing-desk-a flower-pot-pictures in the panels-rugs on the floor-books in the library- lounges-easy chairs-frescoes over head,-why, Rodney, your rusty old sea-shell has a pearl lining! Let me tell you, sir, that the government does not provide me such quarters on the Tamaqua." Dr. Vail proudly smiled at the pleasure which his friend took in the old ship. "Room No. 18, yonder," said Rodney, " is Barbara's. It is as red inside as a rose. Come and see it. No, it is locked, and she has the key. No. 2, on the other side, is Mary's. No. 4, Jezebel's. No. 5, the school-room. Some of the rooms are filled with fruit-jars, but we have spare beds enough to accommodate our friends. Here is No. 10-where Cammeyer slept last night. Robson and Carter were next door in No. 8. Here is No. 15-my junk-shop." Dr. Vail opened the door and showed Oliver a museum of A SAILOR'S YARN. 427 weapons, tools, instruments, and utensils of various sorts. There was a carpenter's work-bench with planes, chisels, and augers. There were brackets and pegs on the wall, holding fish-lines, decoys, harpoons and barbs. There was a rack full of firearms. There was a chronometer in an ebony box, together with five or six watches hanging side by side, all ticking to the same time. These time-pieces," said Rodney, " and the watch in my pocket, have never in seventeen years been allowed to run down." After a prolonged look at this curiosity-shop, Oliver walked to the after end of the cabin and noticed the dead geranium, which struck him with a pathetic interest. "Death," sighed he, " which has withered for you only a few green leaves, has in my house cut down my fair Rose, my life, my all.-What is this scroll?" pointing to a piece of white paper pinned to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. "That's the ship's bulletin," replied Rodney. "That paper is probably the programme of our last concert before landing-or perhaps the play-bill of our last dramatic per- formance at sea." Oliver laid his hand on the shriveled paper, and straight- ening out the wrinkles, read as follows: THE OCEANIC THEATRE, ON BOARD THE SHP COROMANDEL., A Matinee Performance will be given on Saturday next, May 18th, 1864, on which occasion will be presented THE UNSHAKESPEAREAN COMEDY OF JULIO AND ROMET, with an entirely new cast of characters not included il the original play by the Great Bard, to wit: Julio - - - - - - - Dr. R. Vail. Romiet Miss B. Vail. The Watery (instead of Fiery) Tybalt - - - - Mr. Beaver. Nurse and Frier (a la gridiron) - - - - Mrs. Jezebel. P. S.-Boys not admitted unless accompanied by their parents or guardians. page: 428-429[View Page 428-429] 428 TEMPEST-TOSSED. On perusing the above, a smile passed over Oliver's face, followed by a shade, and he exclaimed with a sigh, "After all, Rodney, it is I who, in prosperity, have had life's tragedy, -while you, in adversity, have had its comedy. " Dr. Vail opened his writing-desk and exhibited his log and journal. "How did you take your latitude and longitude?" "In a fashion so rude," replied the navigator, "that I never knew whether - my figures were right or wrong. Capt. Lane, in fleeing from the burning ship, took with him all his instruments except the standard compass, which is fixed up stairs in the deck. At first, I thought I was with- out a chronometer. But you have just seen that I had a good one-the instrument in the ebony box. By a lucky accident, it was left in the Rev. Mr. Atwill's room. He was a missionary on his way from Boston to Madras. Before leaving Boston, he was called to the bedside of an English sea-captain from Liverpool, who had a married daughter in Madras. The captain, believing himself about to'die, begged Mr. Atwill to convey for him his private papers, his gold watch, and his chronometer, as his last bequest to his child. Did you notice its make? It is the Harrison pattern, and set to Greenwich time. On the day after the shipwreck, I found it in No. 11, ticking as it ticks now. I do not know how much it has since gained or lost. But I have always taken as much care of it as of the apple of my eye. "Then, as you just noticed, I found several watches- of more or less excellence-all which I have kept running together, as the uneasy emperor kept his clocks. "I would have given a little finger for Lane's copy of Bowditch's Navigator, which the fugitive carried off with him. All the tables I had were those in the NauticaI Alma- nac of 1847. Here it is. It is very stale now. I corrected it year after year by guess. It served me better for the open sea than it would have done for a dangerous coast. : "I made a sun-dial. You will see it on the binnacle. In A SAILOR'S YARN. 429 perfectly calm, bright weather, while the ship lay motionless, this dial assisted me by its shadows to determine the noon. After long habit, I became able, without watch or dial, but by simply glancing at the sky, to determine the sun's meri- dian within a few minutes. Having my nooning, or my best approach to it, then my Hadley's quadrant-this little one on the top of my desk-gave me the sun's altitude and I thence deduced the ship's latitude. Then, relying on my precious chronometer to tick fox me the Greenwich time- which it still keeps doing, with perhaps some lamentable variations-I compared the Greenwich time with my own time, and so got my longitude as near as I could. "Whether my calculations ever came within a hundred miles of my true position, I could never tell. But even if I could have taken my bearings to an exact fraction, still as I had no map, nor Bowditch's list of prominent points round the world with their latitudes and longitudes (from which I might have roughly constructed a map), I never knew my geographical location. Of course, as years advanced, and as my chronometer and watches fell away from rectitude, I had less and less confidence in my observations. What they chiefly told mie was, that I was in the midst of a wilderness of waters from which the land kept fleeing for ever away. Here is a map of our voyage." Dr. Vail opened a lower drawer in his desk, and took out a long roll of brown paper, which he unrolled and hung against the door of the book-case. It was a singular map. A line ran horizontally across the middle of the sheet to represent the equator. Another line, crossing this at right angles, and a little to the right of the centre, stood for the meridian of Greenwich. Once a week, on this scroll, Dr. Vail habitually marked a dot indicating his latitude and longitude at the time. Each week's course he chronicled by a waved line between the latest two of these dots. These lines, as they lengthened and accumulated, looked at last like a snarl of black thread. page: 430-431[View Page 430-431] 430 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "This map," exclaimed Oliver, " is like the diagram of a drunken man's staggerings to and fro." "Yes," said Rodney, "the ship and I were the blind leading the blind; and we both continually led each other into a fathomless ditch. Look! These inky zigzags are like the wanderings of some restless ant, imprisoned for a whole summer on a single sheet of paper-running backward and forward, hither and yon. The ship crept first one way, then another; now forward, then back again; boxing and un- boxing the compass as often as the winds did; sometimes moving in a straight line, then crosswise, then in a curve; first describing one eccentric figure, then another; making progress one day and unmaking it the next ;, always begin- ning a new voyage, but never ending the old one. It was a circumnavigation of nothing. "I kept marking my course on this map until the lines ran into each other so often that if I had continued this linear record during the whole time of our shifting lodge- ment in the mid-Atlantic, the sheet would have grown to be one black blot." "Were you not always expecting some passing ship?" "Yes, and when none appeared, I sometimes asked my- self had the commerce of the world been destroyed? or was I sailing on some unrecorded sea? or was I blind? I did indeed see some vessels; for at twenty-one different times, noted in my journal, I detected the upper sails of some far- off voyager whose hull, to me, like mine to him, was below the horizon. - I had a flag of distress, reaching as high in the air as I could rig a rickety prop to carry it in calm weather; but my flag must have appeared, at a few miles' distance, a mere speck against the low sky, and my flag-staff a mere spider's thread. The Coromandel was not only small but heavy- laden, and like a shy penguin sat low in the wave. She soon grew dim and dingy, taking her color from her sur- roundings-like the dyer's hand. Once I descried a brig standing toward us, but the welcome stranger tacked away A SAILOR'S YARN. 481 again, and a fog shut her out of sight. Three years after- ward, a ship approached within four miles, answered my sig- nal, and launched a boat; but the boat was swamped. I saw the endangered men rescued with ropes. A gale was blow- ing-night was coming on-and when the morning dawned, the vessel was not to be seen. These were the only times when I have reason to suppose that I was noticed by any human being. So excited was my hope, and so heart-sick- ening my disappointment, that after these two instances, I prayed heaven never to cheat me again." ' I knew," said Oliver, with a sigh-thinking over his past searches for the Coromandel-"I knew there was small hope of your being discovered in that deserted sea except by some chance wanderer like yourself." "Small indeed," replied Rodney. "I was out of the way of the world's commerce. Take, for instance, the ships bound from the United States to Great Britain ; I was far below their latitudes. Take the ships from New York or Liverpool to the Cape of Good Hope; I was to the west- ward of their common course. Take the ships returning from China to Boston; I missed all these in losing the trade-wind. Take the whalers; I might have met with some of these, for they go everywhere; but they are a small flock, scattered from pole to pole. Consider also that half our wanderings were in the night-that more than half of the remainder were in the rainy season-and that even in the driest months, many days were dimmed with haze and scud. Furthermore, you know that evenin the clearest weather the rotundity of the earth permits but a limited horizon. It is easy even for a line-of-battle ship, sailing under a cloud of canvas, and with all colors flying, to hide herself in mid-ocean for weeks and weeks without occasion for dipping a flag in salutation of a passer-by. It is not strange that the Coromandel, lying like a log in the sea, and with no high tower of canvas up in the air, should have drifted unseen." "What a stately pair of white wings!" exclaimed Oliver, page: 432-433[View Page 432-433] 4382 TEMPEST-TOSSED. looking at a couple of feathered curiosities in the top of the book-case. "These are the wings," replied Rodney, "of the largest albatross I ever caught. When the bird was alive, they measured eighteen feet from tip to tip. They seemed to have been made for flying round the world; so I kept them in hope of their wafting our ship to the shore." "You had plenty of leisure for hunting and fishing," ob- served Oliver. "Yes. All the fish in the sea and all the birds of the air were mine-if I could only catch them. I spent days in de- vising lures, snares, baits, weapons, and stratagems. Neces- sity is the mother of invention, and I learned to put a filial trust in her mother-wit. "Occasionally I saw a spermaceti whale, with a head full of sperm candles which I wanted for our evening parlor; but this was always a vain wish, for I could never offer battle to such a giant; I was unwilling to risk my precious tackle on any game heavier than the dolphin or the por- poise. "The sea, I think, must contain as many porpoises as the land counts cattle on a thousand hills I While the Coro- mandel was on her outward voyage to Africa, these gym- nasts would get under her bow and keep pace with her for hours together. After the old ship lost her masts and sails, she could not give them so merry a race. Nevertheless, as the tortoise wins against the hare, so I often won against these scampering hares of the waves: for I picked them out of the water one by one with my harpoon. "At first I often missed my aim-miscalculating the re- fraction, and pricking my fish with one or two prongs instead of five. The barbs would then tear out from the fat flesh, leaving the mad creature to go free. But when my weapon sank deep, the victim would leap-plunge-shoot away with the speed of an arrow-roll and snort-unreel my slender rope from its wooden cylinder for three or four hundred fathoms-and fight bravely for his life, while all A SAILOR'S' YAW. 48 his companions would race after him to be in at the death. I have taken a porpoise five feet seven inches long."5 "4 Did you eat him?" "Yes, we ate his choice morsels, and used his blubber for oil. He made good cutlets and bad lamp-lights. Once, in London, I attended the Lord Mayor's dinner, and among the dishes was the porpoise. Our English forefathers re- garded this as a dish to set before the king. It was served up at state-dinners at the Elizabethan court. Quite likely Lord Bacon ate of it at the palace, and Shakespeare at the Mermaid Tavern. And as it was relished by Queen Bess in her banquet-hall, it was also relishable to Queen Mary in my cabino" "On the Tamaqua," said Oliver, " one day last week we caught a dolphin." "I have caught Many a one," said Rodney. "I do not mean the poet's famous fish which, when dying, changes its color and vies with the sunset. That coruscating creature is the coryphene. My dolphin never wore a Joseph's coat -he was fat and prosaic like the porpoise-a plain, sleek Quaker, six feet long. Nevertheless, with the help of a little sunshine and of a blue sky reflected in the sea, I have seen the common dolphin roll a body of fiery, bluish-green, and flap a tail of golden bronze. To lure him near the ship, I used a decoy flying-fish-here it is-painted, you see, in bad imitation of life-but the greedy monsters of the deep are not fastidious in the fine arts. This decoy has just enough lead under it to make it sink a few inches below the surface. I sometimes towed it for days and weeks before it would attract its victim; but sooner or later, a fierce dol- phin would plunge at it, and my whizzing harpoon would bite into him. Then would follow an hour's fight between fisherman and fish. Whenever I was Calvinist enough to be sure of my five points, the harpoon never came out until I cut it out on deck." "Did the sharks ever follow you?" "Yes, sqonetimes. Once this decoy fish was spied by a 19 page: 434-435[View Page 434-435] 434 TEMPEST-TOSSED, white shark-the man-eater that the sailors hate. Had I not jerked my pretty ornament out of the cannibal's reach, he would have gulped it down, That shark glided like a ghost round the ship, off and on, for twelve days, until at last the pallid spectre began to swim through my brain at night. There was something hideous in his companionship. His small, merciless eyes would look at Barbara when she leaned over the rail as if he wanted to eat her at a mouthful. I threw him a water-pail. He turned over, belly upward, and took the floating pail at a snap. I then resolved to get my pail back. So I fixed an iron hook at the end of a spare halyard-made a bait of blubber-nipped the man-eater in the lower jaw-and after allowing him ample leisure to shrive himself for death, I inflicted the penalty. I then cut him open, and took out my pail." "Sometimes," said Oliver, "the men on my gunboat have caught the bonito; did you get this fellow, so far south?" "Yes, many a time." "Did you ever catch a manatee?-what our boys nick- name the sea-cow?" "Yes, twice, but not until I was in West Indian waters." "Did you ever snap up a sea-turtle? Our boys never could run near enough to one to capture it. They always found it shyer than a bashful maid." "Yes," replied Rodney, "the turtles were hard to catch. They would come to the smooth surface-bask in the sun asleep-give the whale birds a chance to rest on their shelly backs-and then, at the slightest noise, would go down like a stone. Occasionally one would bite a bait, but the hook would necessarily be small, the tackle light, and the creature so powerful that he would go gadding off and by main force break away. "At last I took an empty firkin-corked it tight to serve as a float-hung the bait from the handle-and attached a long rope to an iron ring in the bottom;-the bottom floating upward, and the bait downward. This stratagem worked A SAILOR'S YARN. 435 to a charm. The turtle, on nabbing the hook and feeling its pricks in his beak, would instantly sink, carrying the buoy with him; but the buoy perpetually dragged him up again, so that the farther he went down, the farther he had to come back. Such a strain, after an hour or two, he could no longer make head against. I could then easily haul him to the ship's side, gaff him under a flipper with a boat-hook, and hoist him home. "Here is a sea-turtle's shell. I tried to fix strings to it, to make a harp for Barbara ; but I could never get the notes to chord; and though I was more anxious to draw the trees and rocks toward me than ever Orpheus was, yet at the sound of my poor shell, they seemed always to flee further and further away." "I have often thought it strange," remarked Oliver, who stood stroking the white feathers of the great wings, " that birds should fly so far out to sea, and be found so many miles from their nests." "But," said Rodney, they carry their nests with them; they sleep in their own feathers, as the bear does in his own fur, when he hibernates. The birds were my delight. I envied them their webbed feet and stout wings. A marine bird is sovereign over land, sea, and sky; he lords it over all three of the world's great trinity of realms. What a superiority to man's limitations? "My weapons for capturing the birds, you saw in the rack; first of all, I had Captain Lane's fowling-piece with cartridges to match; and then two revolvers left by Mr. Goodrich in No. 8, each of which had its own limited supply of cartridges. There was no loose powder or shot about the ship, neither in flask nor horn, nothing but these cartridges. This little stock of ammunition I guarded with jealous care, and used only on rare occasions. "As a substitute, I made an archer's bow-see! try and bend it against your knee; it .is made of successive layers of barrel hoops, wrapped round and bound with wire; it looks like a wagon-spring. page: 436-437[View Page 436-437] 436 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "For arrows, look at these-made of ornamental strips from the gilt mouldings of the cabin doors. These steel points are knife-blades. Each arrow is a lance, not a barb. These weapons were too precious to be lost; so, before shoot- ing one of them, I attached to it a fish-line by which to pull it back. In calm weather I frequently shot this lance into some bird that perched on the ship's rail, or rested on the waves. Sometimes I killed him on the wing. Beaver had no happier moments than when he plunged into the water to seize and bring home my game. "But I had other resources more crafty than this archery. I used to set snares on the deck to trip the birds by the legs. Then, too, when a flock of them lighted on the ship, I struck them with a staff. Sometimes the credulous creatures, par- ticularly when the deck was covered with sea-weed, would mistake the ship for an island, and would settle down upon it in great numbers. Then, being unsuspicious of danger, they were easily approached, and gave up their lives at a stroke. "The albatross was the easiest prey of all. Just look once more at those mighty wings. This majestic bird could apparently fly forever and never stop, except to cool his warm breast against a wave. This gigantic tribe of birds flew incessantly about our ship to get the scraps which we threw overboard. They are the fiercest of fish-hawks. I had only to bait a fish-hook with a tempting lump of blubber, and tow it at the end of a long line, when an albatross would fly voraciously down at it and pick it up. As soon as the hook was in his bill, I played the bird as a fish. "Then, too, I occasionally took the tropic bird-that beau- tiful creature that lives on the flying-fish. But I never could get him to perch on our dinner-table except only when I invited him with my fowling-piece. And thin was not often, for I was very sparing of my ammunition ; I regarded my powder and shot as so much gold-dust and diamonds.?' "Did you ever eat the ship's barnacles?" "Yes, often. Before I found them to be unwholesome 1 ,; A SAILOR'S YARN. 437 divided each side of the ship into barnacle-beds, and with a long-handled scraper raked the beds in succession. While we were eating the crop from one patch, we gave the rest of our plantation time to grow. In forty days a barnacle would grow half an inch long ; in eighty, it would reach its full size, nearly an inch-almost as big as the miniature oyster of the epicure." "How did ypu manufacture your salt?" "My clumsy method was to dip bed-sheets overboard, then hang them in the sun to dry, and after the water had evapo- rated, collect the salt that adhered-shaking it off like sand. Boiling the water would have been easier, but I could not afford the-fire. In the climate of Capricorn, from a thous- and parts of sea-water I obtained thirty-four parts of salt; under the Equator, sometimes thirty-five or six. At one period I had twenty-six hundred pounds of packed and salted fish and fowl, which I had caught and cured." "Were you then never without relishable food?" "Yes, always, for I was like all other human malcontents, and longed for what I had not; for instance, for a cow and her milk-for a shoulder of mutton-for a saddle of veni- son-for a porter-house steak ; but whenever I confessed to such cravings, my wife rebuked me and called it impious to repine. As for Barbara, who had never nibbled a mutton- chop in her life, nor seen a slice of fresh meat, nor tasted a boiled egg-except now and then a bird's egg, laid in a stolen nest among our sea-weed on deck-she was content to be without the luxuries which she did not know how to crave." "How did you preserve your health?" "It was by keeping this little box locked," said Dr. Vail, smiling and pointing to his medicine-chest. "I opened it oftener for Beaver than for any other member of the family. I threw more physic to my dog than I took myself. Beaver would watch all night in the rain, and have a regular influenza in the morning. Then, in the clear weather, her would get half blinded by the sunlight, and would come to page: 438-439[View Page 438-439] 438 TEMPEST-TOSSED. me to bathe his eyes with digitalis and water. He would- run a splinter into his foot, limp immediately to me, sit down like the lion in the fable, and request to have it taken out. I could cure him of everything but old age; he was the first of our company to become a patriarch-ante-dating Jezebel herself. At ten years of age Beaver began to show gray hairs in his brown coat. Occasionally one of his teeth would loosen; and, as it never grew firm again, would soon fall out. Whenever Beaver lost a tooth we had a season of mourning, as if at a funeral; for we relied on him for our marketing, particularly in fresh fish and poultry, and considered every one of his teeth a valuable family servant. "Jezebel, who came of a race native to the climate in which we resided, rarely had a sick day, but slowly waxed in comely fatness, and fed her lamp of life with her unfail- ing natural oils. "Barbara had her teething and her croups, but has never yet had her measles. For, as Jezebel says, 'Dar bein' nobody to cotch de measles from, dar aint no measles to cotch." So Barbara, I am sorry to say, has thus far escaped this useful infliction, as also whooping-cough and mumps. All these enemies will be lying in wait for her on her entrance into the world. "Her mother, who used to be an occasional martyr to the sick-headache-by the way, Oliver, do all the women in the civilized world still have headaches as they did in my time?-Barbara's mother, like a true sailor, overcame this tendency at sea. Of course she never grew robust, for a morning-glory cannot change into an oak; but Mary, although the frailest of all flowers, seems to have strangely freshened her life from the saltest of all waters. "My own ailments were principally fevers, that caught their fire from my over-anxieties, prolonged watchings, and harassed mind. "But what family, in any- climate, amid all comforts, could reasonably expect to remain more exempt than mine did from the natural ills that flesh is heir to? Indeed, we had more than the common share, not of diseases, but of exemptions. "' The will' says the philosopher, ' that is the man.' I found that a strong will-a desperate determination not to be sick-was the best way to keep well. The mind is a magical protector of the body. Solomon must have been a physician, for he said, 'A cheerful heart doeth good like a medicine.' "The ship's sanitary regulations I rigidly enforced, and chiefly against myself. I maintained a military order and precision in working the pumps--ashing the clothes- airing the cabins-timing the meals to have them regular- changing the diet to keep it wholesome--sleeping unexposed to the night-damps-and, above all, providing constant occupation of mind, nr' omitting cheerful music, merry laughter, and divertir , talk. "One infirmity we all outgrew-sea-sickness. It deserted our ship totally ;-but I suspect it makes constant voyages in most other vessels. There is a sure cure for sea-sickness; -and that is, to live altogether at sea, or altogether on land. "Then, too, I conquered one of the chief troubles of life- money. I always kept a little gold and silver in my pocket -see, these coins have worn each other's faces off and grown smooth. My cash balance on hand was always sufficient to keep me free from all pecuniary frets and cares. If I was not a millionaire, still I always had more money than I could possibly spend. But I confess that, like many a rich man, I derived precious little comfort from my wealth." Capt. Chantilly and Dr. Vail now found the cabin grow- ing dim in the declining daylight; so they ascended to the deck and sat in the old willow chairs. The shadows had lengthened all across the cove ; the twilight was coming on; the sea-breeze began to blow; and the air grew delicious and refreshing. The hour was full of charm. "How often," asked Oliver, "did you throw overboard message?" page: 440-441[View Page 440-441] "O TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Too many times," replied Rodney, " to count the num- ber; for as our cargo consisted of cans, jars, and bottles- whenever we emptied one of the glass-jars stout enough to be a message-bearer (generally an olive-jar), I put into it a record of our misfortunes, sealed it tight, and cast it over- board. During the long years of our wanderings, I scat- tered scores and hundreds of these little fell-tales up and down the sea. Sometimes, as if loth to part with us, our little messenger would keep within our sight for a day or two. I suspect that fully one-half of these, and of all similar waifs thrown from ships at sea, are swallowed by sharks-just as happened to my water-pail. Nevertheless, as I used to hear stories of such missives reaching the shore, or etting picked up at sea,-I hoped that some of mine would escape the maws of sharks and reach the eyes of men. At least, I always had the satisfaction of feeling, whenever I cast one of these bottles into the sea, that I was drop- ping a letter into the post-office. If it never reached its destination, the fatality was no greater than frequently used to happen to a posted letter from Salem to Boston." "You were saved from one peril," said Oliver, " you had no mutinous crew.' "Yes, I had, for I was the mutineer myself. Sometimes my mind, notwithstanding my best efforts to set a watch at the gate of my rebellious thoughts, would admit into the citadel a banditti of cunning assassins in the shape of in- sane apprehensions and unconscionable hallucinations; 0 what a catalogue of phantoms I could record against my foolish brain! "I feared, for instance, that a sword-fish would scuttle the ship-that the copper sheathing would peel off and ad- mit the ship-worm to honeycomb his way inside-that the coral insects would deposit their rock against our keel and gradually draw us down-that a water-spout would over- whelm us-that lightning would revenge its first failure and strike us again-that an upset lamp would set the ship on fire-that dry-rot would eat the timbers to punk and pow- der-that a sudden leak would pour the ocean into us- that the cargo would turn topsy-turvy and capsize the ship -that on some moonlight night we would be lured to walk on the sea's silver bridge to our destruction-that we would lose our reason and the Coromandel become a mad-house- that Beaver would turn hydrophobic and bite us with frothy mouth-that famine would starve us into cannibals and set us to gnawing each other's bones-that death would smite some of us, leaving the survivors worse than dead: -all these and a thousand other grim and dismal fancies haunted my gloomy mind-playing with windy breath on its JAEolian chords of fear and dread. On the other hand, my mind would react from despon- dency to hope. Often and often I was cheated by the mirage, or what the Arabs call ' the sea of the desert.' Sometimes green islands would appear lying just before us-in plain sight--within easy-reach; or a ship under full sail would be palpably bearing down to rescue us; or a stately pavilion of rest ' would rise like an exhalation.' Sometimes I fancied our little company walking across the sea to meet a pro- cession of our friends approaching from a distance. Some- times I could hear bells ring and music play, and could see the streets of Salem thronged with a public reception on our arrival. Sometimes I was seated in some banquet- hall, surrounded with silver dishes, and waited on by strange and unreal beings. Sometimes I was out of the body, stand- ing off at a safe and happy distance from present peril, and looking at myself as if I were another man. "My dear Oliver, it would be impossible to tell you all the magnificent hopes which I harbored in my mind appa- rently with good and sober reason; or of all the sumptuous pageants which I thought I beheld with my naked and un- deceived eyes. "Whenever I was in these moods,-whether shrouded with their gloom or dazzled with their glory,-I tried to shake myself clear of them as of a night-mare; for I had more dread of the strange antics which my mind could play page: 442-443[View Page 442-443] "2 TEMPEST-TOSSED. upon itself for its own delusion, than I had of any outward ,tempest with its threat of real disaster. Long ago I ceased to wonder that men have sworn to seeing the Fata Mforgana; or that the Canary Islanders have descried off their coast the visionary Isle of St. Brandon; or that the boatmen in the Straits of Messina have beheld the city of Reggio thrown up into the sky. "Once during a fever, when idly rolling in my berth, I saw at mid-day a spectral bark which I took to be the Fly- ing Dutchman-careering unreefed through a wild storm- her sails thin and sere-her hoary sides white with age-her crew turned to phantoms and ghosts, and condemned for misdeeds, done in the body, to sail forever without coming to shore :-and I wondered in my agony whether I too had committed some great wrong for which I was sentenced to go forever drifting on a shoreless sea. "At another time I was visited at my bedside by the wild figure of the Wandering Jew-who lifted his skinny finger and asked me, with chattering teeth, whether I too had offended the Lord Christ, and must wander year after year, without a home among the living, or a grave among the dead? "My mind habitually sought to brace itself to firmness with strong and comfortable words and maxims-Christian and Pagan. I often consoled myself with reflecting that no man's calamities are so great but that another's are greater. When mine grew too heavy for my patience, I pondered St. Paul's superior chastisements, and humbled myself under his great example. What had I to endure compared with a man whose portion was not only shipwreck but stripes rods - prisons - deserts - wildernesses - hunger-thirst-' cold-nakedness-a thorn to vex his life, and a sword to end it! Confucius said, ' The superior man thinks of virtue- the common man, of comfort!' I used to wish for Confu- cius as a companion on my ship, that I might have seen whether he would have proved a superior or a common man. But as Marco Paulo ended his travels with a cheer- i ' ful ' Thank God and Amen,' so I believed that I too would, one day, be able to do the same." "Now that you look back," said Oliver, "upon your strange sojourn on the ocean, how seems the retrospect?" It seems," replied Rodney, " like a troubled dream from which I am hardly yet awake." "I imagine," said Oliver, " that as each day ended, you must have rejoiced at the flight of time." Ah!" exclaimed the wanderer, heaving a sigh at the recollection, " time-with us-seemed never to be in flight, but always to be sitting with folded wing, perched like a bird of ill-omen on our doomed craft. The exact period from our shipwreck to our landing was from Oct. 1st, 1847, to May 16th, 1864. Sixteen years, seven months, and fifteen days." "O! my friend," exclaimed Oliver, "what a long, dismal, endless imprisonment you suffered! -innocent yet con- demned!-a galley-slave chained for life, and life made doubly long by captivity! - O Rodney, notwithstanding all you have told me, I cannot yet realize how many successive seasons went rolling over your deck, like the sea under your keel!-how many sluggish miles this sea-cankered craft has borne you from climate to climate, never holding you two days in one place, yet apparently loitering with you forever on the same spot!-how many winds have blown over youi from the four corners of the earth, yet so long refusing to waft you to the green earth itself!-how many stars have risen and set upon you with pitiless mockery of your mis- fortunes, as if heaven cared nothing for the misery of man'!" "But after all," replied, Rodney, cheerily, "time, when it is past, becomes a tale that is told!" "And to think," exclaimed Oliver, "that Barbara was born on the self-same day of the shipwreck." "Yes," replied her father, "not only on the very day but at the very hour. Our great disaster and our greater bless- ing came at the same moment. Perhaps in like manner iq- page: 444-445[View Page 444-445] "4 TEMPEST-TOSSED. every calamity of life is connected with some simultaneous mercy." "As I look back," said Oliver, " to the shipwreck, the time from then till now does not seem long enough to have per- mitted Barbara to grow from a child to a woman." "Our daughter," said Rodney, "was our almanac. When. ever Mary and I tried to recall the date of some particular storm, or any half-forgotten event, we seldom turned to our diaries, but said, ' It was when Barbara was a baby-0o before Barbara was seven years old-or after Barbara' eleventh birthday.' So as one cuts names into the bark of a tree, we notched our years into the fair rind of Barbara's growth. As Coleridge's water-lily swayed restlessly about its pond, yet was moored to a fixed root under the water,- so our wayward ship was always moored back to the ever- remembered hour of Barbara's birth :-dear Barbara!-our drifting white lily whose native root was in the sea!" "Rodney, when you first found yourself a castaway, were you terror-stricken at the situation? ' "If on that first morning," said Dr. Vail, " when I came staggering up yonder stairs to this deck, and caught my first glimpse of the fallen spars and rigging that lay round me in heaps- my feet entangled at every step-the ship rolling in the trough of the sea-death still threatening us, even after the fire was quenched ;-if on that morning some good or evil spirit had announced to me that, within this dismantled wreck, as it lay there adrift, tenanted only by my own little family, we were to dwell for nearly seventeen years, forbidden during all that time to touch or see the shore,-and yet, that despite these perils, we were to live and prosper, instead of miserably perishing, leaving none to tell the tale ;-I say, if any prophet, human or divine, had predicted to me such a fate, I would not have believed it- no-not'though one had risen from the dead. "My reason would have rejected the human possibility of such a strange career.- No romancist would have ventured to weave such an improbable tale. "No, Oliver, if any man should be set the task of coiiduct- ing a little family of exiles about the sea, on a drifting wreck, for nearly seventeen years; if, then, as part of the problem, his ship at the very beginning of these wanderings must be struck by lightning and wrapped in a conflagration ; if next, in the midst of this appalling scene, a fragile wife, too pros- trate to be rescued from this peril, must be smitten with the chief agony possible to the human frame; if, furthermore, at a moment when these lives seemed destined to be lost, another life was to be unexpectedly born among them de- manding to be saved; if then, starting with these conditions of chaos and woe, the problem should be how to carry this ship, this woman, and this babe through sixteen or; more years of exile at sea, to safety at last :-would not any man naturally exclaim, The task is too great for human endeavor? Would he not ask, ' How could the ship survive such a visi- tation of fire from heaven? How could the prostrate woman rise again under so crushing a weight of mortal woe? How could the tender babe, gentle as its own pulse, have borne so rough and fierce a fate? - How could all these flickering lamps of life escape extinguishment in the tempest's breath?' O Oliver, whenever I look back to our'original- calamity, I shudder at it ; but if it be so dreadful to look back upon, how much more agonizing would it have been to look forward to? Grateful am I to heaven that we could not anticipate our trials. Our continual ignorance of our coming fate was our constant support under it. Man's best foresight on each new day is his merciful blindness to the morrow." "How ddid the women behave?" asked Oliver. "Courage," replied Rodney, thoughtfully, "is a womanly quality, for women possess it above men. Mary and Jezebel were stouter-hearted than I. Whatever storm was raging, whatever cloud was lowering, whatever night was thicken- ing,-the women had always one sunbeam shining in the ship, and, this was the babe. Had not that child been born in the midst of the shipwreck, to take our thoughts from the desolate scene, and for months and years afterward to give page: 446-447[View Page 446-447] "6 TEMPEST-TOSSED. us something else to think of than our own misery, we would probably have died long ago-smitten to madness by gloom and despair. I have often thought that Barbara was our guardian angel. We could not have survived without her. Some people speak of Providence, others of fate; but what- ever name be given to the divinity that shapes our end, it is a power that excels all 'human eyes in seeing the end from the beginning,--and in turning calamity into blessing. The birth of Barbara-which came at a moment when, according to human judgment, it was most full of inopportuneness, peril, and dread-proved, nevertheless, to have been the supremest blessing that heaven could have bestowed on us at that dreadful hour." While Dr. Vail and his friend sat on the deck, in the old willow chairs, talking of the ship and her company,-going over the multitudinous particulars of their voyage, their provisions, their privations, their make-shifts, their hopes and fears, their daily life and longings, their health and sickness, and their final escape from the lonely sea to the lonely isle, -the sunken sun warned the two talkers that their long talk should now end. "It is past the time," said Rodney, " at which we promised Mary to return to the house." Just then, emerging from the cocoa-nut trees, Barbara, who had been sent by her mother to call her father, ran down to the water's edge, followed at a few paces by Anthony Cammeyer. The merry maid took off her straw-bonnet and waved it to the loiterers on the ship, calling them with a ringing voice to supper, at which they must not dare to be late, she said, for fear of Jezebel's frown. The two friends on the ship immediately stepped into the ferry-basket, and the two on shore (not waiting, and perhaps not wishing, to be joined by their elders) tripped side by side briskly out of sight among the cocoa-palms. I -CHAPTER XXIII. Jg AN OUTSTRETCHED HAND. : AS a rich soil, hitherto unplanted, takes eagerly the seed of the first sower, so Barbara's heart, into which never before had any lover dropped a word of love, at last received the magical germ, which, under the bedewing of her joyful tears, blossomed by instant miracle into perfect bloom;- for the swift soul, unlike the slow soil, needs not to tarry for the tedious progress of the seasons, but may ordain the seed and its harvest so near together that it can plant the one and reap the other at the same moment. The miracle which Barbara beheld with such surprise, and wept at with such delight, was not that she was in love with Philip, but that Philip was in love with her. Barbara had loved Philip ever since her childhood. This love-now of so long a date in her constant heart-had originally overtaken her on the dhifting ship just as it would have done in a crowded city ;-for it still remains woman's nature to love, even after it becomes woman's fate to have no lover. Barbara's heart had been fixed on Philip long before she ever thought of meeting him in this world-long before she dreamed of the possibility that this love could have a requital-long before she was aware that Philip knew of her existence. Barbara, during all her thoughtful and serious years- which, though few in number, were rich in the discipline of baffled aspirations-had felt no surer of the foundation of the world than of her love for Philip. No doubt of this im- mortal fact had ever crossed her mind. Her seeing him page: 448-449[View Page 448-449] "8 TEMPEST-TOSSED. was no more a confirmation of this love, than her not seeing him would have been an abnegation of it. The reason why Barbara was now overcome with joyful tears was the wonderful fact that, during all her years of love and longing for Philip, there had been a parallel experience in the breast of her unseen lover;-a strange reciprocity of attachment between them, unbeknown to each other;-an unsuspected knitting together of their two lives into one, as by a decree of heaven. Like some mysterious influence that works upon adverse fate to turn it from its fatality,-or like a besieging prayer that bestorms and finally carries the gates of heaven,-so Barbara's long love, ceaseless in its energy, had at last conquered destiny itself, and brought to her the one lover on whom her love was bestowed, and whose sole possession it was ordained to be forever and ever. Barbara had given her heart to Philip as she had given it to God-never to take it back ; and, in her eyes, one offering was as sacredly made as the other. She knew nothing of the gay art of treating love as "A cowslip ball to fling, A moment's pretty pastime; she was of those whole-hearted givers who, in giving their whole hearts, say, "I give all me, if anything,- The first time, and the last time." This was the gift that Barbara made to Philip ;-and she made it before his asking-though his non-asking was due only to the delicacy which he felt in not pressing upon her any claim to her hand as a return for his rescuing her from * her exile. It was impossible that Anthony Cammeyer, or any other person, should come between Barbara and the one beloved object of her heart's fealty. Had Cammeyer been a king, and Philip a beggar, Barbara would have spurned the crown of the one, and knelt to the rags of the other. AN OUTSTRETCHED HAND. 449 Philip, who had mournfully seen his first Rose fall blighted from its stalk, would now have felt all the charmed joy that follows grief could he have beheld, during his bitter absence on the Tamaqua, how a still fairer rose-the chief flower of all the gardens of the earth-was now waiting till he should return to pluck its blushing beauty for himself. Meanwhile, in Philip's absence, his ambitious rival, having the common self-complacency which marks all such charac- ters, quickly forgot the first abashed confusion which he had felt in Barbara's presence, and saw no reason why his superior officer should possess any greater influence than his own with an unworldly woman's virgin mind. This natural vanity in Cammeyer-which was partly pardonable, at least in so far as it was based on a proper I self-respect-was now inadvertently fostered in him, first by Mrs. Vail and then by Barbara; for Mrs. Vail exhibited toward him a marked politeness which her daughter was quick to perceive, and which, perceiving, she closely imitated in her own deportment as the proper polite model for her to copy. Accordingly Barbara was full of extraordinary attentions to Anthony Cammeyer in Philip Chantilly's absence.- Lieut. -Cammeyer quite naturally misjudged these cour- tesies, - which proceeded thus jointly from mother and daughter, and which were marked in both cases with an unstudied charm such as he had rarely seen in any of the polite circles in which he had moved. Judging Cammeyer charitably, which is the only judg- ment that human beings have a right to render to each other,-it is probable that had this ambitious man known the real state of Barbara's heart; had he discovered in it the image that she had already erected there, and was bowing down before; had he dreamed that for Philip Chantilly-,-her first, her chief, her only accepted lover-she had already filled the wine-cup of her oblation to overflow- ing, and that what she was giving to the second comer was only the good-will which she had for this friend as she had page: 450-451[View Page 450-451] 450 TEMPEST-TOSSED. the same feeling for every officer and sailor on Philip's ship; -it is quite possible that Anthony Cammeyer would have quenched the promptings of his ambition, and left the great prize in the peaceful possession of its first captor and lawful lord. i But Lieut. Cammeyer knew nothing of this. He mis- interpreted Mrs. Vail; he misinterpreted Barbara; he mis- interpreted the situation. And accordingly he was uncon- sciously engendering misery for all. During Philip's absence-which had now prolonged itself beyond the rough weather of the second day into the sunshine of the third--Capt. Chantilly and Dr. Vail talked incessantly together; opening the volumes of two whole lives to each other, and discussing the history of the world during seventeen of its most eventful years. This left Barbara frequently in the company of Cam- meyer. That shrewd officer fancied that his fortune now hung be- fore him like a golden apple, and he only waited till it should be surely ripe before he would reach out his hand to pluck it. Anthony and Barbara took walks together, scouring the island in every nook and cranny; visiting the coral rocks and inlets; rambling among the pineapples and plantains; plucking the red roses and the redder cardinal flowers; singling out the Berenice butterflies; listening to the scream- ing macaws; beckoning to the dwarf-like goats; and climbing the rocks for outlooks toward the sea. "Are you interested in geology, Mr. Cammeyer?" she asked. "Ye-es," said that cautious investigator, who was just at that moment pursuing a softer subject. "Well," said she, ",by standing here on this rock,-you can see the whole coast of the island, except only the southern end. Notice how, yonder, on the west, the ground rises in terraces toward a central ridge of jagged conical hills-though my father smiles at me for calling them hills, and says they have not risen high enough in the world to be AN OUTSTRETCHED HAND. 451 entitled to such honors. On the northwest, as you may observe, the rocks are of coralline limestone. Here on this eastern side, you will recognize under us strata of silicious sandstone, intermixed with ferruginous matter-the calca. reous sandstone passing into silicious limestone." "How did you learn all this?" asked Cammeyer, surprised at her profundity. "O ," said she, " one would have to be quite blind not to notice the obvious difference between limestone and sand- stone." And yet," said Cammeyer, "most of the young ladies whom I have the honor to know, are afflicted with this blindness. What I meant was, how have you learned so much of the sciences?" "Well," she replied laughingly, "I have yet learned so little of them, during our few months' residence here, that I have often wished myself Cambuscan's daughter." "Cambuscan?" inquired Cammeyer, " who was he?" "He!" exclaimed Barbara, surprised that any inhabitant of the touter world should be ignorant of so palpable a fact in human history. "He was the King of Tartary." "Bless me!" cried Cammeyer, " why do you wish to be a Tartar?" "Because," replied Barbara, -who was as ignorant of Cammeyer's slang joke as Cammeyer was of Barbara's his- torical allusion,-" because, good sir, the King of Tartary's daughter had a ring which, whenever she put it on her finger, enabled her to understand the language of all birds and the virtues of all plants. I have often wished to wear that ring." Mr. Cammeyer now lighted a cigar. This was a great curiosity to Barbara. She had never seen such a thing before, nor had ever happened to hear her father mention such an adjunct of civilization. Had Barbara been a young man, she might have taken to this fascinating vice with graceful promptitude, and accepted the lieutenant's jocose offer of one of the perfumed tempters; but as- he accorm- page: 452-453[View Page 452-453] 452 TEMPEST-TOSSED. panied this sham proposition with a statement that sucl indulgences were not for the fair sex, she gazed with bewil derment while he poured forth the curling smoke from his Roman and double-chimneyed nose. "Now," said she, " since you have lighted a torch, I will show you something to set fire to. Come this way." She led him to a little boiling spring; in other words, to a spot where carburetted hydrogen escaped from the earth; and whenever the rain left the shallow excavation full of water, the escaping gas, bubbling up through the water, gave it the appearance of boiling. "Put your hand into it," said she, with a merry twinkle in her eyes. "I do not wish to be scalded," he responded, cautiously. "Then I must put in mine." Saying which, she rolled up the sleeve from her beautiful white arm, and thrust that whole faultless piece of alabaster into the bubbling flood. "How can you bear so much heat?" asked Cammeyer, thinking her a witch. O,"' replied Barbara, ' it is not hot. It only appears to be so. If I had my father's thermometer here, I would show you that the temperature is just the same as of any other pool of rain-water. But I will set it on fire. Please. lend me your torch." ] Barbara took Cammeyer's cigar, and applying/,e lighted end to the boiling flood, set the volatile gas oh fire, which made the disturbed water appear to be burhing with a white, flickering, ghostly light. The glowing face of the woman who wrought this witchery smote Anthony Cammeyer as with a spell of sorcery. Soon a puff of the sea-breeze blew out the fire, and Barbara was about to lead her companion back to thir rocky seat, overlooking the Atlantic,-when Cammeytr, who had trodden on something that seized his foot, gave ' start and cry. "What's that?" he exclaimed; "it has bitten my foot, Miss Vail; what creature is that?" "That," she replied, "is a scorpion ;" and she curiously watched the vicious little thing in the grass. "4 O God!" cried Cammeyer, " am I bitten by a scorpion? It is a mortal-wound. I am a dead man!" He turned to a cowardly paleness, and a cold sweat broke out on his brow. "No," replied Barbara, quickly, "the little creature has very ill manners, but he can do you no harm. My fingers have been bitten a dozen times by just such a suipper- snapper as that." Mr. Cammeyer, on then examining his boots, found that the leather was not cut quite through, and that although his foot had been pinched, yet his flesh had not even been scratched. His scare was for nothing, and he felt a little ashamed of his exhibition of cowardice in the presence of his braver i companion. "You seem," he said to Barbara, "to be afraid of nothing." "O yes, I hate the vampires. They come upon you unawares and suck your blood. I have wakened in the morning and found that they had left a blood-spot on my ear-sometimes on my arm." "How startling!" exclaimed Cammeyer. "Did they not terrify you in the night?" "No, the vampire comes upon you gently while you are fast asleep, and pricks you as with the point of a needle. My mother, several years ago, had some cambric needles on the ship. I remember that their points were very fine. But the vampire's tooth pricks a smaller hole than a cambric needle could do. O I hate these midnight assassins beyond all the evil creatures in the world." Cammeyer expressed his cordial assent to Barbara's views of vampires; which showed no small disinterestedness on his part, since he was something of a vampire himself. page: 454-455[View Page 454-455] 454 TEMPEST-TOSSED. A light green snake, graceful and timid, now glided past them, escaping out of their way. Cammeyer again started. "What is the matter?" asked Barbara, who noticed his agitation. "Was not that a snake?" he asked. "That," said Barbara, " was one of our pussy-cats. Have you a cat on your ship?" "Yes." "O, I wish you had brought it ashore with you. I am so anxious to see a cat-I never saw one in my life." "But you just spoke of a pussy-cat." "Yes, we found mice in the house, and my father said that having no cat-for cats kill mice, do they not?-we must have a mouser; and so we took a harmless green snake-like the one that just passed. We call our snakes our pussy-cats." Barbara grew more and more fascinating to Cammeyer, hour by hour ; and as he walked at her side, he hardly noticed the parrots, the humming-birds, the ants, or even the centi. pedes; which latter, had he condescended to scrutinize them, would have given him even more loathsome occasion to shudder than he found in the snakes and scorpions. He was intent only on gazing at Barbara, who sometimes seemed to him to be a beautiful wild siren of a superior rank to humanity. Comely to his eyes from the first, she swiftly grew before him into'a piece of perfect splendor. "O, my dear friend!" exclaimed Barbara, I I have for- gotten to show you one thing. Look yonder-4t is a little broken boat that came ashore during the earthquake. I planted it round about with flowers. Stand here-see-they have almost hidden it out of sight. But I will push aside the vines and show you the boat's name." Barbara then uncovered the gilt letters of the name, Good Hope. AN OUTSTRETCHED HAND. 455 "It is a man-of-war's boat," said he after some exami- - ation; "but I know of no vessel in the American navy with such a name. As these-are English islands, some English cruiser was probably in this neighborhood during the earthquake. The boat may have been washed from the ship's deck and cast ashore." Barbara, leaving the flowery boat and resuming her seat among the rocks, reflected that she had hospitably enter- tained her guest with such narratives concerning the island as she thought would interest him, and she now felt at liberty to change the subject and become his- questioner concerning the more magnificent curiosities of the great world outside. Accordingly she opened fire with the whole broadside of her dreaded catechism:-shooting at him a thousand inquiries concerning the countries which he had visited- their customs and manners-their governments and laws -their literature, arts, and sciences-their men and women -their music and poetry-their silks and satins-their laces and embroideries;-questions - touching a thousand sub- jects, great and small, and which, for the most part, were so far above or beyond the range of Cammeyer's knowledge that he found himself again in the position of a surprised sophomore undergoing a general examination which was every minute leading him further and further beyond his depth. Had Barbara, instead of wanting to know all about the poetry, the music, the beauties, the grand and shining things which made the great world glitter to her fancy,-had Barbara asked him the more commonplace questions which he had been in the habit of gallantly answering to young ladies of her age, he would have taken more satisfaction than he now felt under an assault of interrogatories which, a second time, staggered him and made him strike his flag. When Barbara received less information from him on page: 456-457[View Page 456-457] 456 TEMPEST-TOSSED, these topics than she expected, she passed on to others and made him relate to her the whole history of the civil war which was then raging in her own country, and which she could hardly comprehend; for after he detailed as well as he could-not being fluent of speech-its battles by land, by river, and by sea; after he spoke of its still unbalanced scale; after he prophesied when it was likely to be over;- she innocently looked up, and put to him the child's question concerning the battle of Blenheim, 'What did they kill each other for " But although there were many interesting questions he could not answer, yet there were so many he could, that Barbara, after a long conversation, which it was now time to terminate in favor of some household duties touching supper, looked into his pleased eyes and said, "O, Mr. (Jammeyer, I have neither sister nor brother. Yes, I have a distant sister, whom I have never seen. Lucy Wilmerding has always been to me like a sister. You heard my father speaking of her yesterday--did you not?" "Yes," said Cammeyer, with an air of ignorance and indifference. 40," exclaimed Barbara, "I wish that you, Mr. Cam- meyer, could have known Lucy Wilmerding-I am sure you would have loved her. Ah, what an unhappy fate is hers- to break her heart over a false lover! Can men be so despicable? What a pity that my dear Lucy could not have been the wife of a brave and noble man-like your- self!" Cammeyer felt javelins piercing him in these words. He quivered under them, but resolved to hide his wounds; which he did with a self-mastery so complete that no trace of his emotion appeared on his face, save a little unnatural whiteness and clamminess. "Lucy shall be my sister," continued- Barbara, " and you shall be my brother-will you not? Then I shall have both brother and sister. Why do you look so agitated?" AN UUflKSETlCEl D HAND. 4t0 E "I cannot be your brother," said Cammeyer, rallying, and recovering his composure, "but I can be something more. Will you permit me to say what?" 6'I do not understand you," she replied. c' There is a reason why I cannot be your brother." "What is it?" she asked. "It is because I wish to be your-husband." i Barbara's breast heaved with sudden tumult. Her face reddened to a flame. Her eyes glittered like stars. She could not have been more deeply smitten to the heart's core if she had been transfixed by a bolt from heaven. But her agitation was not due to its apparent cause. She was excited, but not indignant. Her celestial mind harbored no anger against the sudden proposition of her unexpected suitor; for however impossible it was for her to accept his offer, she could not have been offended at him for making it. No woman objects to an offer of marriage- whether she can accept it or not. So Barbara was not resentful toward Cammeyer. She did not even stop to consider Cammeyer in the case. The impression which that gentleman meant to convey to her,-namely, that he wished to be her husband,-formed no part of the powerful agitation that seized her soul and shook her to the foundations of her lif. This stormy fact was wholly due the novel sensation that shot through her veins at hearing one particular word which had fallen from his lips. This was the word " husband." But it was the word itself, and not the man who uttered it, that so strongly shook Barbara's mind; for so absolutely did the mere word take possession of her, that she instantly forgot by whom it had been spoken. The cool-headed tactician, who felt flattered by the obvious emotion which his proposition had occasioned in Barbara's breast, little suspected (for he was not a pro- found man) that this sudden pricking of the maiden's sensi- bilities was due, not to the archer, but to the arrow. 20 page: 458-459[View Page 458-459] 45 - TEMPEST-TOSSED. In fact, at the very moment when Cammeyer was thus pluming himself on the success of his venture, Bar- bara had banished him from her mind as utterly as if he had never been born. With eyelids drooping toward the ground, she stood a moment in a beautiful mood of abstraction-her mind turned inward upon itself-her face wearing that strange look of unearthly beauty which is occasionally beheld on the human countenance when the soul seems to have tempo- rarily left it in order to spend a few passing moments in heaven itself. There was a confused ringing in her head as if her thoughts were clashing like bells; and they all seemed set to the key-note of Philip's voice, uttering Cammeyerls speech, and asking to be Barbara's husband. Strange to say-and yet not strange-all that Barbara heard or comprehended of Cammeyer's proposition was a -gentle whisper in her ear, seemingly from Philip Chantilly' . own sacred lips, wooing her for his wife. This whisper, as she stood listening to its echo, grew to a solemn cadence which, like some great church chime, or Triton's horn, or Norseman's bugle, sounded tumultuously in- Barbara's ears, conquering all other noises of the earth. M Dy husband!" she said to herself ; and the thought set her face to blushing and her heart to beating. When the first momentary excitement occasioned by the startling word had spent its tumult in her mind, she began to reason with herself. The heart uses a more swift and fiery logic than the head. Barbara, having made the dis- covery through Anthony Cammeyer that a man who ad- mires a woman wants to be that woman's husband, imme- diately leaped to the conclusion that Philip Chantilly could not fail to be actuated by the same desire. If the steps of Barbara's swift and almost instantaneous reasoning could hleave been successively traced, they would probably have run thus: AN OUTSTRETCHED HAND. 459 Philip's interest in her seemed a thousand times greater than Mr. Cammeyer's ;-for Philip had kissed her hand, which Mr. Cammeyer had hot; Philip had written her a letter, which Mr. Cammeyer had not; Philip had compared her to his mother, which Mr. Cammeyer had not; Philip had sent her a ring, which Mr. Cammeyer had not; Philip had made himself a hero in her eyes, which Mr. Cammeyer had not. If, therefore, Philip had done all this, which Mr. Cammeyer had not, why then had she not reason to expect that Philip, on his return, would be a thousand times more eager to be her husband than Mr. Cammeyer could possibly be? Barbara was then puzzled. to understand why Philip, who had passionately declared his love to her, had not asked her to be his wife; while, on the other hand, Cammeyer, who had not spoken to her a word of love, had proposed to be her husband. Barbara's native instinct was that love should be only for marriage, and marriage only for love. Sometimes as many thoughts have passed min a moment through a woman's mind concerning the man of her heart, as there were angels that danced on the point of a needle for Thomas Aquinas. Barbara's mind now filled itself with just such a multitude of angelic thoughts-all dancing on the one keen point that had just pricked her heart in the word "husband." Barbara continued her intuitive reasoning thus: She had been unexpectedly asked to accept a husband. Who had made this offer? Was it Mr. Cammeyer? No, the suggestion, as coming from him, had vanished with the same breath that uttered it. But it did not seem to Bar- bara to come from him at all. On the contrary, it seemed to be the actual voice of Philip himself, spoken through the distance because he was not present-a message which Philip had sent to be delivered through Cammeyer just as some great prince sends royal messages through an am- bassador. page: 460-461[View Page 460-461] fI 460 TEMPEST-TOSSED. The more she pondered the problem, the more serious it became-but serious only as propounded by Philip, and not by Cammeyer. For this reason, though she stood in Cammeyer's presence and not Philip's, and had listened to Cammeyer's words and not Philip's, yet the strange delight that continued to fill her mind and thrill her soul was wholly based on Philip and totally alien from Cammeyer. She never once named Lieut. Chantilly to herself as other than Philip, and never addressed Anthony as othIer than Mr. Cammeyer. Barbara, without intending to slight her present com- panion, was fast becoming ungraciously oblivious to his very existence; for her soul was wrapped round by Philip as her little sun-lit island was girdled by the shining sea. If Cammeyer could have imagined- how thoroughly he was neglected at that moment by the woman to whom he had just made no less an offer than of his hand and heart (that is, if he had a heart to accompany his hand), he might have considered Barbara's manner congenial with her name. One golden thought had now been struck in the mint of Barbara's mind-a thought which, like a guinea, was stamped on two different sides ; each impression being coun- terpart to the other, and both necessary to the perfect coin: one was, that possibly Philip would desire to be her hus- band; and the other-its golden opposite-that haply she was destined to become Philip's wife. Under the present and sweet burden of this too blissful future, Barbara, hiding her holy secret within her happy heart, and shrinking from a rude exposure of it to a stranger's eye, hastily rose and said, "Good sir, I must now go." Saying which, without further word, she sped away with stately haste from her bewildered companion; who, as he watched her retreating form as she disappeared among the l - AN OUTSTRETCHED HAND. . 461 trees, little dreamed that on reaching the house, she stole straightway to her chamber, and sinking on her knees be- fore the ancient crucifix on the wall, called all the saints in heaven to unite in showering blessings on the head of Philip Chantilly. page: 462-463[View Page 462-463] / CHAPTER XXIV. REVOLT, FTER Barbara ended her passionate prayer for Philip (in which her devotions were probably not according to any known rubric or rituaD she rose from her knees, turned away from the antique prie-Dieu that she originally found in her chamber, and stepped in front of a looking- glass that was a contribution' of her own to that strange boudoir. "What tell-tales one's eyes are!" she exclaimed. "One cannot shed a few tears without showing one's heart to all one's friends, and to strangers besides." Barbara's glance at the mirror on this occasion was not to see Narcissa, but herself. Her curiosity was excited to survey exactly what manner of woman it was that Philip Chantilly was in danger of chbosing for a bride. Her desire to appear well in Philip's eyes was the same emotion that has blushingly enkindled many a pure woman's cheeks and modestly prompted her to array herself with chaste beauty to meet the lord of her heart and fate. One swift glance by Barbara, first at her face and then at her dress, reminded her that though she could not heighten the comeliness of the one, she knew where to borrow a queenly richness for the other, This supplement to Nature's loveliness lay sweetly packed in lavender in a chest, and had once been a bride's wedding- gown. This chest had been left on board the Coromandel by Mrs. AtwilL Bt REVOLT. 463 Barbara, who on the ship had kept this chest in her state- room, and who in the Hermitage kept it in her chamber, now lifted the lid-took out the white silk robe- shook out its folds-swept her hand over the lustrous fabric to make it rustle-held it up, first on one arm, then on the other- unclad herself of the gown she was wearing-put on this cream-white array-bejeweled herself with a necklace of pearls-unbound her hair till it fell about her shoulders- shod her feet in white-silk slippers-clasped her bracelets on her naked arms-and, having thus arrayed herself, went to review her own supreme loveliness in the blushing glass. "I wonder," thought she, "whether Philip admires white silk."5 Going to her jewel-box, she took out Philip's letter- which she kept therein as her chief jewel-kissed the envelope-kissed the seal-kissed the paper-and then read the contents from beginning to end, in a low, soft voice, as if murmuring some immortal music to her mortal ears. "O what a letter!" she whispered. ' What wonderful words it contains! 'Your true lover, Philip Chantilly!" And she kept repeating those closing words. "Philip calls himself my true lover. What can I give my true lover in return? True lovers should have true love. O Philip, I give you my true love." Barbara then forgot her glowing image ini the glass, and became absorbed in the contemplation of another image more pleasing to her mind-the figure of the young sailor of the Tamaqua -the hero of her true love, of her pure heart of her whole soul. Her thoughts rose to such a fever-heat that she paced up and down her little apartment, like an untamed leopard in a cage; she shivered and burned; she wept and laughed; she caught up her one and only love-letter, and pressed it to her lips-which was an act of grace such as she had not yet bestowed on her one and only lover; she sighed-yet not CHAP page: 464-465[View Page 464-465] "4 TEMPEST-TOSSED. with grief; she put her hand against her breast as if trying to steady her too tumultuous heart; and she passionately exclaimed, "What did he say? He said, ' Let me be your husband.' So then, from all the women in the world does he choose me? O, how often I have put on this dress to please my father in our solitude! How often I have danced in these slippers on the floor of the Coromandel's cabin as if at my mock-wedding! How often I have worn this necklace as if it were a bridal ornament! And now to think of my becoming a bride indeed! O Philip, are you not wild? Am I not mad? Are we both alive? But, alas! it is still all a dream. You are absent. You did not speak the words yourself. They came from the lips of another. But, 0 Philip, my true lover, how could I hear any other voice utter them save yours alone? Is not this my soul's fore- token that you will come back and utter the same sweet words with your own dear lips? Who is this stranger that offers me marriage? O Philip, are you not coming back to say,-' Barbara, let me be your husband?' Dear Philip, what then shall be my answer? You know already what it shall be. Barbara-your loving Barbara-Barbara, with her letter in her hand-Barbara, with her ring on her finger -Barbara, a bride adorned for her husband-your own happy Barbara shall answer with proud tears : '0 Philip, take your wife." No sooner had these whispered words escaped Barbara's lips with a happy sigh, than she suddenly pressed her hand on her bosom, and with a distressful expression on her face, said in a low moan, "O hush, foolish heart of mine-giddy with vain hope! It cannot be. Do you not know that Philip may choose among a thousand-aye, among ten thousand-of the chief ladies of all the world-? Will he then come back again into the desert to choose you? Barbara answered her question doubtfully, "Yes--no--no-yes," lH* REVOLT. 465 But her doubts were only of a moment's space, for "perfect love casteth out fear." Barbara rallied her shaken heart, and exclaimed, "Did he not write it with his own hand?-' Your true lover, Philip Chantilly?' O Philip, Philip-O heaven's joy outdone on earth!" The excited girl turned again to the glass, and catching sight of her white hand, which Philip had kissed, she kissed it on the same spot--as if some touch of Philip's lips still remained there. The real woman who gave this kiss, seeing her image doing the same thing in the glass, addressed her twin self, there reflected, and said, "O, Narcissa, look at me now! Speak to me, darling, as of old. Speak to me of Philip! Speak to me and say, '0 thou blessed among women!' Speak to me and tell me, 'My beloved is mine, and I am his!'-0 Narcissa!-O Philip!-0 God!" The tumult in her breast overcame her. She felt a sudden dizziness, and thrusting forth her hand to grasp some prop to steady herself, she sank down half unconscious between the guardian griffins of her antique chair. Mr. Cammeyer, meanwhile, had slowly followed the swift- flying Barbara to the house; and as he already had noticed Mrs. Vail's marked courtesy toward him; and as a young man, who courts a daughter, generally finds it worth while to be reinforced by the mother,-he made a frank and bold statement to Mrs. Vail of his proposition to Barbara. In doing this, he distorted the case, and left a false im- pression on Mrs. Vail. "In short," said he, in concluding his adroit remarks, "I asked for your daughter's hand in marriage, and though she received my offer in a somewhat unconventional way, I have the best reason to suppose that she accepted it, and I have done myself the honor to be the first to inform you of it." page: 466-467[View Page 466-467] "6 TEMPEST-TOSSED. On receiving this intelligence, Mrs. Vail was filled with consternation and grief. Anthony Cammeyer was no favorite with Barbara's mother. How then, she wondered, could he have become in so short a time a favorite with Barbara herself? Above all, how could her darling child have so swiftly given her heart to a total stranger-a man, too, not to be compared with Philip Chantilly? Mrs. Vail had not been so long out of the world as to have forgotten how it had always been filled with miserable marriages. What hope of happiness, thought she, could come from a marriage between Barbara and Cammeyer? A present sympathy might, indeed, exist between them, and evidently some strange fascination had already woven its film of captivity over both; but how long could this un- substantial emotion last? She knew that it could begin only in hallucination and end only in disappointment. With motherly aggressiveness, she instantly resolved to interfere between her daughter and this new comer; for Mrs. Vail was the most motherly of mothers, and felt a greater anxiety for Barbara than Barbara could possibly have felt for herself. Rousing her, invalid strength to make an appropriate reply to Lieut. Cammeyer, she addressed him thus: "I am so surprised-so bewildered-and (I cannot help confessing) so grieved at what you have told me from Barbara-who ought herself to have been the first to announce it-that my heart almost refuses to speak. I am her mother, and you a stranger. That girl--from her baby- hood down to these last few days-has seen no other man than her father. The sudden arrival of strangers among us has been exciting and bewildering even to her father and me--how much more so to her/ She is an impulsive crea- ture-rushing hither and thither like the wind. If she has suddenly poured out upon you her sympathy and love, she may follow it with her disappointment, her vexation, yes even her scorn and hate. She is a law to herself, and will I r - REVOLT. 467 be loth to receive her law from another. Remember that she has no knowledge of the art of accommodating herself to others-not even to friends and acquaintances, since she has had none-least of all to a stringer like yourself. Of the submissions which women are supposed to make in mar- riage-of the subordinate rank which they are expected to hold-of all this, Barbara knows nothing. True, I wish to see her married-for no woman can be happy without mar- riage-but I hope she may be guided to marry wisely; otherwise, I would rather see her borne to her grave. Consider how liable such a girl's feelings are to be mistaken -to be misdirected. - You take an undue advantage of her isolation and ignorance. No woman should marry a stran- ger. I would rather that our old ship had never brought Barbara to the shore than that in her first misstepping on the land she should stumble into a false marriage. If Bar- bara loves you truly, nothing will sever her from you; and her love will not grow less, but more, by waiting and feed- ing itself on hope and trust. On the other hand, if she does not yet know her heart, but has parted with it igno- rantly,-you will harm both yourself and her by pressing this suit any further-just now. Mr. Cammeyer, I believe you to be a man of honor-a gentleman. You have my respect aAd confidence. As Barbara's mother, I beg you not to say another word to my daughter on this subject until I can speak with her father and herself-not until I give you my consent to so doing-not even if you have to wait several days, or even longer. Will you promise me this?" Mr. Cammeyer was so abundantly satisfied with Mrs. Vail's argument-an argument which, to him, seemed to tell powerfully in his own favor-that he gave his promise on the spot; and; noticing her excitement and weariness, with- drew from her presence. Barbara, in the next room, overheard the rumbling voices of the two talkers, but did not catch the drift of their con- versation. page: 468-469[View Page 468-469] "8 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Lieut. Cammeyer then walked with elastic and conquer- ing step toward the Coromandel-hailed Robson and Carter -stepped into the ferry-basket-was drawn by them to the ship-sat in a willow-chair on deck-lighted a fresh cigar--. and plunged into a profound meditation. Possessing a judicial if not a just mind, Cammeyer now held before him in the scale of his well-balanced judgment two women for comparison. One was Lucy Wilmerding- the other, Barbara Vail. As he sat weighing them, one against the other, his mind passed into an unexpected and unwelcome mood. Among the mystic laws of human nature, which follow like Nemesis in the track of human conduct, is one which ordains that no man's mind, however excited with present interest or engrossed with prospective ambition, can at any moment be safe against the inopportune and awful intrusion of the dead, of the absent, or of the wronged. Lucy Wilmerding, like a phantom, now confronted An- thony Cammeyer, and accompanied him in all his thoughts of Barbara Vail. He seemed to have just parted from the real presence of the one, only to join the shadowy society of the other. Cammeyer's smoke-wreaths, which he sent forth from his retrospective cigar, went rolling up, one above the other, till they moulded themselves into the veritable image of a young brunette with piercing black eyes, sitting in a London hotel, on her sixteenth birthday, holding a bunch of English violets in her hand. It is not to be supposed that Anthony Cammeyer still loved Lucy Wilmerding; for, properly speaking, he had not loved her at first, and he loved her now less than, ever. Whatever pleased interest he may have had in her during the early days when he fondly inwreathed her name into his visions of future advancement in the world, his feeling was not true love. Its shallow depth had no right to that deep name. Undoubtedly he then believed himself to be in love. But this vain imagination was natural to a man who REVOLT. 469 expected that Lucy's lovable face, together with her pro- spective fortune, would become his joint possession to make him a happy and powerful man. Cammeyer's love for Lucy had amply proved itself never to have been love at all;- at least not by the canon of the song that says, "O tell me how love cometh? It comes unsought, unsent: And tell me how love goeth? That was not love which went." If it be answered that this is too poetic and ideal a test to apply as an everyday rule to common human nature, and par- ticularly to the average type of man, still in Cammeyer's case, if he ever had any love, he had sacrificed his love, which was little, to his selfishness, which was great; and this points back again to the same conclusion ; for little love is none at all; and no man loves a woman truly if he can love her less than he loves himself, or less than he loves any other person or thing in the world. Love is born to command; it is love only while it reigns supreme; it ceases to be love the mo- ment it is dethroned. Like the queen-bee, love must rank chief, for it has no capacity for a subordinate part. And yet Lieut. Cammeyer-though he had never truly loved Lucy Wilmerding--had not become so wholly cal- lous to the soft impulses of his heart, nor to the hard reproaches of his conscience, as not to have groaned in spirit many times at the injury which he had inflicted on this life-blighted woman. He knew well enough that the blow which he gave her had broken her heart-that it had scarred her with a wound which she could never in this life find any balm to heal-that it was a murder which he had committed upon her, most murdero{s in that its victim, though slain, could not die, but must endure a living death. Cammeyer knew also that for this dastardliness on his part he had suffered a long, slow punishment, which nature had wrought out within him in her subtlest way. page: 470-471[View Page 470-471] 470 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Whom we injure we hate," says the wise proverb: and this is one of the greatest truths which human wit has yet discovered of the human heart. Cammeyer's injury to Lucy Wilmerding was followed by his long and unre- mitting hatred of that sweet, sad woman-hatred intense, bitter, and burning-hatred that time did not quench but increase. The very thought of her would oftentimes sting him in the night, and make him groan in his dreams. He could never forgive her for making him appear despicable in his own eyes. He was now thirty-six years old, and for the latter half of that long period his soul had been envenomed against her as the evil hate the good. This strange turmoil which had already destroyed his peace for years, and which promised to destroy it for life, now underwent an unexpected metamorphosis in his mind. Cammeyer's short, swift acquaintance with Barbara, culminating in his solicitation of her hand in marriage, had in a weird way,-which he had not expected, and could not comprehend, -suddenly placed the fascinating Barbara Vail before him in the identical position which, up to that moment, had been occupied by the injured and hated Lucy Wilmerding. Cammeyer, in transferring to Barbara the love which he once thought he cherished for Lucy, was amazed and horror-struck to find that his ill-fated soul could not avoid transferring to Barbara, with his early love, his later hate. This hate was so much stronger than this love, that the angrier passion entirely conquered the gentler, and dragged Cammeyer back in a moment into the remorse and half- madness which had desolated his life for the last dozen years. No sooner had he lifted Barbara to the place which Lucy, at the same age, had held in his thoughts, than he found himself, before he was aware, shaking with the old and oft- repeated inward tremor from head to foot, silently gnashing his teeth, and swearing a dumb oath of vengeance and REVOLT. 471 ' hatred against Barbara Vail, as he had a thousand times done against Lucy Wilmerding. In the midst of these tumultuous feelings, Cammeyer saw the image in his smoke-wreath gradually change from Lucy's to Barbara's, and knew by a shuddering instinct that the new love had already inherited the life-long curse bequeathed to it from the old. In the utter wretchedness of his cowardly and despicable soul, he realized in this dread and revelatory moment that "The Powers who wait On noble deeds," and whose function it is to "Cancel a sense misused," had condemned his life to be forever turned from love to hate-from hope to despair. Cammeyer's apparently unnatural revulsion of feeling against Barbara was due not only to the identity which he had now unwittingly established between herself and Lucy Wilmerding-thus making these two personages glide together into one interchangeable image in his mind; but also to his natural disappointment that Barbara, even when considered apart from Lucy, did not awaken in him the love which he hoped some woman, fit to be Lucy's successor, would inspire in his heart. Cammeyer was distinctly conscious that, in spite of all his admiration for Barbara, and of the fascinating spell which she had wrought upon him, and of the offer of marriage which he had made to her-he was, neverthless, not in love with her; and this fact showed him that the power to love, if he had ever possessed it, had been at last obliterated from his nature. "If I cannot love such a woman as Barbara Vail," said he, " then I can never love any one." He was right: the fire was extinct within him- the gift was withdrawn-the fountain of this most human and most divine of all feelings was dried in his breast forever. page: 472-473[View Page 472-473] 472 TEMPEST-TOSSED. If, in the rude clash of- carnal powers, it is a truth of history that they that take the sword shall perish by the sword, it is still more awfully true that in the jarring col- lision of human souls whoso destroys another's love and heart and life shall suffer the destruction of his own. This is an awful retribution, but Cammeyer knew that it had been inflicted upon him, and what was more, that he merited his fate. A cold anger, like the chill of rain, passed through his blood against Barbara for her unconscious agency in reveal. ing to him the searing and blasting of his nature-the final sentence of his fate. If there is a moment of supreme suffering in human life, it is when a proud man's pride is pierced to the quick by the sudden discovery that some great function of his head or heart has been blighted within him and gone from him forever. Cammeyer, who was one of these bankrupts, and who knew his beggary, now paced the deck. The twilight came, and still he paced it. The darkness came, and still, like a caged tiger, he continued his pacings up and down. His face, and his soul behind it, outshadowed the night with a superior gloom. But his prolonged meditations did not lead him to change, but only to intensify, his determination to woo and win Bar- bara; for he thought that in so doing he might possibly, after all, find his way back toward his former and lost self. If not too late, he hoped yet to renew the freshness of his youth-to be once again at peace with his tempest-tossed breast. Otherwise he knew himself a lost soul,-condemned to the blackness of darkness forever. Meanwhile, before the sun went down on Cammeyer, and while yet the afternoon was melting its gold in the hot orucible of the west, Dr. Vail, who had left the Coromandel shortly before Cammeyer came on board, returned to the house. "It is a luxury," said he to his wife, " to commune with one's fellow-men again. I have been talking with Robson and Carter. Then, too, I have been strolling about and chatting still more with Oliver-who will come up and join us here at supper. The world's history, with its wars and progress, its arts and sciences, its thought and endeavor,- all this has been withheld from me so long that it is a joy unspeakable to commune once again with my fellow-creatures concerning the human race. I remember, among my medi- cal studies, reading of an Englishman who was threatened with blindness, and condemned to sit in a dark room, unvis- ited by the light, unable to read, too sensitive to be read to, and so kept in an enforced oblivion of the world's passing events. On his recovery, when he found that these events had included Napoleon's wars, ending at Waterloo, nothing would satisfy his eager curiosity save to read from the file of The Times a complete narrative, day by day, of those astounding scenes. This man's excitement as an Englishman was no greater than mine as an American. Not so great. I have been in longer blindness. I have dropped a longer history, to pick up. I have missed a greater war, to fight over again-a war rending my own country in twain-a war which has been thundering on land and sea while I have been floating about, a mere wreck of a man, like the hull I drifted in- a war not yet come to its Waterloo. Mary, I am like a drunken man. My head totters-the world swims round and round me-I seemed to have missed everything, and to be now clutching at it all at once. But among all the things that you and I have missed, there is nothing in the world,-nothing in its Iuxuries-nothing in its society--nothing in its arts-nothing in its advantages,- no, nothing worthy to be compared with the sweet, the inestimable privilege of companionship with one's fellow- beings. It is this which I have most missed; and it is this which I am now stealing back,little by little, from the fate which has so long stolen it from me. All men seem to have a glorified look in my eyes. Cammeyer, too-I have just' page: 474-475[View Page 474-475] 474 TEMPEST-TOSSED. seen him from a distance, walking down toward the ship; and his step had something kingly in it-he seemed to tread the grass as if suddenly grown superior to himself." Mrs. Vail, with a sigh like a heart-break, replied, - Ah yes, you are a man. The outer world is your emr. pire. As for me, I am more content to-day with my isolation than I shall be to return to society. Already the little portion of the world that has broken in upon us has brought with it the one great problem on which its whole fate turns --I mean love. Barbara is in love. O Rodney, I am sick at heart! Mr. Cammeyer has made to our daughter an offer of marriage, and she has given him her assent." Dr. Vail stood transfixed. What!" he exclaimed. A tempest gathered on Rodney Vail's brow. The lion, which sleeps in every strong nature dike Thorwaldsen's statue cut in the rock), was roused within him, and he seemed ready to devour the man whom he had just praised. No eagle, glaring at the fiery sun, ever showed more piercing eyes than Rodney's at that moment. "Never!" he exclaimed, in a white heat-exhibiting such anger, scorn, and rage as his wife had never once witnessed in him before. "O Barbara!" he continued, moderating his brief frenzy into a deep grief, and addressing her absent image as if she herself were present to listen to his reproaches, " O Barbara, Barbara,-my daughter, my life,-Barbara whom I have lived for, all these years!-whom I have fought for against fate and death, -whom I have protected against every storm of heaven,-O Barbara, can you desert me?-your mother and me? Can you abandon your parents for this stranger of a day? By heaven, no! I forbid it. Never, never, never shall Barbara marry that man!" He clenched his hands; he walked up and down the small room in great agitation; the floor shook under his feet; his wife turned pale at the sight of his rage; and in the midst of this exciting scene, which wrought the father to , [ REVOLT. 475 frenzy and the mother to prostration, Barbara herself suddenly opened her door and stepped forth in her bridal dress! She stood before her father like an apparition. They met, face to face, mute as statues,-and looked at each other, eye to eye. Every word of Dr. Vail's violent speech had floated like the scream of the sea-mew into Barbara's ears. It had filled every nook and cranny of her chamber like a frost. It now tasted on her lips like a poison. It was rankling in her heart as a barb. It well-nigh smote her mind into a craze. Never had she experienced such an excitement in her life. Barbara had not heard any mention of Cammeyer's name. What she heard, instead of a name, was her father's invective against an absent person, contemptuously described as " that man." With Dr. Vail and Mary,"that man" was Anthony -Cammeyer. With Barbara, it was Philip. Such, and so great, are the misunderstandings that fre- quently arise between those who are nearest to each other, and who ought never to misunderstand each other at all! As for Anthony Cammeyer, he was not in Barbara's thoughts. He was no part of the problem which Barbara had stepped forth to face her father with. It was not Cammeyer who had written her the letter which she had kissed. It was riot Cammeyer who had given her the ring which she wore. It was not Cammeyer whom she had now come to defend. There was something awful in Barbara's agony at this flushed moment. Her emotion showed itself in her dis- tracted face. She was white and ghostly, as if her cheeks had caught their color from her veil. Her lips were blood- less. She looked like one against whom all the world had turned, and who in despair suddenly resolves to fight- perhaps to die. "O," she thought, agonizingly, "why has heaven, in the midst of my happiness, visited me with such woe?" page: 476-477[View Page 476-477] 476 TEMPEST-TOSSED. The case was a simple. one, as it appeared to Barbara's pure and innocent mind. She loved Philip. She loved him truly, wholly, absolutely. She loved him without reserve, without fear, without shame. She had not intended that this love-now that it was requited-should be kept secret from her parents; but thus far there had been no conve. nient opportunity for her to make to them a disclosure. Moreover, Philip was absent, nor had he yet asked of her the same question which another had put; and certainly it was hardly time for her to speak until he had spoken. Nevertheless she had meant to hold back nothing in guile from her parents ; and now, as they had brought the matter up so distressingly, she would settle it unflinchingly. Dr. Vail, standing before his daughter, gazed at her half in love, half in anger, and wholly in grief. Barbara felt that Philip had been unjustly and- ignomin- iously treated by her father; that Philip, the son of her father's best friend-Philip, their long seeker and final discoverer-Philip, the noble prince and hero-Philip, the master of her heart ;--Barbara felt that this paragon of men had been scornfully denounced by her father as "that man." Her father had called heaven to witness that she should never marry "that man." The loving maiden, "clad all in white, pure as her mind," bled under her white veil from the wound so suddenly struck at "that man." So Barbara, with lovers loyalty, resolved to take the fate, whatever it might be, which was now in store for "that man." It is idle to argue about filial duty. This is a beautiful gauze which fond parents weave about their children, think- ing it to be some charmed armor of protection, like Great Heart's shield in the Allegory; but it is neither a shield nor a coat of mail; it is not a defence at all; it is a mere filmy veil-a vapor-an exhalation; it is consumed, blown away, annihilated at the breath of one sweet and glowing word spoken by the stranger of yesterday who becomes the lover REVOLT, 4" of to-day. Vain is it for the mother to bind her daughter to imprisonment at home in chambers "silken, chill, and chaste." Vain is it for the father to spend his toil, his thought, his life, for the sake of one fair girl, who, like a bird, hearing a cooing-call afar off-a singer in another sky-flies away at the call, and forever abandons the nest in which she was fledged. This is Nature's absolute fiat-which fathers and mothers may tremble at, but which they cannot resist. Barbara, like all other daughters, true to Nature's law, I was sweetly false to her parents for the same true-hearted and immortal cause. And yet Barbara saw no reason to be unjust to her parents for the sake of being loyal to her lover; for she passionately loved all three, and determined to cling to them all, letting none of them go. "Yes," she thought, "I must be faithful to all, even though my heart be torn by each from the other; even though I bleed and die of this grievous, O this too griev- ous wound." Barbara believed that she was to have a desperate, an awful encounter with her father. She had never had a serious difference with him before. True, the wayward, impetuous, headstrong child had often needed curbing by the calm, powerful, and commanding will of that master-man. He had never permitted her a victory over his will. Whenever she conquered him, as she gener- ally did, it was not by arousing his opposition, but through some winsome appeal. His will, she well knew, was a rock against which all waves might break in vain. With woman's quick wit, she suddenly resolved, for Philip's sake, to try love's soft tactics with Philip's hard foe. This determination evinced, not her weakness, but her wisdom; for none know so well how to respect the will of others as they who have a will of their own. page: 478-479[View Page 478-479] 478 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Of this class was Barbara, for she was her father's child. But Barbara possessed not only her father's will, butt her mother's tenderness. The daughter, like her father, could be a rock, and immovable; but like her mother too, she could yearn, and plead, and stoop to conquer. Rodney Vail perused his daughter's face and saw signs of such distress in it as were never depicted there before. "She shall be the first to speak," thought he, which is oftentimes a strong man's plan of bringing on a battle, particularly when he wishes to possess the good excuse of provocation before he strikes his blow. "I have heard all you said," remarked Barbara, sadly; "I was not eaves-dropping, but when it thunders, one cannot help having ears." Barbara," said her father, who was now ready to strike, "have you come in this attire to invite me to a wedding?" "cc No," she replied, "I am not going to a wedding." "Why then," asked he, with a frown, "why are you in such haste to put on a semblance of marriage?" "It was you," she replied, " who taught me to wear this dress. For your pleasure, many times have I put it on. At your command, I can take it off. Shall I do so? A Barbara's voice grew tender and sad, for she saw that her father was now in tears. "O Barbara, my daughter," he exclaimed, melted still further at the sound of her soft voice, " you have never given me a pang until to-day. But your willingness to desert your mother and me-and with such suddenness-with so little warning --withl such ewildering haste ;--to desert your parents in order to unite yourself to a stranger of whom you know nothing ;-all this, O my daughter, is so rash -so unwise- so -fraught with present pain to your mother and me, and most likely with future disappointment to your- self ;-O0 my darling, all this-or any part of it-yes, each single and separate bitter drop of it-is enough to fill my whole cup of life with perpetual gall. Henceforth, nothing but bitterness remains for your father's soul." iHe then caught up her hand in his, as he was wont to do -held it-patted it-and at last kissed it. In doing this, he espied on her finger, for the first time, an unfamiliar ring. He flung down her hand violently, and exclaimed, "What is this?" "It is a ring," she replied, meekly, "a wedding-ring." Dr. Vail instantly conjectured that it was Cammeyer's hasty and crafty gift. "Barbara!" he exclaimed, with rekindled indignation, "this is blasphemy! Take that ring off! Obey me! You are my daughter-I command you. This is minad haste- this is unmaidenly behavior. The sight of this ring will be a shock to Capt, Chantilly; I will spare him an unnecessary pang." "O," exclaimed Barbara, appealing to her mother, and showing a new phase in her agitation. "What have I done? This innocent ring-why should it offend? Let me think! Yes, it was Capt. Chantilly's gift to Philip's mother. She is dead. Her widowed husband, seeing me wear it, might be too sorrowfully reminded of her death. I never thought of that-indeed I did not. I will take it of at once -pray do not mention it to Capt. Chantilly when he comes back from the shore." She took off the ring. "Rosa's wedding-ring?" inquired Mary, with profound curiosity and surprise. "Yes," said Barbara, "look at the inscription ;" and she handed the ring to her mother, who, on holding it up, saw on the inner golden circle these engraved letters: O. C. and B. C., Jan. 12, 18J0. "How came this ring on your finger?" asked Dr. Vail,- o whose anger was all gone, as if a new heart had been cre- ated within him in a moment. "I put it there myself," replied Barbara, calmly. "How came it into your possession?" page: 480-481[View Page 480-481] 480 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Barbara knew not how to account for the sudden change in her father's manner. a It was a gift to me," she replied, and tears welled into her eyes at the confession. " 'From whom?" A proud heat, not unaccompanied with anger, then shot its fire through Barbara's blood; and, remembering her father's unjust and unaccountable assault on Philip, she answered, with a flash of resentment, "It was given to me by that man." "Who?-Lieut. Cammeyer?" "No,-Philip Chantilly." All the remaining clouds then broke away in a moment, and sunshine gilded each wintry face into a midsummer glow. "Barbara," said her father, "I was present at that wed- ding. So was your mother-long before she became your mother, or my wife. We saw the bridegroom put this ring on the bride's finger. Do you say that Rosa's son made a gift of it to you? "Yes." "When and how?" "He sent it to me from the Tamaqua, accompanied with a letter." "May I see the letter?" Barbara gave her father a proud and penetrating look, and stood before him with a dignity beyond her years,-as if some strange tincture had been incorporated into her blood, conveying with it the courage and wisdom of maturer life. "I will show you the letter on condition," said she, "that you will promise to love and honor the writer." Barbara," exclaimed Dr. Vail, catching her in his arms, "I accept the terms ;" and her father was more proud at that moment to surrender to his daughter than to have con- quered a king. Barbara then, with joy unutterable and in the midst of REVOLT. 481 blushes that suffused her cheeks like the rosy streaks of morning across a clear sky,-went to her chamber, and returned to her parents with her letter from Philip. "Barbara," said her father, after he and Mary had perused it together, while tears were in Mary's eyes-which her daughter was quick to see and to bless as a good omen of the melting of her mother's soul-t"Barbara, what did you say to Lieut. Cammeyer about marriage?" Nothing." "What do you mean to say to him about it?" "Nothing." "What does he expect you to say to him about it?" "Nothing." "But your mother informed me that Cammeyer had asked you in marriage, and that you had accepted this proposal." Barbara stood in mute bewilderment. A trouble had come between herself and her parents for the first time in her life. This trouble she was at first wholly at a loss to , understand. But her misunderstanding was now at an end, and Lieut. Cammeyer stood revealed before her as having borne false witness against her to her mother. This discovery aroused within Barbara a quick indignation against a man who, at that very moment, but from quite another process of human nature, was full of anger against herself. Barbara, who seldom resisted any impulse of her heart, already fulfilled the prophecy which her mother made to Cammeyer, and was entertaining for that gentleman, not love for love, but scorn for scorn. It is not a little singular, and yet perhaps is to be ex- plained by some- future canon of that perfected mental philosophy for which the world waits, how the souls both of friends and foes seem to take cognizance of each other at a distance and to engender mutual passions at the same moment. "My dear father," said Barbara, who was determined, 21 page: 482-483[View Page 482-483] 483 TEMPEST-TOSSED. both for Philip's sake and her own, to make her position still more clear, "I have done no wrong-why, then, should I be wronged? Yourself shall judge. I was talking with Lieut. Cammeyer. He described his travels-the war-the great ships. I was a hungry listener, having starved so long. I felt grateful for such a companion-especially in Philip's absence. I thought of Viola in the Twelfth Night, and how she said, 'I am all the daughters of my father's house, And all the brothers too.' So I told Mr. Cammeyer that having no sisters or brothers, I had made Lucy Wilmerding my sister, and I asked would lie be my brother? He then, to my astonishment, offered to be my husband. I made him no answer, but left his presence. - Mr. Cammeyer has done me a wrong-you a wrong-and "She was about to add "Philip a wrong '" but her blushing face spoke her meaning better than her lips could have done. "Barbara," said her father, who was now the most pleased of men, so that he heaved a mock sigh of pretended misery, "I have just discovered the fearful sacrifice which I must make in order to regain the lost world :-I must pay Jeph- tha's price for it." Barbara gave a look implying that she would endeavor to mitigate her father's sense of sacrifice by exhibiting on her part a less mournful resignation than filled the breast of Jephtha's daughter. XXV. CHAPTER EMBARKATION. ARLY next morning, at Capt. Chantilly's suggestion, preparations were made for removing the household articles from the Hermitage to the Coromandel, so that the ship might be ready, on Philip's arrival, to be towed without delay to Barbados. "The lad," said his father, " is now his own captain, and will order himself back at the earliest possible moment, you may be sure." This remark was addressed to Barbara, who answered, "I hope you interpret Philip's wishes correctly. The sooner he comes, the sooner he will get the glad welcome that awaits him from us all." "We shall be in Barbados to-night," remarked Capt. Chantilly. "O joy!" exclaimed Barbara. "That will be, to me, my first entrance into the civilized world." Her eyes sparkled with delight; her cheeks grew flushed; her form seemed as full of life as if she were about to run a race. There was such a fresh, original, unconventional air about her, that the captain-perhaps with a thought for Philip-said to himself, She is the most magnificent creature I ever saw." "Why did not Philip," she asked, "come yesterday? The wind long ago abated. Indeed there was no tempest at all." "I don't know why he did not come," replied his father, "but Philip always acts with judgment; and he must have page: 484-485[View Page 484-485] ,i 484 TEMPEST-TOSSED, had some good reason, which we shall know in good time. One thing I know already-he did not stay away through any loathing to return." Much as Barbara wanted to see the world, she did not want to see it half so much as to see Philip. Indeed, if she could have chosen between going back again for years on, the ocean with Philip for her companion, and going into the crowded world without this companionship, she would have chosen Philip and given up the world. The consciousness )f this made her say to herself, "In all these past years, when I thought the chief desire f my heart was to see the world, I must have been ignorant and foolish, for now the whole world seems to fade away in comparison with one man in it." Barbara thus found that, judged by the final test, the chief thing in life is love. The transfer of the few household gods and goods to the ship was quickly made, for Capt. Chantilly ordered Lieut. Cammeyer to bring Robson and Carter to the scene, who, with brawny arms and Atlantean shoulders, carried the chests, boxes, beds, books and everything else so swiftly down, that in three hours, or long before noon, the removal was successfully accomplished. "Mother," said Barbara, looking at the stained-glass windows, "I am thinking of what Eve said, ' And must I leave thee, Paradise ' O, how much more highly favored are we, who, instead of leaving Paradise, are about to enter it! And yet," she added, "when we came to this place I thought it a Paradise. Since that time, it has brought us the greatest happiness of our lives. So why should we not think our little island now more a Paradise than ever? O, I wonder if the whole world will thus go on from glory to glory!" "Would you stay here with Philip?" asked her mother, with a twinkle in her eye. "I would stay anywhere with Philip," said the earnest girl. Barbara was too proud of her love to make any pretended belittling of it,-as the manner of some is. Lieut. Cammeyer passed an uncomfortable morning. Very little was said to him by anybody. He noticed the universal reticence. To counteract this unfavorable omen, he made himself busy and useful, asking whether Mrs. Vail and Miss Barbara wanted this article to go, or that to remain?--and could he not help here or there?-and would it not be well to do this or that? All his questions were answered (as he thought) rather frigidly. "Something is wrong," said he. "The bird almost hopped into my net yesterday. What baleful influence has interfered between her and me since then? It is not Philip Chantilly, for he has not arrived. What, then, can it be?" At that moment Dr. Vail and Oliver went by him- talking earnestly, unaware of his presence. He could not catch the theme of their discourse. All he heard was a few detached words, together with a single complete phrase, spoken with declamatory loudness,-.- "What a scoundrel!" These words were uttered by Capt. Chantilly. The talk had been concerning Lucy Wilmerding-particularly con- cerning the baseness of the man who sought to marry her for her father's wealth, and who, when she seemed no longer likely to inherit it, deserted her and broke her heart. But neither Capt. Chantilly nor Dr. Vail knew or imagined that Lieut. Cammeyer was this destroyer of a woman's peace. Little did they dream that they were discussing the conduct of a man who, at that moment, stood behind a cocoa-tree, within three paces of them. "I heard the name of Lawrence Wilmerding," said Cammeyer to himself. "Then they know about my affair with Lucy. How the devil could they have heard? And do they dare berate me as a scoundrel within hearing of my own ears? I will pay them for this audacity." page: 486-487[View Page 486-487] 486 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Lieut. Cammeyer began from that moment to play a cunning part;-the part of a devoted and obliging friend to all the family, particularly to Barbara. The young officer was unusually affable. He was omnipresent as an assistant, -here with a rope, therewith a strap-here with a hammer and nails, there with a hoop or band. But the more officious he grew, the more unresponsive they. At least so it seemed to him. But with all his acute- ness he misinterpreted their mood. They never suspected that they were offering him a slight. The islanders, grateful for their rescue, would not for a bag of gold have shown any unkindness even toward the meanest of their rescuers. Mrs. Vail and Barbara were so absorbed in the great change going on around them, and at the greater change going on within them,-a change of residence and of destiny,-that they were pardonably lost in this inward activity of mind. "The greatest joys (as Talley- rand said) are silent." Nevertheless in proportion as the exiles were silently rejoicing over the rescue which their deliverers were busily preparing for them, Lieut. Cammeyer conjured up an imag- inary repugnance and hatred existing toward him in the minds of the Vail family, and particularly in the anger- bearing soul of his senior officer-whom Cammeyer well knew to be a man capable of wrath and vengeance. Barbara was of too generous a nature to harbor in her- white bosom any dark malice toward a human creature; and though Cammeyer's misrepresentation of her to her father and mother had given her an hour of agony, yet on reflection she could not so greatly blame Cammeyer for misunderstanding her as she blamed herself for being mis- understood. Moreover it is not in the heart of any woman to bear unkindness toward a man whose chief offence against her consists in his offering to marry her. Barbara was waiting for a good opportunity to say some- thing very decisive to Cammeyer, but she meant to say it with dignity and kindliness-not with pettiness and spite. E^ z EMBARKATION, 487 This opportunity soon came, for Cammeyer himself was quick to invoke it. "I am not pressing you for an answer, Miss Barbara," said he. "Mr. Cammeyer, an answer to what?" "I refer, Miss Barbara, to the question which I addressed to you yesterday under the cocoa-nut trees." "Mr. Cammeyer, you asked me if the boiling-spring burned me, and I answered no. You asked me if I was afraid of serpents, and I answered no. You asked me several other questions, to all which I answered yes or no. You then asked me a grave question which I .did not answer at all. I think you know what it is-I will not mention it. But I have a request to make concerning it." "What is your request?" asked Cammeyer, who was now convinced that Barbara was about to make woman's usual plea for delay. "My dear MVr. Cammeyer, my request is that you will never again speak to me on that subject." "My dear Miss Barbara, have you heard anything about me that has displeased you?" 4' Yes, good'sir," said Barbara, with charming frankness; for she thought his misrepresentation a sufficient cause for her displeasure ; "but I should not have told you so, had you not asked me. And now I beg you never to allude to this misunderstanding again." Cammeyer pondered. o "They must have told her,"' thought he, " that I deserted Lucy Wilmerding ;-and they have told her that I am a scoundrel." With that quick logic with which guilty minds persuade themselves that all the world perceives their perfidy and stands ready to punish it, Cammeyer felt that he was a dis- graced man in the eyes not only of Barbara but of Mrs. Vail, Rodney, the captain, the ship's crew, and all mankind. Proud and arrogant by nature, he was stung to the quick--roused not to shame and repentance, but to resentment anq revenge. page: 488-489[View Page 488-489] 488 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Ever since yesterday, in proportion as he found himself hating Barbara, he grew determined to marry her; for he felt that in some way she was needed by him to retrieve his nature from its unaccountable perversion and moral paralysis. "Miss Barbara, I would like to explain myself," said he, bitterly. "No, good sir," replied Barbara, "not on that subject." For she remembered the anger and agony which he had already caused her, and her heart rose within her like a lioness and awed him down. "So be it then," said the baffled man, who cringed like the hnpure before the pure. He then resumed the icy reticence which habitually dis- tinguished his demeanor. On sober second thought, Cammeyer considered that rather than be brought to explain himself before a preju- diced court of Lucy Wilmerding's friends, he would prefer to say nothing, and so accepted the offer of silence. During all this time, nobody in the party, except himself, had the remotest suspicion that he had ever been in any way associated with Lucy Wilmerding, or had known or seen that lady in all his life. "I will deal blow for blow," he mufttered, clenching his hands and grinding his teeth, "yes, and I will have this pretty toy-this scornful siren of the isle. I will have both my vengeance and my prize-I will punish the men and capture the maid; I will possess the estate besides. Scoun- drel Hthat's a hard word. So much the better-it will have the more momentum for flinging it back. I will swing it over them as if it were a bludgeon-I will gash them with it as if it were a knife." Cammeyer was one of those cool and gentlemanly villains whose inward passion is hidden by outward calm, and who, when occasion requires, are competent to be the most con- summate of knaves. But although he was too intelligent not to know that he was a man with a convenient absence X EMBARKATION. 489 of a moral sense, and thereby fitted to execute a high order of treachery, he woult nevertheless have been shocked at the contemplation of himself as other than a man who re- fused to be wicked except now and then in an extreme case, for which a general tenor of good behavior, before and after, would amply atone. A thick, cool sea-fog had hung over the island all the morning, and Capt. Chantilly had several times attempted to look through it with his glass in hope of seeing Philip anchored somewhere off the coast, waiting to find his way to the cove. At length the wind freshened a little, thinning away the vapor so that the dim form of a vessel was discovered in the distance, lying so far away as to make Capt. Chantilly think that Philip, in the thick weather, had mistaken-the next adjoining island for the right one. The captain watched the faint, black hulk, to detect whether or not it moved; but after several successive observations, he came to the conclusion that the vessel was at anchor. "Philip has chosen a wrong anchorage," said his father, "but when the fog lifts, his anchor will lift with it, and he will hasten hither." Lieut. Cammeyer volunteered to go in the boat, with Robson and Carter, and to pilot the ship. "Yes, go and laugh at Philip for losing his reckoning," said the captain. "My dear Miss Barbara," he added, whispering in her ear, "there is something that makes young men blind; do you know what it is? It is sung of in songs and it rhymes with dove." "Then it must be a sweet song," said she. Cammeyer, in proposing to go in the boat, was not dis- interested, for though not desirous to assist Philip in find- ing his way back to the island and to Barbara, yet he sought a good excuse to getaway from the company awhile, to plot his revenge. page: 490-491[View Page 490-491] I 490 . TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Lieut. Cammeyer, are you not -well, sir??" asked Rob- son, noticing that his face was unmemlly pale. "Perfectly well," replied the officer, who then turned to the other oarsman, and asked, "When did that ship heave in sight?" "We saw her lying there, sir," replied Carter, " when the fog lifted." "Boys, pull me out to that ship," said Cammeyer, lighting a cigar. It was a longer pull than they expected. Fogs magnify and delude. The rowers pulled and strained on the rolling sea for two hours, and still the ship appeared as far off as ever. They found themselves plunging into a still denser mist. The situation was risky. Cammeyer felt perplexed. To go back was dangerous, for the mist had shut out the island behind him, just as it had shut out the ship before him. "Boys," said he, " keep the wind on the starboard, just as you have it, and we will fetch either the ship, or else, if we miss that, then the coast beyond." It was now easy for Cammeyer to understand why Philip had mistaken the island. Shortly afterward, a loud, ringing laugh from a chorus of voices came through the mist. "That's the Tamaqua," said Robson, "that's one o' Tom Jackson's yarns, and the men are laughing at it." A large ship loomed up ahead of them, and they were just under her stern--so near that they could hear the flap- ping of her flag. "Ship ahoy!" cried Cammeyer. "Boat ahoy!" was the response. Cammeyer ascended to the deck, while the two men remained in the boat. He was met at the gangway by a stranger whose uniform bespoke him an officer in the Con- federate service. Cammeyer gave a glance from the officer to the ship, and noticed dimly through the mist that she was not the Tamaqua. A second glance showed him that the flag at the stern was not the stars and stripes but the stars and bars. He had boarded an enemy's man-of-war. This was a capital blunder; and he bit his lip with vex- ation. "What ship is this?" he asked, with diplomatic gravity. "The Good Hope, sir." "In what service?" "The Confederate States of America." "What commander?" Captain Lane." Cammeyer was caught in a trap. His uniform had already betrayed him, and it was too late for his ingenious mind to devise a stratagem for escape. "You are my prisoner, sir," said the courteous midship- man who had greeted him, "we take blue cloth wherever we find it; we shall be happy to take all you can bring us of the same pattern." Robson and Carter were then ordered up on deck, and, greatly to their astonishment, were immediately put in irons. "I would like to see the captain," said Cammeyer. "You shall have that pleasure," responded his captor- "which I am sure will be mutual. Do me the honor to follow me into the captain's cabin." The commander who greeted Cammeyer was Capt. Lane, formerly of the Coromandel and now of the Confederate Navy ; but although Cammeyer once knew that the former captain of the Coromandel was a man named Lane, yet he had so long dropped this fact from his current thoughts, that it had dropped itself from his memory. The greeting between the two strangers was not cordial but polite. After some mutual and commonplace inquiries, Cammeyer touched the pith of the matter, and with dignified emphasis remarked, "I respectfully protest, sir, against this capture. These page: 492-493[View Page 492-493] it 492 TEMPEST-TOSSED. i l I' are British islands. You are trespassing on the neutrality of the British flag." This was a valid argument, and Capt. Lane knew it. "I shall do myself the honor," said he, " to hold you and your men, not as prisoners of war, but as police arrests. You have come as spies-that gives me a right to treat you as thieves. Besides, this island is uninhabited. I know these Grenadines well; I came near running ashore on one of them four months ago during an earthquake: As it was, I lost the ship's pinnace-I know these coasts well. I have stopped here many a time to fill my water-casks. And I know, sir, that no law prevails here except sluch as I choose to make for the occasion. You are a sailor-what is your ship?" ' The Union gunboat Tamaqua." "Who commands her?" "Captain Chantilly." "Chantilly! That's a strange name. I once knew a man of that name. He was a Yankee in South Africa. Damn him, I owe him a grudge. The very name makes me angry." "It is the same man," said Cammeyer, who instantly felt disposed to make friends with an enemy of Capt. Chantilly. "What! Oliver Chantilly, of Cape Town?" "Yes, the very same." Capt. Lane was seized with a double passion of anger and fear. "Where is the Tamaqua now?" he demanded. "I don't know." "Don't trifle with me, sir, or I may teach your tongue to tell its secrets with a hot iron." Capt. Lane, who, years before, had been something of a coward, was now something of a bully ;-two characters that frequently exist in the same person. "I mistook your ship, sir, for the Tamaqua." "That's a fiction," said Lane, who thought it a ruse. "C No sir, that is the truth," replied Cammeyer, with an affected urbanity. "Explain yourself," demanded Lane. "On Tuesday last," said Cammeyer, "I was one of a party who left the Tamaqua to make a boat reconnoissance of the next island yonder. (I say yonder, for it is there, though you cannot see it through the fog.) The vessel proved to be an old wreck-a ship that was struck by lightning at sea, seventeen years ago-and that drifted about, disabled and helpless, with a handful of people on board, till at last they went ashore about four months ago on one of the Grenadines. We found the old hulk still afloat, and-what is more-the company still alive. The Tamaqua is hourly expected to touch at the island and carry them away to Bar- bados. So I very naturally mistook your ship, sir, for the Tamaqua." "What was the name of the wreck?" "The Coromandel." Lane started to his feet like a man stung by a serpent. "That's not possible!" he exclaimed. "Yes, sir, as I said before, a strange story, but true." Lane's agitation was peculiar. It was made up of glad- ness, regret, confusion, chagrin and wrath. He exhibited a strange behavior that was unaccountable to Cammeyer. "The Coromandel, did you say?" asked Lane, who tore off a sliver of white margin from a newspaper, and with a swift ferocity kept re-tearing it into infinitesimal bits. "Yes, sir, the Coromandel. She is a strange-looking old hulk-green-whiskered with long sea-grass. She was built originally for the Arctic Sea-and made stronger than the Tower of Babel." "The Coromandel!" exclaimed Lane, repeating the word over and over again ; alternately looking down at the bits of paper that he was littering the floor with, and up ato Cam- meyer's face to detect some evidence of a falsehood. "O no," he continued, suddenly bursting into a loud laugh, like the enforced merriment of one who hears a ghost story, which he partly believes and wholly fears. "No, sir, not the Coromandel! Nonsense, no!" page: 494-495[View Page 494-495] "4 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Cammeyer, who was still puzzled by Lane's agitation, once again assured him, on a sailor's word of honor, that he had made a true report of the old ship. "Give me," cried Lane, , the name of one of the pas- sengers." "Dr. Rodney Vail," said Cammeyer. "Another." "Mary Vail-his wife." "Another." -"Barbara Vail-a daughter, born on board. "Any more?" "A negress-Mrs. Vail's nurse, named Jezebel." "Is that all?" i "All but one, -a dog called Beaver." "Great God!" exclaimed Lane, throwing down a mimic snow-storm of bits of paper out of his hand. "Iwas captain o /of the Coromandel on the very voyage when she was wrecked. That was my dog. All true- all true!"And he flung him- self down in his chair in profound astonishment and apparent dejection. "Great Heaven!" cried Cammeyer, marveling that he should have encountered the former captain of the Core- mandel. "But, sir," said Lane, leaping again to his feet, " before I believe this miracle, I must see it with my own eyes." "You will find it exactly as I have stated," said the cautious and calm Cammeyer. This disclosure put Lane into an entirely altered mood toward Cammeyer. It made him look upon his prisoner as a man whom he would like to change from an enemy into ;a friend. Lane felt that his reputation would be ruined forever by the reappearance of the Coromandel, to whose sinking he had sworn an oath. He would be disgraced, not only as a perjurer, but as a coward who had deserted his ship; and he now suffered all a coward's anguish at the prospective revival of the condemnation which in years past had been visited upon him for this affair, and which had J A jD J . MX I I'X . .. , LVN " RE hardly yet faded from men's memories. He gazed into Cammeyer's face with a pitiful look of misery and implo. ration. Cammeyer, who was a shrewd man, sprang at the oppor- tunity to make himself of service to Lane,-as a means of accomplishing not only his deliverance but his revenge. "Capt. Lane," said he, "you remarked that you had a grudge against Oliver Chantilly. So have Hagainst both the Chaafillys. Let us then come to terms. I will pay you a good ransom for my liberty-a better price than you can guess, or would ask." "Sir," cried Lane, who, instead of receiving Cammeyer's offer, hastened, like a weak man, to make advances himself, "I know those Chantillys. You will never rise so long as you serve under them. They are the chief men wherever they go. The devil himself can never get ahead of them. I know it, for I have tried." Capt. Lane seemed unconscious of the self-disparagement which his hasty words implied. ",Sir," he continued, "I can do more for you than they can. I want to pay off a very ancient grudge. If you will tell me how I can do it, I will gave you a safe return, and they shall never know you had a finger in the business." Cammeyer caught at this suggestion, as a night-hawk snaps at a glow-worm. Two ideas gleamed like twin stars in his mind-first his escape, next his revenge. Here was a chance for both. Quick in invention and fertile in expedients, he replied : "Capt. Lane, listen. There's a lady in the case. She belongs to me-she is mine-she made a formal gift of her- self to me-at least she did so by implication, which is the waySthat ladies always prefer. But notwithstanding this commitment of the woman by her free will to me, and to me alone, I have reason to believe that Philip Chantilly wants to capture her for himself. Now I want to outwit that young coxcomb, and carry off that-woman for my own." "Who is the lady?" page: 496-497[View Page 496-497] "6 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "She is Rodney Vail's daughter, born on the Coromande]. And she is a beauty. - She outvies anything from Grosvenor Square to Rio Janeiro." - Capt. Lane, in thinking how his deserted ship had come back again to mock him, and how she had brought with her a paragon of beauty-a young princess born and reared on a hulk which he had left to go to the bottom-was stung anew with the reflection that he would never again be able to hold up his head among honorable men. "Sir," said he to Cammeyer, with mingled mildness and ferocity, " is she such a beauty as you say?" "Yes, sir." "And she has promised you her hand?" "She has." "And Philip Chantilly is interfering between you?" "Yes." g "And you want to punish him?" I do." "How do you propose to do it?" "By capturing the woman and marrying her at once." "The devil!" exclaimed Lane, who immediately tore off more paper and began dividing it into flakes of snow. A long talk then followed, during which the two men grew more and more violent toward - the Chantillys, and i warmed more and more toward each Other in a common purpose. s "It will destroy your reputation as a sailor," said Cam- : mneyer, shrewdly, "to have the Coromandel's safety made known to the world. It will be said that you abandoned your ship and your duty. You will be disgraced. You might as well leap overboard at once, and have done with life. The trouble is you cannot now prevent the dis, covery being known. It is probably already proclaimed in Barbados. Your best plan is to discover and rescue the Coromandel yourself. Rob Philip Chantilly of the honor of that performance. This will wipe out your disgrace. This will solve your problem: then as to mine- I want the EMBARKATION. 497 lady, and will make a bargain with yon to capture her and transfer her over to me. If you will deliver Miss Vail into my hands-if you will make me appear to her to be her only protector-if you will lay her under an overwhelming obli- gation of gratitude to me, so that I shall have the right to insist on her marrying me to repay it, I will reward you by--" "By what?" "By delivering the Tamaqua into your hands." "The devil!" exclaimed Lane, who continued tearing the paper, and listening with intense interest. "4 Is it a bargain?" asked Cammeyer, hastily. "It's a bargain!" said Lane, gleefully. The two men clasped hands. "By the way," asked Lane, to whom the case began to wear a romantic aspect, "is it for love or hate, which?" "It is for neither," replied Cammeyer, cynically, "it is for money." '"I thought," remarked Lane, dryly, "there must be some other consideration than sentiment." "She is an heiress in her own right," said Cammeyer, "and she is a jewel of a woman too, to go along with her property." "Money! money! money!" said Lane, thoughtfully, twirling his two forefingers round each other; "that's the fulcrum that moves the world; that's the chief temptation of human nature-; that's the price for everything, including love itself." "Is the bargain a bargain?" inquired Cammeyer, who did not like this moralizing. "Yes, and a damnable bargain it is," said Lane, "but I have made others before, and I will stick to this now." "How do you understand the compact?" inquired Cam- meyer, who felt that if there were any loose ends they should be tied at once. "I understand," replied Lane, " that I am to capture the woman and give her to you; in return for which you are page: 498-499[View Page 498-499] "8 TEMPEST-TOSSED. to capture the Tamaqua and give her to me. In other words, a girl for a gunboat. A fair exchange no robbery." "Capt. Lane," said Cammeyer, "our understanding is complete." - The two men, with a smiling malice on their faces, and a foretoken of victory in their breasts, then discussed at full length a clever little piece of conspiracy by which they were to carry out their base plan. Meanwhile, in the thickening fog-which began at first to drizzle and at last to rain-the islanders had taken once again their old familiar quarters in the cabin of the Coro- mandel. Three or four of the state-rooms were put into habitable condition. The swinging-lamp was hung. The wicker-work chairs now rickety with time, were disposed in easy order through the saloon. The old look of everything was almost exactly restored. Rodney Vail went round from point to point, showing to Oliver Chantilly still more minutely than before how the floating family had lived in those sea-faring quarters. Barbara kept running to the deck and peering into the fog-searching for signs of weather clear enough to bring back the expected ship. "This mist is very dense," she said, "I hope Philip will not get on the coral reefs. Much as I wish him here, I almost wish him miles away. It is dangerous." Barbara's sweet rest in Philip was now a halcyon pleasure to her soul. She had experienced many exquisite sensations in life, but this surpassed them all. The breakers roared on the outer side of the sand-bar, and filled her ears with their ceaseless noise; but she heard only a still, small voice whis- pering within her soul. That one voice uttered but one name, "Philip." A screaming gull flew past, and this too seemed to say, "Philip." The wind sighed softly by, and murmured the same sound, "Philip." The water in the cove, beating like a gentle pulse against the Coromandel's sides, seemed to whisper nothing but, "Philip." Barbara'si EMBARKATION. 499 heart kept rushing to her lips, and she went about breathing the same charmed word, "Philip." Indeed if all the morning stars could then at mid-day have sung together, Barbara's ears would have imagined their theme to be, "Philip." But Philip did not come. The time was long past when he was expected, yet he did not appear. What harm could have overtaken him? "His ship," said Barbara, "was only a little way of before the fog came-only a few miles. O to think that he is so very near, yet cannot come still nearer!" Barbara did not say these words in the hearing of all the company, but only of her mother. "It is high time," said Capt. Chantilly, "that Cammeyer returned with the boat, bringing Philip with him. Either the Tamaqua has moved from her place, or else the fog hides her. She is not to be seen where she was." Capt. Chantilly said this as the result of observations made on the hill-top, where he had been with Dr. Vail. 'Do you think," asked Barbara, "that the Tamaqua would venture to approach the coast in this fog?" "No," replied. Capt. Chantilly, "but Philip could anchor the ship and come ashore in a boat. Cammeyer knows the* way back. The fog ought not to prevent him from finding the island. The breakers ring like a fog-bell, and he has only to follow them southward to the mouth of the cove, and come up here in smooth water." "Never mind, honey,'" ejaculated Jezebel. "Be patient. What's de good book say? 'One day wid de Lord is a tousand years.' 5 "Then," said Barbara, "I must have spent this day in leaven, for it has seemed a thousand years." Barbara grew anxious, restless, and full of longings. The hours passed, bringing some rain, and a little wind, but not Philip. "How late is it?" she asked her father. "Six o'clock." "Then," said she, "it is almost time for the sun to go page: 500-501[View Page 500-501] 500 TEMPEST-TOSSED. down. Night is on us. But Philip could come in the night ---could he not?" she asked of Capt. Chantilly. "Perhaps so, my dear, but Philip might deem it prudent not to risk his boat's crew in the night. Cammeyer of course has found the ship, and gone aboard. He and Philip together will decide what is best. Besides it is not yet quite nightfall. But to tell you the truth, Barbara," con- tinued the captain, gayly, "you had better console your heart for Lieut. Cammeyer's absence till morning." Barbara went to her old state-room, and shutting the door, wept; for this satirical allusion to Cammeyer revived all her tender passion for Philip. "It is cruel-this-absence-this separation," thought she. "The fog is like an enemy-a prison-a fate. I hate it! In years past, I have gone through days of it together, and have not cared; but now it breaks my heart. O Philip, do you know how I long for you? Can you guess that I am thinking of you? Come Philip, my true lover, I am waiting to greet you! May God keep you. May no storm fall upon your dear ship, and no rock lie in your way. O Philip! -I O my soul!" And she buried her face in her hands. Jezebel crossed the cabin, muttering in her quaint, cheery way, "What's de good book say? 'At ebenin' time it shall be light.' Dey must a' had lamps in dem days. So we must hab a lamp in ours." She lighted the evening lamp-the same old astral burner I that once was blown outhy the earthquake's breath. The lighted lamp in the cabin suggested to Barbara a signal-fire on the hill-top. "Perhaps," thought she, "Philip may be bewildered in the mists; the fire, if I should kindle it, would guide him on his way." Barbara thought of Hero's light in the tower to guide Leander across the Hellespont. Dr. Vail and his daughter proceeded to the hill-top to kindle a fire. EMBARKATION. 501 " It will not be easy," said he, "to raise a bright flame in this mist and vapor; we must stay and watch it, for if we turn our backs, it will go out." While the father and daughter were thus engaged on shore, a ship's boat, containing four sailors to row it, and two pas- sengers sitting in the stern-one an old man in a pea-jacket, and the other a lady hooded in a water-proof cloak-glided briskly up the cove, and stopped at the Coromandel. "Ship ahoy! " shouted the old man, standing in the dim light. So husky and hearty was the stentorian voice that Oliver Chantilly, who was on deck at the time, recognized it as the roughened but unimpaired organ-pipe of old John Scar- borough. Capt. Chantilly acknowledged the salutation anId asked, "Where's my son Philip ?" "The lad," said Scaw, " is hon the Tamaqua. He wouldn't leave the ship without a proper hofficper to stay behind. He sends letters-he sends me-and better than hall, he sends a fine lady besides." Capt. Chantilly bowed to the fine lady, who acknowledged the courtesy. "Did Cammeyer come ashore ?" "No," said Scaw. "Why, then, did not Philip leave Cammeyer in charge of the ship, and come himself ?" "Cammeyer ?" exclaimed Scaw. "Why, Cammeyer hisn't on the ship. Philip said as 'ow Cammeyer was on the h'island." "Cammeyer left us this morning," remarked Capt. Chan- tilly; "he started With Robson and Carter in the boat to board the Tamaqua, lying off the coast in a fog." "Well, then," replied Scaw, "Cammeyer must a' lost his way 'imself, for he has not been near the Tamaqua. And no more has the Tamaqua been lyin' hoff the coast in a fog, -though it's you who say it who mebbe ought to know page: 502-503[View Page 502-503] 502 TEMPEST-TOSSED. your hown ship when you see her,-honly you can't know her when you don't see her. Philip would 'ave liked a'mighty well to grip the han' o' Cammeyer, and 'ave changed places with him among the friends 'ere." "Then do you say that Cammeyer and the two men did not reach the ship at all?" "Well," said the critical Scaw, "I didn't say but what they might 'ave reached hay ship, if there was henny ship to reach-as you say there was-but demmit, sir, they didn't reach the Tamaqua :-that's what I say." During-this'colloquy Capt. Chantilly had indicated to the oarsmen to run their boat ashore and to take the ferry. basket to board the ship. The lady came first. "I have not the honor of knowing you, madame," said Capt. Chantilly, as he handed her from the basket to the deck, " but I suppose you are a very special and particular friend of Capt. Scarborough, since he keeps your name alto. gether to himself." "A lady," said Scaw, speaking with an emphasis as if he were expounding a tenet of international law, " a lady has a right to keep her name to 'erself till she is willin' to be- stow it on hanother; and hif this lady would drop hoff 'ers, I know a hold cove who would be 'appy to give her 'is. I am summat in hage, Holiver, but am spry yit-you see." At which, Capt. Scarborough, who was now fourscore years old, danced a step or two on the deck. "Holiver, I halways said as 'ow I wasn't too hold but I would live to dance on the Coromandel's deck. And I've done it. Yes, demmit, and though I've been a powerful bachelor all my life, yet I wouldn't mind a dancini at my own- weddin' at the 'leventh hour." Capt. Chantilly could not resist the suspicion that the old lion was in love. - i The' lady, who had been on the point of replying to i Oliver, but was interrupted by the foregoing remarks of Scawberry, now said, f EMBARKATION. 503 \ "I would be glad, sir, to go unannounced into the pres- ence of Mrs. Vail." She said this with a gracious dignity of manner in striking contrast with the roughness and bluffness of her leonine friend. Capt. Chantilly, after shaking hands with Scarborough- a ceremony which the old man insisted on repeating two or three times in honor of the discovered Coromandel-left the instrument-maker on deck, and conducted the lady at her request as a stranger into the cabin. Mrs. Vail was sitting on the faded velvet cushion of the Leaning Tower. She had taken for granted that the noise of feet which she heard overhead indicated the return of Philip and Cam- meyer; and she was regretting that Rodney and Barbara were absent on shore. Her surprise at noticing an unfamiliar female figure was followed at the next moment by the intense joy of behold- ing-after the lady threw aside her cloak and hood-the beloved form and face of Lucy Wilmerding. The two women rushed into each other's arms, speaking only through their wet eyes. Capt. Scarborough, when he met the Chantillys in Carlisle Bay, had accidentally, in the first flush of his eager greet- ings, and of his imparting the secret concerning the sup- posed Confederate steamer, forgotten to mention that M/iss Wilmerding was then in Bridgetown, She had, a few years previously, accompanied the family )f James Scarborough to Barbados, and had since resided n' that island, remote from the gay world in which she pent her earlier years. On the return of the Tamaqua to Barbados with news rom the Coromandel, Lucy Wilmerding sought through 'apt. Scaw an interview with Philip, and begged permis- ion to accompany the ship back to the island and to the Xiles :-a request which that gallant young officer was roud and happy to grant. ^ ! page: 504-505[View Page 504-505] 504 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Lucy had at first hesitated about making this request, for she had incidentally learned that Lieut. Cammeyer- whom she had not seen, or heard from, for many a sad year-was on the island. She shrank from meeting him. Her pride and womanly reserve would have prompted her to avoid coming face to face with the destroyer of her peace. But she reflected that on Philip's arrival at the island Cammeyer would immediately be put in charge of the Tamaqua, while Philip and she would go ashore; and that therefore she would be quite as thoroughly aloof from the shunned man as if he were on another continent. Lucy had never ceased to love Cammeyer,-for the divine flame, having once been set burning on the early altar of her pure heart, remained henceforth and forever like a vestal fire, unquenched; but the shock which her false lover had communicated to her whole nature had been so violent, and its effects so abiding, that despite her ever-continuing love, nothing would have tempted Lucy Wilmerding to hold an interview with Anthony Cammeyer-unless, indeed, she should find him fallen into some great misfortune. In such a case, it would be quite certain that his distress and extremity would touch in this rich-hearted woman those fountains of pity which in woman's nature, like the waters of Jacob's well, may lie sealed with a stone from sight, but, when uncovered at need, are still found to be sweet, plentiful, and pure. Neither Philip Chantilly nor John Scarborough had the slightest idea that Lucy Wilmerding and Anthony Cam- meyer had ever known each other-least of all that they had ever been betrothed. While Dr. Vail and Barbara were striving to make the signal-fire burn brightly on the hill-top-a task in which they diligently fought their watery enemy, the mist-Lucy Wilmerding and John Scarborough were holding an ani- mated talk with Mrs. Vail in the cabin. This talk was frequently interrupted by Jezebel, with numerous inquiries concerning her boy Pete. EMBARKATION. 505 It was also interrupted by Beaver, who grumbled and growled, and was about to take Capt. Scaw by the trowser- leg, but was rebuked and shamed by the lifted forefinger of Mary Vail. Old Scaw was beside himself with delight. His words went bellowing through the cabin like the explosion of hand-grenades. He walked round thumping the timbers with his knuckles, to assure himself that he was on board a wooden ship, rather than in a stone tower. He occasion- ally stopped in his pacings to peer into Mrs. Vail's face, and to offer her the rude and sincere homage which the strong and robust awkwardly show to the fragile and weak. Capt. Scaw excited at first the merriment of Jezebel, whose sense of the ludicrous was strong, but when he was asked to state his age, and responded eighty, the old woman grew instantly jealous of his slightly superior years, and plainly showed her pique at being cleverly dispossessed from her position as patriarch of the ship. The old man's attentions to Lucy Wilmerding were so marked and incessant as to be embarrassing to that ex- quisite lady. If some aged elephant, wandering in the famed E1 Dorado, had suddenly tasted the waters of a re- newed youth and attempted to dance and gambol about some tall white lily, to woo and win that flower for his bride, the picture would have greatly resembled Capt. Scaw's tremendous courtesy and powerful gentleness toward Lucy Wilmerding. Meanwhile Oliver Chantilly carefully perused the follow- ing letter from his son : ON BOARD THE TAMAQUA,-At Sea, Sept. 22,1864. MY DEAR FATHER- On reaching Carlisle Bay, I steamed up past Needham's Point, and on ranging Fort Charles with St. Anne's Castle, anchored for the night. The wind was high, with dashes of rain, yet nothing like the tornado which the barometer threatened, and which at one time I expected. 22 page: 506-507[View Page 506-507] 506 TEMPEST-TOSSED. At 9 P M. I took Forsyth .with me ashore, and we reported to the American Consul ;-from whom I received intelligence that a Con- federate cruiser, the Good Hope-commander unknown-is prowling about these waters, seeking, like a she-devil, for what she may devour. Early the next morning Capt. Scarborough came on board, bring- ing with him, to my surprise, Miss Lucy Wilmerding;-who is now a resident of Bridgetown, and of whom the veteran seems to be extraordinarily fond. The old man has quite changed his crusty opinions about women. Acting on the Consul's information, I have deemed it my duty to spend part of two days in skirting these islands to find the rebel fox's den;-which will explain my delay to return. If you or Cammeyer were on board, so that I could leave the ship with some older head than Forsyth's, I would now give three drops of my heart's blood to go ashore to see Barbara. But it seems my perverse fate to be separated from everything in this world that most reminds me of the next. I shall put to sea far enough to-night to give all the Grenadines a wide berth, and shall crawl back early in the morning to pick you up and hold a council of war. An American merchant ship-the Demarara--is at Bridgetown, loading with sugar. She is commanded by-guess whom? Capt. John Blaisdell, the Coromandel's first mate who helped the passengers into the boats during the fire. He sends his hearty regards to Dr. Vail and family, and hopes the Coromandel will get to BridgetowD before the Demarara sets sail. His eyes filled with tears when I told him the story of the wandering hulk and her little company. He is a brave- and manly fellow, and his ship is a beauty-he deserves as good a one as ever sailed. There was a report at the Custom-House that the new governor of Barbados is to be Sir Richard Wilkinson, whose arrival is expected every day. The Coromandel will be an interesting curiosity to show to the baronet! The enclosed letter you will please deliver by your own hand in : private. Your oft-vexing and now vexed son, PHLIP CHANTILLY. The enclosure in the above was a letter from Philip to Barbara-the second in the modern system of postal com- EMBARKATION. --07 munication which had proved so great a novelty to the primitive mind of this fair maid. "Hark! said Mrs. Vail, "I hear footsteps on the deck. Rodney and Barbara are returning. My dear Lucy, here is Barbara's chamber. Hide yourself in it, and I will send her to find you there." Mis. Vail conducted Lucy to Barbara's room, and lighting a little lamp on a rack, left her sitting in the dim light. Mrs. Vail, on coming forth, and closing the door behind her, met Barbara just as she came tripping down the cabin- stairs. "O!" exclaimed the flushed girl, at witnessing strange faces in the cabin. Her father was equally surprised. Then came a tumult of excitement- a pell-mell of in- troductions, hand-shakings, explanations, and joy-wishes; during all which, Capt. Scarborough ruled the scene as before,-or rather, he was its " lord of misrule." His great sides did not seem capacious enough to contain his overflowing spirits. He roared with irrepressible hilarity. He looked like Neptune risen out of the sea on purpose to make himself merry for an evening in ,a stiip's cabin. He was on the point of tossing Barbara into the air as he used to do with Philip, but reflecting that he would bump her fair head against the deck-beams, he wisely refrained from thus killing her with kindness. Barbara was the common delight and treasure of all,-an object of supreme happiness to everybody except herself; for she suffered a pang of disappointment at the absence of Philip. Capt. Chantilly, who noticed this shade, slyly handed her Philip's letter, which she instantly fled away with to her own room. What was her surprise to see herself there confronted by a beautiful woman, who rose, and with a tender and gracious gaze, looked into her face without saying a word! page: 508-509[View Page 508-509] 508 , TEMPEST-TOSSED. Had Barbara seen an incorporeal spirit, she could not have been more completely astonished, subdued, and awed. Here was one of her own sex-one of the great world of women-one of the fair sisterhood to which she herself belonged-a real and not a shadowy Narcissa. Barbara was no longer in exile. She was at last in society. She saw at a glance that whoever her visitor might be, she was a benignant lady, tall, majestic, and elegant. The stranger was clad, not sumptuously, but in a light- green silk-of a color apparently native to the climate, and the natural accompaniment of a fair flower. i A few threads of early gray in her hair seemed inter- lacing her youth and her maturer life into one ripening comeliness, borrowed from both seasons. Her eyes were black, and burned with deep yet gentle lights. Her face possessed that, uncommon type of beauty which is heightened instead of hurt by a mournful expression; as if the ineffable dignity of some inward grief marked itself in majesty on the outer front. It is the first instinct of all women, civilized or barbarian, when they first meet as strangers, to look at each other thoroughly before they speak. These two women stood speechless, face to face; both beautiful, but utterly unlike; one past the heyday of her youth, the other just mounting toward it; one pale, the other flushed; one brunette, the other blonde. No king's palace ever contained two more exquisite faces -each perfect according to its own type. The two together seemed to outshine the lamplight, and to be themselves the illumination that filled the room. "My darling," said the elder, "this is a strange hour. I am not altogether sure that I ought to believe my eyes- they report to me such incredible marvels and mysteries. I knew your mother when she was young-long before her marriage. Your forehead is like hers; so is your mouth; but that is all the resemblance. O what beautiful hair you have!-and what a sweet face! God has favored you, my EMBARKATION. 509 darling. Beauty is one of heaven's best gifts to woman. And so you are Mrs. Vail's daughter! I would not have known you. To think that I have lived to see both her and you! And to think that you have had such a strange, such a romantic, such a fabulous life! Ah well, I too have had a strange life. All lives are strange, my child. It is a strange world." After Lucy had made these remarks, Barbara, who was not yet recovered of her astonishment, showed no disposi- tion to speak, but only to listen. Lucy, in speaking, appeared more than ever a monument of beauty to Barbara's eyes. No woman whom Barbara had seen pictured in the books, or whom she had mirrored in her mind, or whom she had imagined in her dreams, was equal in comeliness to this impressive stranger. There was a perfume that exhaled froi her as from a delicate flower-there was a graciousness in her presence that fell upon Barbara like a benediction. The unknown visitor then put her arms gently about the younger maid, and pressed her to her heart. "I am glad," said Barbara, who had now regained her self-possession and her tongue, "very glad-0O more glad than I can tell-to see any friend of my mother. You are most welcome. You will remember that I am a stranger to all my mother's friends-so please tell me your name." "Ah," said Lucy, "I wish you might guess it." "No, I cannot," replied Barbara. Pray, dear lady, tell me who you are." "Your mother always loved me," said Lucy,-" will you love me, I wonder?" "Yes," said Barbara, with a bountiful emphasis, 'I am sure of it." "Will you promise?" "Yes, fair lady," said Barbara, who once again resorted to the high and stately salutations of the story-books. And as she gazed into Lucy's dark, lustrous eyes, she saw in them more loveliness than she had supposed to exist among women. page: 510-511[View Page 510-511] 510 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "I am Lucy Wilmerding." Barbara leaped back. Her astonishment was supreme. She had never once in all her life thought of Lucy as other than fixed in an immortal youth-a creature who had been born at seventeen, and had always remained at that original and unchanging age. Lucy Wilmerding a middle-aged woman? No! And with threads of gray in her hair? Not possible! Lucy herself?-her own dear Lucy?-the fair goddess of her dreams? Not at all-it must be some delusion. Barbara stepped forward and surveyed the majestic woman from head to foot. Then a sudden flood of feeling overcame her, and swept away all her doubts. Rushing up to her, she clasped her idol to her breast and exclaimed amid her tears, "O Lucy! Lucy!" . All persons who hear much of one whom they have never seen are apt to form concerning that one a preconceived image which a subsequent personal interview totally obliterates. i The Lucy Wilmerding of Barbara's imagination was an entirely different person from the Lucy who now stood before her: and yet the real Lucy was- not less noble-but even more so-than her prototype. She had such a stately figure, such a grave manner, such a thoughtful face, such an air of refinement about her whole person and countenance, and such a pathetic tenderness in her voice, that Barbara, under the combined influence of Lucy's presence, tone, manner, and spirit, was thrilled as by some magnetic spell or magic charm. "Yes," she exclaimed, " you are worthy to be Lucy Wil- merding!" and she kissed her as one princess would kiss another. "Dear, darling, beloved Lucy! I am proud to belong to the human race since you and-since you, my dear, belong to it." Barbara and Lucy held each other in their mutual arms as two flowering vines intertwine themselves into one. X d2J.12VA I i^u^. J. 1./[ a.[l When this embrace was at last unlocked, Barbara found herself holding a crumpled letter in her hand, at sight of which she showed a look of pity and distress, as if the little white object were some living thing whose life had been ruthlessly crushed. cO," said she, eagerly, "I hope it is not harmed- destroyed." "No," remarked Lucy, who knew that Philip had sent this letter to Barbara, and who was charmed to see the pure girl's passion for him written so plainly on her face, "I sus- pect that it contains something which even death itself cannot kill." "What is that?"' asked Barbara, who thought of some other piece of durable metal, like the gold ring which the former letter enclosed. "Love," answered Lucy. Barbara blushed into a charming unison with the crimson wall of her chamber. "I am afraid," said Lucy, with a gentle satire in her tone, "that he has omitted to write one thing which he said to me this morning on the ship." "O what was that?" asked Barbara, who was as anxious that no precious word that fell from Philip's lips should go to waste as Dr. Johnson was that no scrap of Dryden should be lost. "My darling," said Lucy, "Lieut. Chantilly told me this morning that you were the loveliest woman that had ever yet lived on earth." Barbara. bent her head down to her letter. What Philip wrote in that letter, Barbara did not com- municate to her friend, but appropriated entirely to herself. It is a mistake to suppose that love is a generous passion. It is the chief greed possible to human nature. It is the selfishness of great hearts. It is the avarice of God. Lucy Wilmerding, with all the beauty of her living pres- ence, was less to Barbara than a little crumpled note-sheet in the handwriting of Philip Chantilly. page: 512-513[View Page 512-513] 512 TEMPEST-TOSSED. SoO Lucy stepped forth from the state-room to meet Dr. Vail, whom she had not yet seen-leaving Barbara alone with her letter and her love. God be thanked, there still remains in this dim earth a prospect that, so long as women dwell in it whom men love and write to, there will now and then be written a love- letter that will so illumine the face of the pure maid who reads it, as to destroy heaven's too exclusive monopoly of seraphs and saints I '. '. E CHAPTER XXVI. AGATHA. TER an evening of the most animated talk ever heard on board the Coromandel since the days when her cabin was full of outward-bound passengers seventeen years before, the company broke up about midnight and scattered to their state-rooms for repose; Barbara and Lucy sleeping together in No. 13 ; that is, if two talkative women can be said to sleep when they spend nearly the whole night in a sweet murmur of confidential chat. The souls of women are like nightingales; their sweetest discourse with each other is at night. But not even night- ingales could interchange such sweetness as did Barbara and Lucy in their mutual love. They told each other the story of their lives-making' such reservations as each narrator thought to be dictated by a proper modesty in her own case; that is, Barbara told hers, omitting a too open reference to Philip; and Lucy hers, studiously disguising her acquaintance with -Cam- meyer. How strange is the passion of women for concealing from each other the most important facts of their lives! Such meager confessions as Lucy made grew out of an allusion to a disaster which she experienced at sea. "No, my dear Barbara," said she, "you must not talk of shipwreck. I was once on board the Great Eastern-the largest steamship in the world. It was her trial trip from Deptford to Portland Roads. On -the second day out, her funnel was blown up through the deck-the chandeliers in page: 514-515[View Page 514-515] 514 TEMPEST-TOSSED. the cabin and all the gilt work and ornfame -nts came crashing to the floor-ande I thought we were all killed, 'Several of the men were scalded to death. Now you have never' had such an accident. No, dear Barbara, it is I who have been shipwrecked-ah, yes, shipwrecked indeed-shipwrecked in life and hope and all."5 No sooner had these words escaped Lucy's lips than she drew a long breath, and resolved to be more guarded in her subsequent expressions ;-for she had no desire to acquaint Barbara with the facts concerning Anthoiay Cammeyer. So Cammeyer's name, not being in Barbara's thoughts, nor on Lucy's lips, passed without mention. "Do not sigh so," said Barbara, "you will make me think it safer to be drifting about the world in an old hulk, than to dwell among one's fellow-creatures, subject to disasters and disappointments on every side.". ":Dear Barbara," said Lucy, fondg he, " you are just at the threshold of life-I hope the door, when it opens, will usher you into the fullest realization of your hearths wishes." "Darling Lucy, you have gone through the whole world. You have seen everything. Which is the loveliest thing of all? Lucy smiled at this impossible question, and replied,' "My sweet Barbara, one of our poets-a woman too- asks the question, 'What's th e best thing in the world?' And her answer is, ' S ome t hing out of it, I think."- "O Lucy," whispered Barbara, "; I think the most beauti- ful thing in the world must be a little child-a sweet babe in its mother's arms. This is a sight I never saw. I am more eager to see a babe-a little toddling child-a group of school-children-than I am to see all the kings and queens of the earth. I am sure I shall love children. My father frequently quotes Goethe's remark, I I love God and little children.' AGATHA. 515 "Dear Barbara," said Lucy,-to whom the thought of never having seen a child communicated a powerful sense of Barbara's complete isolation from the world,-"you have lived such a lonely life on the ship-in such extreme and uncommon exile from mankind-that you seem like the heroine of a romantic tale.- I would not be surprised if some writer would one day make a romance out of your adventures. Only he would never be able to tell the story as beautifully as you have lived it.*" "O Lucy to" sighed Barbara, with an eager and tearful earnestness, "I have always thought of your life as being full of sunshine and happiness, and yet some great sorrow seems to be resting upon you. Dear Lucy, I have told you my story-now tell me yours. I am eager to hear it." Barbara knew from Capt. Chantilly's conversation that Lucy Wilmerding was a broken-hearted woman, but did not tell Lucy what she had heard on this sad subject, hoping to hear the tale from her own lips. The disguised narrative which Lucy told ran as follows: "You already know," said she, "that after my mother died, my father and I went to Europe." "Yes." "You know also that my father was very rich." "Yes.' "Well, his intention was to see foreign lands as only a rich man -could see them-to show them to me as a duke might to his daughter." "How splendid!" interrupted Barbara, her eyes burning in the darkness at the magnificent thought. "So for four or five years, my father and I traversed Europe-going everywhere. We lived in Paris-we lived in Madrid-we lived in Rome-we lived wherever there was life. We sought music and pictures-everything lovely and attractive. We drank the full cup of all pure pleasures. My father never allowed it to be empty for a moment." "How delicious!" exclaimed Barbara, feeling the wine of this description flowing: in her blood. page: 516-517[View Page 516-517] 516 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Then my father had many troubles, in the midst of which he died." "O how sad!" exclaimed Barbara, with pain. "His death occurred at Florence." Tears came into Barbara's eyes. "He was buried in the Protestant graveyard there." Barbara, who had invoked the telling of this tale, almost wished that Lucy would stop it, without going further. "Then I was left alone-a stranger in a strange land." "How dreadful! What did you do?" "I looked about for-for-some companion in my dis- g tress." "Did you find one?" [ X "Yes." "Who?" - - g "She was-a-young woman of my own age. She too had equal misfortunes. So we sympathized with each other. ! We resolved to live, toil, suffer, and die together." . "Dear Lucy, how sisterly!" "Yes, we were like twin-sisters-only very much closer than sisters. We always lived in the same room, always slept in the same bed. We were never seen out of each other's company." "What was her name? How did she look? Where is she now"? ' "You shall see her to-morrow when we reach Bridgetown. She is an American girl, and called-it's a strange name- Agatha. She went to Europe on the same steamer with me. That was years ago. She became engaged to a young American naval-officer whose name she forbids me ever to mention to a human being. Her lover-though I think he never loved her- was a splendid man in appearance -tall and stately. But he had a sordid mind, and when he found that Agatha would not inherit her father's fortune- for her father told him jestingly that he was going to bequeath all his property, not to his daughter, but to a public charity-the young lover, who proved to possess no I ji true love, made cunning excuses for postponing the mar- riage, and finally deserted her forever, without letting her know his changed purpose. She never saw him afterward, nor has she received a solitary word from him from that day to this." "Perhaps he died," said Barbara, who could not compre- hend such conduct in a living man toward a loving woman; and she felt, too, that there was a strange similarity between Agatha's case and what she had supposed to be Lucy's own. "No, he did not die," said Lucy. "He has since been heard from in Japan, in South America, and in the American war." "Poor Agatha!" sighed Barbara. "What a comfort she must take 'n you. It must be such a help to Agatha to have a real sister-not such a foolish image of one as I had in Narcissa." "O Barbara," said Lucy, "Agatha and I clung to each other because we had no one else to cling to. Our sorrows, which were great, and our comforts, which were few, we had in common. We made a co-partnership in misery, and divided evenly our stock of woman's woes. I said one day, 'Agatha, let us count up our joint possessions.' So, add- ing hers and mine, we found we had in money 112 13s. 6d., together with an equal *amount of womanly education. We then footed up our joint losses to include (that is, hers and mine together) first, the loss of a fortune, next the loss of a father, and last the loss of a lover. Having lost all these, we set about to guard against losing our only remain- ing treasure, lest that too should be gone." "What was that?" asked Barbara. "Heaven," replied Lucy. Barbara was now full of sympathetic sighings and ca- resses. "Among my father's financial associates," continued Lucy, " was an old man-James Scarborough. There were two brothers, James and John-twins. The other brother is Capt. Scarborough, now on the Coromandel. He then page: 518-519[View Page 518-519] 518 TEMPEST-TOSSED. lived at Cape Town. James lived in London. He was a strange old man, and perhaps out of his mind. At least, that was his lawyer's defence of him in court. But it did not avail. He had become involved in speculations, andi taken trust-funds, my father's deposits among them, ruining my father and others." "What are trust-funds?" asked Barbara, who knew j nothing of money or- its uses, except to regard a few coins as picturesque curiosities,. "Trust-funds," said Lucy, "are other people's money. Old Mr. Scarborough, finding himself in difficulty, took other people's money to help him out." "Well," said Barbara, " if he was in trouble, and other people's money would relieve him, would they not be glad E that he took it?" "No, my child; on the contrary, they were very angry because he took it. He was sentenced for five years." "What do you mean by sentenced for five years?" in. quired Barbara, whose opportunities for reading police re- ports had been limited, and who was lamentably deficient in a current knowledge of the world's wickedness and its punishment. "I mean," said Lucy, "that he was condemned to im- prisonment for five long years." ! "O," exclaimed Barbara, "how cruel to treat a good old man in that way." Lucy could not make Barbara comprehend the sin of embezzlement and forgery, so she dropped this point, and went on with her story. "My father's American property, consisting of some sort of stocks, which I never exactly understood, was thrown on the market and sacrificed." Barbara listened, not understanding what was meant by stocks, or their being thrown on the market and sacrificed; but she did not wish to interrupt the narrative by showing her ignorance; so she asked no question for her financial enlightenment. The truth is, Barbara knew quite as much of finance as Lucy did, for both together knew nothing:-in which respect they resembled some of the statesmen of the present day. "My father," said Lucy, "in consequence of the losses which he suffered through old Mr. Scarborough, became a bankrupt." "A bankrupt!" thought Barbara. "I wonder what that is!" But she made no inquiry. "It was this misfortune," continued Lucy, "that so preyed on my father's mind as to drive him into his grave." Barbara inferred that bankruptcy was a subtle disease of which men die :-and she was right. "Well," continued Lucy, "Mrs. Scarborough, the old man's wife-a second wife, and the mother of young chil- dren-was broken-hearted over her husband's disgrace, and wrote me to call and see her, which I did. She then told me that she had a moderate income in her own right, and begged me to accept a portion of it, and to live in her family, saying that this was the only reparation she could ever hope to make for the losses which her husband had entailed on my father and me." "What an unhappy woman she must have been," said Barbara, "and yet how just and kind and good!" "Yes," responded Lucy, "her offer was generous. H that is Agatha and Haccepted it." "You both accepted it?" "Yes, we both went to live with Mrs. Scarborough; for Agatha and I could not live apart. No. We resolved to remain together. It was a home for us, and that was what we wanted. Agatha and I lived there for five years. It was a small country place just out of London. Mrs. Scar- borough bore up with great patience. The hardest thing for her to endure was the sneering of the village boys at her children. At length, her husband's term expired." page: 520-521[View Page 520-521] 520 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "What does that mean?" asked Barbara, who now felt that she must ask some necessary questions or else she would not understand the story. "It means," said Lucy, "that after the old man had stayed five years in prison, he was then let out, and he re- turned to his home." "How glad," exclaimed Barbara, "they must have been to see him!" "I never saw," said Lucy, "such a face as his. It was sorrow's self. From the day of his sentence, he never smiled. He was as soft and quiet as a lamb. He looked a hundred years old, though only seventy. HAgatha and I -could not bear to stay, he seemed so ashamed to meet us at the table; and we resolved to go. 'No,' said Mrs. Scar-' borough, 'it will pain him if you go. It will be another burden for him to bear. It will be another piercing of his X soul.' So we stayed g "It then became, strange to say, a still more pleasant home for us than ever. He was a stricken and penitent man, and would weep like a child at any tenderness shown to him. Agatha and I would comb his white locks, and he would sit like a dead man, bolt upright in his chair, never ! speaking except with his eyes. Such an incarnation of help- X lessness and heart-break I never saw. "His one and only thought was, 'How can I undo the wrong? I can never undo it in my life. I must suffer for it till death. And unless God shall prove more merciful than man, I shall continue to suffer for it after death.' "At length, to get him away from the scene of his wrong-doing, his wife-who grew to love him with a most pitiful tenderness--persuaded him to take the family out of England, and go to one of the colonies. "First they thought of Cape Town. But the old man's brother lived there--high in the esteem of the community -and the culprit would not go where he thought his pres- ence might fling a shadow on the one remaining good name in the family. AAr TIlA. -, "At last they thought of Barbados as an old-fashioned English island where Mrs. Scarborough's moderate means would suffice to support the family. "Agatha and I went to Barbados with them. They would not have us stay behind. ' No,' said Mrs. Scarborough, ' you are of us and must dwell with us.' So we went. "That was several years ago, and yet it seems only yesterday. "At first we thought the old man's story could be kept secret, but the newspapers told it. Nevertheless he soon gained the respect of everybody. He would walk with ,his gold-headed cane up and down the streets, and everybody would bow to him-everybody pitied him. "And he never smiled-no, not once. Agatha and I never saw a smile on his face. But there was nothing save loveliness and sweetness in his life. In spirit he seemed like some sad, death-smitten dear child, waiting meekly for the grave. "About three years ago Mrs. Scarborough died. This was the final blow that broke the old man's heart. He was then seventy-seven. The three children, all boys, had grown to young men, and gone to seek their fortunes in different parts of the world. HAgatha and Hnot having any re- maining ambition in life-for we had lost early what others lose late-that is, we had lost everything-well, having nothing to gain elsewhere, we stayed with the old man, and helped his tottering steps downward toward the tomb. If he had been our own grandfather we could not have loved him more. And he was so full of gratitude for any kind- ness that at last I dreaded to see him so moved, so shaken, so full of feeling at any little courtesy. "One evening, about two years ago, he had a stroke of paralysis. I sent word to the Sisters of Mercy. Father Pentony, the convent physician, came, and Sister Aurelia with him. Four days afterward occurred a second stroke. Day and night Agatha and I watched the stricken man, . page: 522-523[View Page 522-523] 532 TEMPEST-TOSSED. with Sister Aurelia's help. In a fortnight more came the final and fatal blow." "He died?" asked Barbara. "Yes ;- and his funeral was one of the largest ever held in Barbados. Everybody was in tears. All hearts were touched and melted. "Notification was then sent to Capt. John Scarborough at Cape Town to come and settle the estate. It was a small estate, only a few thousand pounds. The will was not opened, for nobody had a right to open it. Agatha and I declined to do so. At length Capt. Scarborough arrived. "O Barbara, you never would imagine that two men could[ be so alike in looks. When the surviving brother walked up the street for the first time, all the people stared as if they! had seen the ghost of the other risen from his grave!-the same white hair, the same large features, the same cast of j countenance, only not- the same expression. Don't you think J that Capt. Scarborough has a beautiful face?-so old and ! yet so fresh?-so full of honesty and sunshine? It was a feast to my eyes just to look at it-for it seemed his. ! brother's face over again, without any gloom to shade it- without any burden of conscience to crush out its life.. "Before Capt. Scarborough arrived, I had gone-that is, J Agatha and Hto live with the Sisters of Mercy; not as a member of the order, but the convent employed us to instruct j the choir, in return for which we had our residence in the building without cost." - "Dear Lucy," said Barbara, "how different your life has been from what I imagined it!" "Ah, Barbara, few lives ever fulfill their early promise. I had too much of sunshine at the beginning not to need the shadow at last. God knows best." I "Please go on," said Barbara, who drank every word as if from a fountain,- half bitter and half sweet. "When Capt. Scarborough came and opened the will," said Lucy, "he found the property to be 63,000, all be- queathed to me,-I mean, to Agatha and me; with a AGATHA. O; statement, written in the old man's trembling hand, that he had not dispossessed his three sons through lack of their unworthy father's love, but that the little money which he was able to leave belonged morally not to himself but to Lawrence Wilmerding's daughter, who would have inherited the same and a thousand times more from her father, had not her father been brought to ruin by the testator's acts. "This will pleased Capt. Scarborough, who said in his quaint way, 'Right, Miss Lucy, right. My brother was always out of his 'ed, but never out of his 'art. His 'ed was always wrong, but his 'art always right.' "( It makes me laugh, Barbara, to think of the amusing talk of this living brother concerning the dead. He never de- fended, yet never abused him. He always spoke of him with a comical gayety and affection. He is eighty--and yet you see him hale and lively-he is a fine specimen of an old bachelor. And only think, Barbara,-but no, you cannot guess what he wanted to do." "What was it?" "Why, he wanted to marry me!" "What did you say to him?" "O, I -answered that if I should marry either of the brothers it would be the one dead, for I would never marry any living man," "Dear Lucy, do you mean never to marry?" "I marry? Why, what then would become of Agatha?" Barbara felt that she had touched a dangerous subject, and must speak carefully ; so she simply said, "It must be a very great loss, my dear Lucy, to lose one's heart's idol. Did Agatha forgive the man who proved so unworthy of her? Did she cease to love him?} Does this base man live still?" "Barbara, I must not speak of what Agatha never mentions. Every heart knoweth its own bitterness. All persons who see Agatha, even without a word from her lips, and in spite of all her efforts at concealment, discover that she is a sorrow-stricken woman, walking her shadowed page: 524-525[View Page 524-525] 524 TEMPEST-TOSSED. way through the world, seeking for some quiet gate out of it. "Barbara, I have seen a great deal of the world-you, a very little of it; but it is of small consequence to see much or little; happiness does not consist in that little or much; happiness is here-here alone," and she pressed her hand with pathetic emphasis against her sad heart. "Ah, yes, if even the kingdom of God is within us, as the canon of Scrip- ture says, then of course the lesser kingdom of the world must find room within us also. "I mean that everything is in the heart. The heart is the life. Agatha has found it so-and so everybody else must find it. Agatha has gained nothing by seeing the world; you have lost nothing by not seeing it. Indeed, Agatha has lost everything; you have gained everything. She is bank- rupt in her heart's love; you are rich in it. "My darling, you are looking forward eagerly to the world which you are about to enter; and I can tell you in advance the most that you will find in it." "O what?" "You will find in the world chiefly what you carry into it. Heaven and earth are in 6ur own breast. Life will be little or much to you according to the fate or fortune of your heart's love. You are very happy, and I can tell you the secret of your happiness." "O what is it?" asked Barbara, who sat listening ps to an oracle. "You are happy," said Lucy, " not because you are about to enter the world, but because you have found a true love and a true lover. These are what constitute woman's hap- piness. - Give a woman these two things-love and a lover -and you may then deny her everything else. Love- fulfilled in a lover-this is woman's all in all. "You, my dear Barbara, are the most fortunate of women, not because you have been rescued from shipwreck; not because you have been picked up from a desolate island; but because you have a happy love and a noble lover. It is AtA 1THA. 0^/ love, and love alone,-the love which a faithful lover brings to a woman's heart-this is what makes a woman's life. "If you should ask Agatha -I mean when you see her to-morrow-which of all the world's treasures are chief, she would point to the one she lost; the loss of her first, her last, her only possible love ;-no, not her love, but her lover. Her love she can never, never lose-it is only her lover that is gone. But when her lover went, all the world went with him. So, as I said before, Agatha knows that nothing now remains for her but heaven." Barbara, whose interest was intense in Lucy's conversa- tion, pressed her with numerous questions concerning the man whom Agatha loved-his character and history ;-but Lucy evaded them all on the plea, as before, of her obliga- tion of reticence concerning Agatha's secrets. "Dear Barbara" asked Lucy, " do you think you will love Agatha?" "Yes, I am sure I shall. Is she like you? Has she dark eyes?" "Her eyes," said Lucy, "have grown dark through walk- ing a darksome way in life, and there is not enough sunlight left for her in the world to brighten them ever again." "Lucy, you said that you and Agatha were always together-why did you not bring her with you?" "Ah, Barbara, I must tell you what is going to happen to Agatha." During all Lucy's recital of Agatha's story, thus far, Barbara kept wondering, what could be the narrator's own. She had reason to believe that Lucy's must be somewhat like it. But this resemblance (at least, so Barbara thought) might perhaps be a common attribute of all women's sad fate in a wicked world. "Go on," urged Barbara, emphatically. "After Agatha," resumed her biographer, " took up her quiet abode in the convent- though she was no more a part of it than her lodgment in a country inn would have made her a part of that-she nevertheless became greatly attached page: 526-527[View Page 526-527] 526 TEMPEST-TOSSED. to the Sisters of Mercy. The Mother Superior was very kind to her. So was the Mother Assistant. They sympathized with her in her sorrows, but never alluded to her history. They hoped in this way to wean her from herself. "Mother Dionysia would say, ' To those who forget them- selves, and who remember only God, there can be no other sorrows except the sorrows of the Saviour which He suffered for our joy, and the sorrows of others to whom we are to carry this joy.' Mother Dionysia's sweet sayings sank deep into Agatha's soul. "Agatha became intimate with one of the Sisters-the youngest of the noviciates. This was Sister Angela." "What a beautiful name!" interrupted Barbara. "Yes, and she was a beautiful child-for she was a mere child. Barbara, you said you wanted to see a child. O that you might have seen this loveliest of all the children of the earth-a child now gathered to the saints in heaven." "Please tell me about her." "Her parents made a short voyage at sea, and were lost. How strange this world is! -Your parents made a long voyage, which was a continual wreck, and yet were saved at last ; but Angela's, after being only four days at sea, went to the bottom. Then Angela, an orphan, was sent to school at the convent. Through grief for her loss, the little bruised heart determined to give itself up to God. At fifteen she prepared herself to be a nun, although she could not take the white veil until seventeen." "What is the white veil?" "It is a garment the nuns wear-a badge of their order. At seventeen, Angela still looked the merest child. O Bar- bara, she was beautiful! She was a blonde, just like you; her hair, before it was cut off, was just like yours. And, O, such deep and quiet blue eyes!-deep as the blue sea itself! "She was very slight, and never was well-any little raw wind gave her a distressing cough. "She was the loveliest spirit that ever was lodged for a while in a human form-too good for the earth. She was truly our Sister Angela-an angel like her name. Agatha and I used to say that if all the world had been one flower, this dear child would have been its honey-drop. "During Angela's sickness, Agatha-who loved her just as I did-joined with me in watching her. We would allow nobody else to do it, for it was such a comfort to do it ourselves. "I fed myself on Angela's spirit as if it had been sacred manna; I drank her soul into mine as if it were heavenly dew. "When the dear girl began to fade away, I could have taken out the heart from my own breast and put it into hers if that would have kept her alive. ' She would pray just as flowers give forth their odors; she every day embalmed herself in sweet intercessions for our sake, and hallowed the air for us by praying for all her companions by name. Sometimes, when she would put her thin hands together, her face grew so bright as to make me realize the halo of the saints. "One day she suddenly awoke, and exclaimed, "'O blessed vision, I have seen the Lord Christ! He came to me walking on the sea. His two hands were out- stretched, one to my father, the other to my mother, and He led my parents to me over the waves, and they beckoned to me with their hands, and smiled on mne as they did in mortal flesh, only far more tenderly. Then He led them back again over the same stormy waves, and as He went back with them, He turned and said to me, "Follow thou me." "After Angela said this, the dear child crossed herself and turned so pale that I knew she must be dying. "Agatha and I immediately ran for the Mother Superior to come to the bedside. She came, and bent over dear Angela, kissed her, and put the crucifix to the sufferer's lips. The little maid clasped it with her white hands, and kissed it so passionately that I am sure her kiss must have thrilled the very heart of our Lord in heaven. page: 528-529[View Page 528-529] 628 ,TEMPEST-TOSSED l "Then the little thing's teeth chattered. "I ran to my cell and brought a soft flannel which I spread over the dying girl.- "' Darling,' said I, ' this will make you a little warmer.' "O' O no,' she said, meekly. 'It cannot keep out the chill i of death.' "The physician was sent for, who, when he came, gave one glance at the Mother Superior and another at me. We all saw his meaning. The time had come. "After a little sleep, Angela awoke, and moving her lips as one who has been sipping a glass of wine, exclaimed, "' I am tasting it.' "' Tasting what? ' I asked X "' Death,' said the dying voice. And O how sweet it is! -too sweet! Give me a little wormwood to make it : bitter.' "'What are you saying? ' asked the Mother Superior. "Wormwood,' she replied, ' a little wormwood or gall.' "' Why, my darling daughter, what for? ' asked Mother Dionysia, and we all feared that Angela's mind was wan- dering. "'My death,' she answered softly, 'ought not to be so sweet. Our blessed Lord had wormwood in His.' Can I M not have one little drop of bitterness in mine?' Agatha burst into tears. "'O' said the dying Angela, 'my prayer is now granted -for it is bitterness enough to me to see you weep. Mother of Mercy, be merciful to Agatha, and dry her tearj. Dear Agatha, bend low-I have something to ask you. Listen. If I go, will you take my place-will you wear the white -veil? ' "Agatha trembled and made no reply. ' Dear Agatha, speak to me,' said she. ' What message 2 shall I bear from you to our blessed Mother Mary? Will, you take my place-will you wear the white veil?' "Agatha answered not a word, but sat wrestling as with ( life and death, with time and eternity i AGATHA. 529 J "'The candle 1' moaned Angela,' I beg you bring it I '- signifying that she desired to hold the holy candle. "It was sent for. "' Agatha,' she whispered faintly, 'my soul is in burden for you, O my sister Agatha, promise me to take my place when I am gone-will you wear the white veil? '" Barbara was now weeping at Lucy's mournful tale. "O Barbara," said Lucy, "no heart, not even of stone, could have held out against such an appeal." "What did Agatha reply?" asked Barbara. "She said, ' Yes, Angela, I promise-I promise to take your place-I promise to wear the white veil. '" "What did the dying Angela then say?" asked Barbara. "She said nothing, for she was too overcome to speak, but .she crossed her arms over her breast, and seemed to be uttering thanks to heaven. "The holy candle was then lighted and put into her hands in token that she was a virgin whose light was burning; and as its gentle flame overspread her face, she suddenly opened her eyes and exclaimed in a voice like music, "' Behold the bridegroom cometh! ' "And those were her last words. As soon as Angela breathed no more, Agatha put her arms round her-the trembling living arms round the cold and stiffening form of the dead, and pressed it as if she would work a miracle and bring it back to life . "Now, dear Barbara, what do you think I found in that death-bed?" "What was it?- "The Sisters have a way of scourging themselves with secret flagellations. They attempt to conceal these mortifi- cations from all eyes save God's. On disrobing the slender child-for I arrayed her- with my own hands for burial-I found about her waist a hair-girdle which had worn a belt of raw ulcers in her flesh. This girdle was bloody with fresh lacerations that day. "Mother Dionysia admired this long-hidden heroism, and 23 page: 530-531[View Page 530-531] 530 TEMPEST-TOSSED. urged us all to imitate it. 'My secret to myself,' she said. That's a proverb among the nuns. How closely Angela had kept her sanguinary secret to herself! O Barbara, for what she did in secret I am sure she will be rewarded openly- before all the hosts of heaven." Barbara shuddered at the recital. "Dear Barbara, Agatha, -faithful to her vow, is to take Angela's place in the Convent of St. Carliola, and will publicly assume the white veil on Sunday next. You will arrive in Bridgetown just in time to witness the ceremony." "Do you think," asked Barbara, "that Agatha will find any rest in the nunnery?" "O no, Agatha does not go there for rest'; that would be misery for her; that would tempt her to brood over the past; she wants active toil. She joins the Sisters of Mercy to be clothed with their habit, and to go out every day to exhausting tasks for the relief "of human suffering. She has been so long in Barbados that everybody knows her; everybody (I think) respects her; and when she becomes officially one of the Sisters of Mercy she will go [ with peculiar welcome wherever her vow carries her, and wherever misfortune invites her. Her order consecrates itself to the poor, the ignorant, and the suffering. With her nun's garb as a badge, she will go into hovels,-jails,- hospitals,-everywhere. For, what is mercy? It is a sun- beam shining in a dark place. Having much experience of sorrow in her own life, she will be all the more able to minister to it in others. So Agatha has resolved to take Angela's crucifix in her hands and to uplift it by dying beds. Agatha believes that after what she has suffered, this is the only refuge for her in life.?' "Dear Lucy, what is the ceremony of taking the white veil?" "When we arrive," said Lucy, "you shall see it for your- self." "What is the white veil made of?" "It is made of simple white muslin." AGATHA. 531 "O Lucy, I have a lovely piece of white muslin. It is French, and soft as velvet. It is many years old, but white as snow. May I give it to Agatha for her veil?" "Dear Barbara," replied Lucy, with a sudden outhurst of tears, "shall I tell you how you can keep yourself always beautiful in my eyes?" "O how?" asked Barbara, who clasped her dear com- panion to her fond breast. "You shall give to Agatha her white veil," said Lucy, "and when she puts it on I shall feel that your own arms are clasped round her; and I shall say, ' Agatha, we are not alone, for Barbara is with us.'" "Why do you weep so?" asked Barbara. "My darling," said Lucy, brushing the tears from her eyes, "you know I lost my mother early. Your mother seems to be mine: and you, her daughter, seem to be my sister. O Barbara, Agatha will love you just as I do-just as I do," and she clasped Barbara's neck, and kissed her with a wild and passionate grief. "Dear Lucy," said Barbara, "after Agatha joins the convent, you must go northward with us, and live at our home in Salem." "Dear, sweet Barbara," replied Lucy, sobbing, "your mother has already asked me to do so." "And what did you tell her?" "I told her," said she, recovering her composure, and speaking more calmly, "dear Barbara, I told her I must wait on Agatha's wish." "If Agatha then is willing," interposed Barbara, "you will surely go?" "Yes; but not if Agatha forbids." "O Lucy," exclaimed Barbara, folding her once again in her arms, "I wish you had such a sister as my Narcissa- whom I command at my will, and who obeys me in every- thing." "Dear, dear Barbara, if Agatha should forbid me to leave her-then " page: 532-533[View Page 532-533] 532 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Then what?" asked Barbara. "Then she shall make you a beautiful gift," said Lucy. "What will it be?" asked Barbara, curiously. Ah, my darling," whispered Lucy, " if Agatha is to receive from you the white veil of a nun, then you must receive from her the white veil of a bride." As the night waned, there was much other talk between these two sweet tongues ;-talk on many different phases of one general theme-THE WORLD:-how Agatha was just quitting it, as Barbara was just entering it ; how neither its relinquishment nor its possession was comparable with one precious treasure in it which it could neither give nor take away; how this one priceless prize, of life-especially to women-is Love ; how a woman who has all other things, yet is without love, is poor beyond beggary; how a woman who- has few other things, yet has love, is rich beyond royalty; in other words (as Lucy finally summed up the case, just in time to sleep an hour or two before morning), how Agatha, Barbara, and all other heart-yearning maids, whether on land or sea, whether in society or seclusion, must sooner or later discover for themselves that where J love is,-there, and there only, is woman's world. "s'& CHAPTER XXVII. SURPRISE. AFTER midnight the fog thinned away, and the stars peeped out. Every soul on the Coromandel slept;-and sweet and weary was their sleep. Beaver too was among the sleepers-an unwatchful watch- dog; for although Barbara, early in the evening, had led him from his downstairs kennel and stationed him on deck with orders to remain there as a sentry all night, and par- ticularly to give a loud bark of welcome in case of Philip's approach, yet the burden of the old dog's age hung heavily on his eyelids and weighed him down into a deep slumber at his post. But Beaver never once- suspected that he had fallen asleep, and would have been profoundly mortified if such a treacherous thought had occurred to his faithful mind. Had Beaver been awake, he would now have barked; for a boat full of men was stealthily rowing toward the ship, softly urged with muffled oars, and dimly visible in the gray dawn. It was a boat from the Good Hope, and the men were armed to the teeth. Chiswick K. Lane was standing on the bow; peering at the Coromandel to make sure of her doubtful identity. He had once been her captain ; he was now coming to bo her captor. IUammeyer was not among the boat's company, vbut had - e page: 534-535[View Page 534-535] 534 TEMPEST-TOSSED. been left behind on the Good Hope, to save appearances. He was there guarded in free confinement as a prisoner- of-war. And yet, as a great general does not go into the battle which he plans, but directs it from its distant verge, so Cammeyer, who had planned the expedition which Lane was now executing, remained for the time being not the Good Hope's captive but captain. The boat-load of conspirators drew nigh the anchored hulk in silence. "Can it be possible, that I see the Coromandel once, more?" thought Lane. Te agitated man, notwithstanding the positive proof which Cammeyer had given him of the ship's identity, did not dismiss his last remaining doubt until he drew close under the bow, and dimly saw the old craft's gilded name. There it was! The begrimed letters-blurred yet recognizable seemed to certify to all the world that he had committed perjury. In reading the ship's name, he read in it his whole past history. The mildew that gangrened the one seemed typical of the stain that defiled the other. - God's vengeance!" he cried. u It is the Coromandel- afloat-safe-sound! And I am the man who made oath that this ship went to the bottom, and Rodney Vail with her. She and he have come to life to make me a perjurer. The Chantillys too are in the trick. But I will stop their game. I will clutch the Coromandel with one hand-the Tamaqua with the other. Neutral waters? To hell with the neutrality! A man has a right to his own. This ship is mine-mine in any sea-mine in any port-mine here- mine as much as if she were my hat, blown off yesterday, and picked up to-day." Whispenng to his men to remain in the boat, he climbed noiselessly to the deck, and walked from. the bow as far aft as the mizzpnmast-recognizing at every step the ship's- familiar features, notwithstanding the marks of fire and time, ^Yes," he whispered, "the same water-tanks, the same wheel, the same compass-all the same as of old." Turning round to walk back again toward the bow, his elbow accidentally jostled against a bucket which stood on the edge of the binnacle, and knocked it to the deck. Wakened by the noise, Beaver slowly opened his eyes, leisurely shook his shaggy sides, and sedately stepped forth from the midst of a coil of rope in which he had disobe- diently kenneled himself during the night. "The devil!" exclaimed Lane in a whisper. "The same dog! I knew his brown coat before it had a gray hair. We, had a jest on shipboard that this dog must have come over in the Mayflower, for he had the best blood of New England in- his veins. The fire is still in his eyes.-Beaver, lie down!" This command, spoken in a low voice, was accompanied with a threatening scowl to enforce it; for Beaver began to make noisy and joyful demonstrations, He had evidently identified Capt. Lane as his old master of seventeen years before-just as the dog Argus recognized his master Ulysses on that hero's return after an absence of twenty. "Lie down, I say," repeated Lane. Beaver wagged his tail-swung his heavy and brain-laden head up and down-put his fore-paws against Lane's breast -and wheezed forth his welcome to his old master in a manner most unwelcome to the man. "Hush, Beaver!" whispered Lane again,-patting him on the head, and trying persuasion instead of authority; but joy is not easily repressed, either- in men or dogs ; and the more Beaver was commanded and cajoled, the more he grew delighted and irrepressible. "Down!" exclaimed Lane, pointing with his finger ; but Beaver only took this to be a satirical invitation to do the opposite; so he leaped up again against his old masters breast, Und whined with a deep, guttural, and joyful sound. "Take that, then!" said Lane, striking him a stinging page: 536-537[View Page 536-537] 536 TEMPEST-TOSSED. blow on his right ear, to stop his congratulatory barking; but the dog accepted the buffet in kindness, and replied with other noisier barks. "Damn the cur!" muttered Lane, "he will wake the ship's company before the time." Whereupon the desperado drew a bowie-knife, and as the unsuspecting and kindly creature once more leaped up against him, the inhuman wretch swung back his arm to its utmost reach, drove forward the glittering blade -with full force and momentum, and plunged it to the hilt in the old dog's throat! O shades of heroes!-think of Ulysses poniarding Argus in return for the old dog's welcome to the master of his youth Beaver, under the murderous blow, fell heavily to the deck-groaning-gasping-and quivering in a pool of his own blood. Lane ran to the bow, and bending over, motioned to his men to ascend. - They were barefoot- shod with silence. They Iran up like squirrels. On reaching the deck, they mustered in a straight line-numbering twelve marines and a lieutenant. Not a loud word escaped their lips. Lane then stole on tiptoe toward the stairway leading to the cabin; when suddenly Barbara, - who, having waked at Beaver's joyful bark, had robed herself with glad haste, and had fled with winged footsteps to the deck to be the first to welcome the coming guest,--now exultingly accosted the conspirator in the faint gray light with the ringing exclamation "Philip!" But at the next moment her eyes cruelly corrected this happy error of her heart, and she discovered-not Philip- but, in his stead, a strange man with a bloody weapon in- his hand. At a second glance, she noticed his companiions ranged in battle array. SURPKRISE. 537 "Where is Philip?" she wondered, full of alarm and distress. "And who are these menacing men? Why have they come? O what if they are pirates!" Catching sight then of the bleeding dog, she gave a wild scream. "O Beaver, what is this? Blood? Are you killed? O, O Beaver I My dog, my dear dog!" Barbara bent over her panting pet, and was horror-struck to behold him in his death-throes. Beaver, recognizing her well-known voice, lifted his head -turned toward her his closed eyes, which he could not open-gave a faint moan, which was all the response he could make-crawled as near as possible to her feet-dropped his head against the deck-quivered convulsively-gasped- and was dead. Barbara leaped in tempestuous anger to her feet, and confronting the strange man, exclaimed, "What murderer are you, who have slain my dog! Quit this deck! Go, bloody and brutal man! No,-0 stay!- what have you done to Philip? Have you killed him too? Is Philip dead? Tell me, kind sir!--0 speak P" Saying which, the terror-stricken maid, in an agony of apprehension for Philip's safety,-her anger having given instant place to fear and supplication,-knelt at Lane's feet and looked up into his face with a blindness still more pitiful than Beaver had shown in vainly trying to gaze into hers. "Your dog?" asked Lane, who cringed at the spectacle of the girl's misery. "Not yours, my lady, but mine-he was my dog. A man may kill his own dog-may he not? This dog belonged to this ship, and this ship belonged to me, and both were mine before you were born." Hearing these incredible and preposterous words, Barbara felt that she was in the presence of some maniac or savage, who was inventing a horrible tale such as she had read in the plots of books. "O Beaver!" she exclaimed, bending over him in grief, "I have lived with you all my life-romped with you- page: 538-539[View Page 538-539] 588 TEMPEST-TOSSED. taught you tricks-fed you-watched over you-and now I see you killed!-murdered I O my dear old dog!" Barbara, weeping over him, stroked his soft silky ears, which were still warm with their unchilled life, and observ- ing the increasing stream of blood that issued from his neck, felt a sickening emotion and turned lividly pale. Her father, who heard the noise, now came up stairs, and seeing his daughter prostrate on the deck, and Beaver dead beside her, and blood near them, and a bloody-handed man standing over them, imagined that his child had been murdered, and that he was face to face with her murderer. A sudden icy fire, like the sting of cold, pricked and burned his pulse. Leaping upon the assassin, he recognized a familiar face. "Lane!" he cried. "Miscreant! Having abandoned us to one death, do you revisit us with another? It shall be your last crime!" Dr. Vail clutched Capt. Lane by the throat, and in the twinkling of an eye threw him heavily down into the pool of the dog's blood. Barbara meanwhile sprang up and stood by her father's side,-turning her eyes with a fiery glance at Lane, who a moment afterward rose, besmeared with a worthier blood than flowed in his own veins. Capt. Lane's marines, during this scene of violence, remained motionless, for he had instructed them against making any demonstration except at his positive command: -a precaution to avoid infringing the neutrality laws. Capt. Chantilly now, appeared on deck, followed first by Scarborough, and then by Robson and Carter. - 'What means this bloody business-?" asked the captain of the Tamaqua, who swept his swift eyes about him, and saw at a glance that it was a stratagem of war. The hour for Lane's manceuvre had been fixed by Cam- meyer at day-break, because this was the time of high-water. In pursuance of Cammeyer's plan, the Good Hope, flying the Confederate flag, was now hovering off the mouth of the cove. Her draught of water was only thirteen feet- not deep enough to endanger her touching bottom. S1;e might have steamed up to where the Coromandel lay, except that in so narrow an estuary she could not have turned round to go back. Following the first boat came three others,-all wielding lusty oars to tug the Coromandel to the cove's mouth, where she was to be put in tow of the steamer. One of these boats straightway slipped the chain-cable by which the Coromandel was anchored, leaving the anchor in its watery bed. Another detached the -hawsers which guyed the great hulk to the shore. The third cut off-the ferry- basket. The stratagem for the capture, backed as it was by a force of seventy men in the boats, together with a co-operating man-of-war in the offing, was about to prove a success. Capt. Chantilly turned to Lane, and with a haughty sneer, remarked, "I have met you before, sir, and know you for a coward. Gentlemen "-(turning to the armed marines), " this captain of yours commanded this ship seventeen years ago. He abandoned her in a storm, leaving on board of her one man and two women. These exiles have drifted about the sea on this same hulk almost ever since-like a little colony on a floating island ; and they are alive. to-day-in this year of 1864-against this wretch's sworn oath that he saw them sink in 1847! He was a coward then, he is a coward now. See, he has drawn his knife on a feeble old dog-his ship's dog-a dog that stood by a ship which the captain deserted -a dog that has been the playmate of this young woman ever since she was a child. Sir "-(turning directly to Lane), "there is not in all your body a drop of blood as brave as this which you have spilt from a dog!A Capt. Scaw, in recognizing Lane, was so choked with rage that he could not speak, except to roar forth a few detona- ting imprecations that went echoing over the island like successive discharges of artillery. page: 540-541[View Page 540-541] 540 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Lucy Wilmerding had started for the deck, but arrested her steps midway on the cabin-stairs, not venturing to go further, and stood there shuddering with an ominous sense of impending woe. Capt. Chantilly, who saw the strategic perfection of the scheme, now bethought him that the enterprise could not have been planned without an intimate knowledge of the situation; furthermore, that this knowledge could not have been obtained by an ordinary reconnoissance from a distance; wherefore he leaped to the conclusion that Lane must have, :i had an accomplice on the shore; in other words, that Cam- meyer was in the plot. Zounds!" thought Captain Chantilly, "Cammeyer's unaccountable absence from the Tamaqua confirms my suspicion." Additional corroboration rose to the captain's mind on recalling certain strange incidents in his lieutenant's be- havior; thus, though Cammeyer was habitually reticent and seldom spoke to any one on the Tamaqua, he was never- theless frequently voluble in talking to himself in his room at night; for his soliloquies had been repeatedly overheard through the partition; and he occasionally went so far as to mutter violent words, and to grind his teeth in a rage. Capt. Chantilly knew that Cammeyer had in this solitary and eccentric manner-which the lieutenant never exhibited in company--made use of execrating epithets against both his superior officers, particularly since the affair-at Savannah. Moreover, the sailors-those rare judges of character- had christened the punctilious Cammeyer as "the devil's own clerk." Capt. Chantilly now reflected that the extreme fidelity with which the severe lieutenant had always performed his duties as an officer, might very easily have blinded his associates to his baser qualities as a man. "'Where, sir, is Lieut. Cammeyer?" asked Capt. Chan- tilly, turning upon Lane with a fierce tone of peremptory inquiry. "He is on my ship, sir, a captive-where I hope to see you join him in captivity." Lucy Wilmerding overheard this intelligence concerning Cammeyer's misfortune, and immediately ascended to the deck. "Sir," replied Chantilly, "you dare not touch a hair of my head-nor of any head in this party-no, not even of that head "- (pointing to Beaver). "We are on neutral waters, and you know it. We are at an English island. Your presence on this deck is an unlawful intrusion. Leave! -I command you!-Go! Now, gentlemen,"-(turning again to the marines), " this cowardly chief of yours, by leading you into marauding on neutral territory, renders each one of you liable to hang by the neck on an English gibbet. This peaceable man," pointing to Rodney, "is now a resident on the soil of Great Britain, and claims the protection of her flag." To which Lane haughtily replied, "And I claim my ship. This ship is mine. She was mine seventeen years ago-she was mine when I lost her -she is mine now that I have found her-and being milne, I shall take her though the devil himself should say nay." "You perjured liar," cried old Scaw, who was now suffi- ciently calmed to speak, "you claim this ship?-you, who took a hoath that you saw her sink .?-you a findin' of your lost wessel? Demmit, sir, the wessel what you lost went to the bottom o' the sea-you swore to that same in a haffidavy, -and demmit, sir, hif you want that wessel, my hadwice to you his to go straight to the bottom to find her." Lucy Wilmerding, who was now trembling with distress in contemplating Cammeyer as a prisoner, never suspected his treason, but supposed him to be an honorable captive. This sudden calamity to a man whose fortunes, whether for good or ill, were once the chief object of her constant thoughts, woke within her a desire to help him in his extremity. page: 542-543[View Page 542-543] 542 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "But," thought she, " what can I do without exposing the fact that I have known him? I' She resolved to wait till the situation should develop a good opportunity by which she could render some merciful service to the man who had stabbed her heart and slain its X life. . Lucy believed in applying divine laws to human conduct X -one of the divinest of which, to her mind, was that which 3 says: "Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." . Capt. -Chantilly's suspicions of the perfidy of his lieu- tenant 'filled him with such an intense contempt for theX traitor that he could have withered and blasted him with 8 one scowl of scorn. "How came my officer on your ship?" he arrogantly asked ; for although the roused captain of the Tamaqua was now practically a prisoner on the Coromandel, yet he still ruled the scene by the force of his proud spirit. "Sir," replied Lane, "it took nothing but Lieut. Cam-- meyer's own free will to bring him to me, but it will takeX mine to let him go again." "Sir," responded Chantilily, "I call your attention once more to the fact that you are in neutral waters-a fact which includes the case both of Cammeyer and the Coro- mandel." "Sir," retorted Lane, " you may go further and include E yourself. You are in neutral waters, as you say :--I grant it. And I will give you ten minutes to go ashore-yourself and party. But if you remain voluntarily on this ship till after I have towed her beyond the neutrality line, I shall then seize you as a prisoner-of-war, and hold you as captured on the high seas. Will you go ashore or stay i aboard-which? But there is one of your company whoi must go, even if all the rest stay." "Who?" interposed Dr. Vail. "Your daughter, sir." B "I?" exclaimed Barbara, who had just returned from SURPRISE. 543 the cabin, where she had been to speak a word of cheer to her mother. "Yes, my pretty maid," said Lane, "when love calls, woman must obey." Dr. Vail was about to spring once again at Lane's throat, but the rebel pointed with a smile, first to his men behind him, then to the boats in the stream, and finally to the steamer just ahead. "Rodney Vail," said he, " it will be a useless waste - of your life, to attempt mine. Besides, so handsome a young woman as your daughter will not thank you for interposing between her heai and its paradise." Dr. Vail construed this remark as a brutal threat against Barbara. "I would give my two eyes," said he, " and enter willingly blind into a world that I long to see, in exchange for a loaded pistol to shoot you dead!" "Your daughter," said Lane, with a sneer, "knows where her heart is, and will be glad to be there with it, to keep it company." Lucy, who during this colloquy had gradually approached Barbara, now threw her arms about that distressed child, and without speaking a word gave her a look that seemed to say, as Ruth to Naomi, "Whither thou goest, I will go." The Coromandel by this time had been drawn almost to the mouth of the basin, and would soon be past any con- venient spot for landing her passengers. "Do you decide to go or stay?" asked Lane peremptorily of Chantilly. A hurried consultation was held by Vail, Chantilly, and Scarborough. ' Oliver, my, dear friend," said Rodney earnestly, "you must go ashore to be picked up by Philip-otherwise you will be a prisoner." "No," replied Oliver, " my chance of being picked up by Philip will come sooner on the Coromandel than on the page: 544-545[View Page 544-545] " TEMPEST-TOSSED. island. Philip cannot be far off. And when he catches sight of the Coromandel in tow of a Confederate steamer, there will be two sides to the question, instead of one." Dr. Vail again urged his friend to embrace the last H opportunity of going ashore; - pointing out to him the 1 difference between their two positions,-one a naval officer, the other a civilian; one subject to imprisonment by the laws of war, the other free by the equity of nations. "You will be confined in irons," said Rodney-"impris- oned until you are exchanged for some officer of equal rank, or else not liberated at all." "No," replied Oliver, "it is a long way from here to Richmond Prison, and Philip is a watchful lion waiting in the path. By heaven, if Philip does not yet prove a player in this game he is not his father's son. Did he not write that he was skirting these very islands? Philip is in the neighborhood-we have his own word for it. I shall stay by the ship." This decision was formally announced to Lane; after which the Coromandel, having reached the open sea, was hitched by a long hawser to the Good Hope. "Boys," exclaimed Lane, speaking to his marines, "retire into the boat and wait for me there."' After they had clambered down the Coromandel's sides, Dr. Vail turned to Lane and said contemptuously, '"Capt. Lane, the last time your men- and you--had occasion to quit the Coromandel, you were not the last to go; I think John Blaisdell could testify to this fact." This cutting allusion to Lane's cowardice during the storm elicited from him no direct reply; but he curled his lips scornfully, and said, - "Your daughter, sir, has fled again into the'cabin-bid her come back, to go with me at once-I am in haste." "Capt. Lane," said Rodney, " you once deserted this ship and left my daughter to be born here. You cannot do any act of atonement so complete as to desert this ship again and leave my daughter to remain here." i, SURPRISE. 545 "Rodney Vail," cried Lane, in a passion, "bring that girl to me at once, or I shall call back my men and take her by force!" "By heaven, sir," replied her father, "my daughter shall not stir from. this ship." Barbara at that moment returned again to the deck; and Lane, smiling at her with an affected gallantry, remarked, "My fair lady, I have your lover on board my ship-in irons : would it not be gracious in you to share his chains? Will you go?" Barbara, who had heard none of the previous allusions to Lieut. Cammeyer as a prisoner on the Good Hope, gave a piercing cry at Lane's announcement concerning her lover. "O God!" she exclaimed, stunned and staggered by the intelligence. "Is he indeed a prisoner on your ship?" "Yes," replied Lane, " and he has sent me to fetch you to him, to soften and solace his captivity. Will you accom- pany me?" - "Yes, yes!". exclaimed Barbara, " a thousand times yes! -let me fly at once." "I thought so," replied Capt. Lane, turning to her father with a sneer. "What fond darlings these-women are I I won- der what we should do without them in this rough world?" Capt. Lane, not doubting that Cammeyer was Barbara's accepted lover, imagined that the distressed maid would, on this account, be a powerful assistant in carrying out Cam- meyer's plan. "Yes," thought the rebel captain, "the game is perfect- I shall have the Coromandel and the Tamaqua, both." Lucy Wilmerding, who was bonneted and veiled, had all along been mistaken by Lane for Barbara's mother. There was no room in his mind for a suspicion to the contrary, for he knew from Cammeyer that the only women on the island were Mrs. Vail, Barbara, and Bel. So too he never suspected that Barbara, whom he saw in beautiful agony for her imperilled lover, was not thinking of Anthony Cammeyer but of Philip Chantilly. page: 546-547[View Page 546-547] 546 TEMPEST-TOSSED., So too Barbara little dreamed that Lane was inviting her to join a man whom she could more easily loathe than love. "Moreover, Lucy, who had heard that Cammeyer was a a prisoner on the Good Hope, supposed now that Philip was there too. Half the events in history (and more than half in ro. mance) turn on similar accidents and mischances. j "Are you ready?" asked Lane, speaking gently to Bar-il bara, whom he now looked upon as his chief ally i "Yes,-no; let me say good-bye to my mother first;" X and she tripped down into the cabin and back again-eager X now to go-kissing her father-and rushing up to do the same to Lucy. "No," said Lucy, "no farewell to me-I shall go with youn X -do not say nay-I insist-let me have my will." X Capt. Lane, still supposing that Miss Wilmerding was iX Mrs. Vail, not only consented to her going, but was full of iX glee at having both the daughter and her mother as hos-, tages-probably as accomplices. ; The gunboat was now under full headway, towing her X moss-clad prize out to sea, -eastward, direct for Barbados. X Barbara and Lucy were taken on board. .X Capt. Lane, in leading the ladies into\ his cabin, cast hisH eyes on a little photograph of Sir Richard Wilkinson, and X inwardly chuckled at the reception which he expected to enjoy from his old patron, the new governor of Barbados. "The baronet," thought he, "will find that he did not spend forty thousand pounds on the Good Hope in vain- X he will get his money back again and more besides." The two ladies clung to each other, fearing a fate that- seemed all the more portentous because it was unknown. But their fears were not for themselves. Barbara feared'S for Philip - Lucy for Cammeyer. Each kept her own anxiety a heart's secret from the other : which is the habit H of deep-hearted women. H "I am sure," said Lane, addressing Barbara with marked SURPRISE. 547 courtesy, "quite sure that you cannot be offended, even with a rude sailor like me, for conducting you to the man of your heart; and I can only regret that so fine a gallant is not the man of your father's heart also. But, begging your par- don, madame,"-(bowing to Lucy), " the young lady is now out of her father's jurisdiction, and free to, choose for herself." "I do not understand you," replied Barbara, in bewilder- ment. "Ah," said Lane, " it is very proper for you to say so in this presence,"-(pointing again to Lucy), "but the lips which you are waiting to kiss have already told me all." "All? "Yes." "I pray you tell me what they have told?" "My pretty miss, they have told me how you have given a certain gentleman a promise to make him the happiest of men, but that your father is an obstacle to the match." "O, this is false!" cried Barbara. "Do you then accuse your lover of falsehood?" "I beg you," said Barbara, eagerly, "take me to Lieut. Chantilly at once." "At once?" Yes. "To Lieut. Chantilly? "Yes." "I cannot. take you to Lieut. Chantilly at once," said he; "I cannot take you to Lieut. Chantilly at alL" "Why not'?" "Because I do not know where that rover is." "But you told me he was on this ship-and in irons." "No." * "You did, sir!-I call heaven to witness that you did!" "No," replied Lane, struck with Barbara's beauty, which seemed to increase with her distress ; c I said I would lead you to your lover-but he is not Philip Chantilly-he is Lieut. Cammeyer.?' page: 548-549[View Page 548-549] 548 TEMPEST-TOSSED. At this remark Lucy Wilmerding started as if stung by a serpent. , "I will call Lieut. Cammeyer at once," said Lane. "My . Xi blooming maid, you will not find him loaded with very heavy chains; they are not of actual iron-and they shall be altogether silken, if you so decree. He is at his ease, enjoying his freedom-and I presume is expecting your approach with the proper palpitation of a true lover's i heart." Lucy, who had hitherto remained standing, now sank into a chair. She wished her thin veil thicker, to hide more com-. pletely the anguish pictured on her face. A human soul, when it is in agony, finds another agony in the hdread of exposing its writhings to human eyes. "You have been deceived," said Barbara to Lane; for with her quick wit-now that she knew Cammeyer to be on board the Good Hope-she saw that Cammeyer must have made to Lane the same misrepresentations which he had previously made to her mother. "Lieut. Cammeyer has spoken falsely," she said. "He is not my lover, nor am I his." "But," interposed Lane, "he explicitly told me of his offer to you of marriage-of your willing acceptance,- and of your father and the Chantillys as obstacles." Every successive word of this disclosure concerning Cam- meyer's attempt to marry Barbara, pierced the veil of Lucy Wilmerding like the seven daggers that rent Caesar's man- i tle; and her heart was now bleeding from the thickly mul- tiplying wounds. "Good sir," said Barbara, with indignation, "Lieut. Cam- meyer did propose marriage to me, but I was the obstacle, not my father, nor any other person." "Has he then dared to deceive me?" asked Lane, biting his lips. "If he has told you this," replied Barbara, "or anything like it, he has deceived you most wickedly." "You do not, then, wish to marry him?" SURPRISE. 549 "I do not." "Have you not given him your word?" "I have not." "Do you reject his offer?-' "I spurn it." "Do you not love this man?" 4"I disdain him." Barbara's beautiful eyes were now flashing uncommon fires; while the veil that covered Lucy Wilmerding's pale face was hiding a whiteness as of death itself. "The devil," exclaimed Lane, gnawing his nether lip like Macheth. "If this man has been playing a trick on you, my lady, he may be playing one on me. Tell me, Miss Vail, is Cammeyer a villain?" "I have never dwelt among villains," said Barbara, " and I know not in what villainy consists." Capt. Lane summoned a midshipman and said haughtily, "Bring me the Yankee prisoner." "Which one, sir?" "Lieut. Cammeyer." After the midshipman departed, Lane turned to Barbara and exclaimed sharply, "You shall meet this Yankee renegade face to face in my presence. There is a falsehood between him and you. I shall determine for myself which one of you has told it." "Shall I retire?" asked Lucy, who now rose as if about to go, and who gladly would have gone; for she now felt an intensified dread of meeting the basest man of all the world. "O no, I beg you to stay," urged Barbara, imploringly; "please let her stay," she added, turning to Lane. Cammeyer then entered the room, and noticing that Bar- bara was accompanied by a lady, took for granted (as Lane had done) that this companion was her mother. The cool strategist first bowed deferentially to the sup- posed mother, and then, turning to the daughter, was about page: 550-551[View Page 550-551] 550 TEMPEST-TOSSED. to kiss her hand, when Barbara drew it back and fiercely X exclaimed, - "I forbid you, sir, to touch me-and I appeal to Capt. X Lane for protection." This remark not only solved Lane's doubt, but touched his pride. . "The girl speaks the truth," said he, " and the man is a S knave." Capt. Lane's sympathy quickly welled up toward the angry young beauty. "Miss Vail," remarked Cammeyer, with admirable corm- posure, "I desire to see you a few moments alone." "I decline to be seen." "But I have a word for your private ear."l "Sir, I refuse to listen to it." "But it is for your interest and safety." "I disdain, sir, to receive any proposition that you may X make." "Miss Vail, I am anxious for your happiness." "Then, sir, leave me instantly." "Miss Barbara, this is unexpected." "I beg you, captain," said Barbara, turning to Lane, "terminate for me this interview at once." "It shall be as you wish," said Lane, who by this time was wholly won to Barbara's side. "I have a few words then," remarked Cammeyer, with chilly blandness, "to address to this lady"-(pointing to i Lucy, still supposing her to be Barbara's mother), "I prefer to speak with her in private-that is, with your kind per- i mission, captain-and with the lady's own." i Cammeyer, little dreaming in whose presence he stood, was then left alone with a woman whom he had deserted thirteen years before-whom he had not seen since-whom he strangely and intensely hated-and by whom, during all that long period, he had been despised, pitied, and loved. "Madam," he said, walking up and down the little cabin, and holding his chin between his thumb and forefinger-.- SURPRISE. 351 which was his favorite attitude of meditation-"I did my- self the honor to inform you promptly of my proposal of marriage to your daughter, and of your daughter's virtual acceptance of the same. You received this intelligence with a kindness to which I desire once again to appeal. May I speak further?" The veiled lady bowed her assent. Lieut. Cammeyer had previously come to the conclusion that the vague rumor of his ill-treatment of Lucy Wilmer- ding was the pricking spur to Barbara's indignation. He was quite sure that neither the Vails nor the Chantillys had any accurate lknowledge of this shadowy event in his past life. He therefore resolved, with bold and wicked inge- nuity, to represent Lucy Wilmerding as dead, and himself as a long and faithful mourner of her memory. Such a fabrication, he fancied, could not but disarm Barbara's resentment against him on the one hand, and win for him her mother's sympathy on the other. "Madam," said he, with an air of preparatory solemnity, "before I speak to you again of your daughter, I must first refer to a lamented being whom you once loved almost as a daughter. You will readily imagine that the name which I am about to mention is that of Miss Lucy Wilmerding. And when I take this name on my lips, you will pardon me if I betray an emotion which for years past I have endeavored to conceal-which, indeed, I have endeavored to bury in the same grave that holds her moldering form. Ah, madam, when her father died, and the broken-hearted daughter-then an orphan-soon after followed him to the tomb, I was left to mourn the greatest loss that: can fall to the lot of man. At first my chief desire was to be buried .7 her side-under the violets that she loved. That desire lopg remained in my afflicted heart. Time, madam, which is said to cure grief, proved impotent to cure mine. Nor has this early pang ever been really assuaged, until it was recently softened-yes, melted away-by a sight of your daughter's face. Let me confess that Miss Barbara revived, and I may page: 552-553[View Page 552-553] 552 TEMPEST-TOSSED. say re-hallowed, the memory of my lost Lucy-our lost Lucy. If you think this to be a memory which I have rightly cherished-then, madam, pray permit it to inspire in me a desire that your daughter shall accept the same place in my heart which Lucy held while on earth. And I am sure that if the departed one could now look down on lus from heaven-as she doubtless does-the dear saint would be more charmed that her heart's legacy had fallen to Miss Barbara than to any other woman in the world. I therefore make bold, madam-of course, with your kind permission- to offer my hand, through you, to your daughter once again. And .since I have thus exposed to you my heart's long sorrow, I shall the more confidently look to your good offices to procure for me the only solace which this sorrow can ever know. I have hesitated to make this appeal in this form until now, because in the joy of your re-entrance into that civilized society of which you will be an ornament, H I have not wished to communicate to you so mournful a piece of intelligence as Miss Lucy's death :-a death which, b my dear madam, you will now mourn for the first time, but which I have never ceased to lament since the day when I gazed with anguish into her new-made grave." During these remarks Lucy Wilmerding sat trembling so visibly that her shudderings ran like ripples up and down u her veil. Alternate heats and chills shot through her flesh. Tears started toward her eyes, but dried on the way thither, and left her eyelids stung with fever. Her pulse rose high and then suddenly stopped, as if her heart were in doubt whether to go on with life any longer, or to put a merciful end to it at once. Happy are they who know how "to suffer and be strong; " for in the midst of their suffering they have need of their strength. Lucy Wilmerding, in the midst of her suffering, appealed to her strength. The slow utterance of Cammeyer's cunningly devised speech-which he pronounced hesitatingly-afforded Lucy, SURPRISE. 53 before its conclusion, an opportunity to rally from the hor- rible and sickening surprise with which the base man's falsehood and sacrilege overwhelmed her at first. Hardly had the last word escaped his slow and monoto- nous lips, than she swiftly rose, threw up her veil, and gazed haughtily into his astonished face. "Lucette!" he exclaimed-tottering backward-throw. ing up his arms-leaning against the wall-and gasping for breath. This was the familiar name by which he had been wont to call her before he parted from her in the days before their youth had parted from them both. Neither they who commit wrong, nor they who suffer it, can prevent it from emblazoning its tell-tale revelation on their faces; and in moments of high passion or startling surprise, these life-records, in spite of all effort at conceal- ment, will discover themselves at a glance-divulging ghastly inscriptions of crime or grief. Lucy Wilmerding looked ten years older in a moment, and showed the majestic pallor that comes of extreme anguish sustained by supreme pride. Anthony Cammeyer was violently seized by the wild feeling which, of late years, had many times mounted into horrible possession of his mind ;-the same unaccountable rage which had occasionally impelled him to pace up and down his solitary room-to gnash his teeth-to clench his hands-and to threaten violence, sometimes against others, oftener against himself. Meanwhile, in answer to Cammeyer's one spoken word, Lucy spoke another,-uttering it with such a tone of heart- break and anguish that she seemed to have compressed all her life's sorrow into a single sigh. This single word was- "Anthony!" The base trickster, whose trick was so unexpectedly frus- trated and exposed, surveyed Lucy from head to foot- scowled at her like a madman-clenched his right hand- sprang toward her where she stood-and was about to fell - 24 page: 554-555[View Page 554-555] 554 TEMPEST-TOSSED l her to the earth-but her calm, undaunted, and defiant look' paralyzed his cowardly arm. "Wretch! she exclaimed with mingled pride, scorn, and' wrath ;-and she gazed at him as if she too, in turn, could become a destroyer-not by a lifted hand, but simply by a withering glance. ? "Am I dead?" she exclaimed,-advancing purposely near him, to show how little a brave woman needs to fear a cowardly man's threats. "Yes, Anthony, I am dead indeed -dead these thirteen years-slain you know by whom;-- you are right in calling me dead. But you are wronOg-0 grievously wrong, Anthony, in announcing me in my grave. Heaven has long, long denied me that peace. Perhaps you are sent to confer it on me at last. Every death is entitled a to its burial. You did but half your work years ago-do X the rest now. I beg you strike hard enough to lay me under ground-strike, I say!" Cammeyer stood petrified. The blow which is welcomed hurts little. The blow which Lucy outhraved remained un- dealt. She stood the temporary conqueror-quivering with an inward heat which shot a visible fire from her black eyes. Such eyes would have overawed the sanest man :-they were absolutely overwhelming to one now half insane. "Have you come to taunt me?" cried Cammeyer, cring- ing before her. "Did you cloak yourself like an assassin that you might steal upon me for your revenge? Is revenge so sweet to your sex that a woman whom a man has spurned, will follow him round the world-for a lifetime-just to see him spurned by another woman in return? Did I mistake you for Barbara's mother only to find you a devil's fiend? Down, then, to hell-to hell!" He lifted his hand menacingly a second time, but she, instantly covered her defencelessness with the same courage which had already proved its sufficient shield. "Be thankful," she said haughtily, "that I am not Bar-" bara's mother-to reproach you from the depths of a mother's soul for the guile and deceit with which you would ensnare SURPRISE. 555 her innocent child. O Anthony, would you force her to a marriage with you against her will-her whole heart pledged to another? Is not one blighted life enough to fill the measure of your mischief? Is not one murdered woman-is not one martyr to your treachery-is not one broken-heart enough for you to answer for at the Judgment Day? Base man-would you destroy Barbara also? Would you blight that young and happy spirit? Would you woo her for her handful of lucre, and then fling her off if she failed to count you as many coins as you expected? O Anthony, heaven itself-that was pitiless to me-has been merciful to her - it has interposed to protect her against your false pretences and base-heartedness. God be thanked that at least Barbara is safe beyond any wound which you can ever inflict upon her happy heart!" Cammeyer's face was now livid-his eyes wild-his frame tremulous-his fingers moving as if playing on a hundred vibrating strings-and his whole aspect that of a man who, though conquered before, was dangerous now. But he was soon overpowered by his own excitement. He sank back in a chair, and gazed down at the floor with a vacant look, as if unconscious of his visitor's presence,-his countenance lapsing into an expression of pitiful abject- ness and woe. "O God!" thought Lucy, "what have I said? I have forgotten my vows-I have spoken in anger-I have cruci- fied charity-I have not remembered mercy. Forgive me, Mother Mary in heaven!" Lucy's natural resentment now passed under the awful condemnation of Agatha's religious faith. No sooner had Lucy's anger rushed to her lips in harsh words, than Agatha's rebuke followed this passion and put it to shame. Lucy felt that she had violated the true submission of a devout mind to that Divine Being who had ordained her fate to be just what it was. Lucy had long ago surrendered herself to Agatha's spiritual guidance, and though she occasionally revolted against this higher genius of her life, yet she always , page: 556-557[View Page 556-557] 556 TEMPEST-TOSSED l made humble haste to renew her allegiance with contrition and tears. Lucy now stood appalled by the ringing of her too violent words in Agatha's calm ears. Lucy's haughty anger was conquered by Agatha's soft humility. Lucy's indignant self-assertion was melted into Agatha's self-abne- gation. , I "Tell me," cried Cammeyer, who now leaped up from his chair, and went raving round the cabin, " what damnable errand brings you here to torment me before my time-- confess, or I will sear your eyeballs and tear out your heart." Throughout this interview, thus far, Cammeyer's demoniac behavior had been so wholly unlike the cold and reserved manner of the man whom, in earlier years, Lucy had looked upon as a very statue of self-poise and stony repose, that her astonishment at the spectacle was equaled only by her grief in beholdingit. "Was it you? he continued, quivering with rage, " who put Lane on my track? Was it you who sent the Good Hope to the island, to cheat me in the fog? Was it yout who spread this rebel's snare under my feet? ? Once again Cammeyer leaped toward Lucy as if to wreak i a powerful vengeance on her by one final act of malice. , "No, Anthony," said Lucy mildly, remembering that a soft answer turneth away wrath, and looking him steadily in the face with the same unfailing courage that now lost nothing by an added tremor in her voice, "I am a woman - and, being such, my pride and wrongs would have forbidden me to seek your presence save at the call of your misfortune. It was at that call I came. I heard you were a prisoner-a captive in the hands of an enemy. Capt. Lane, who holds you, was once in my father's service, and commanded one of his ships. My father was lenient to him for a breach of trust. This fact, I thought, would give me a ground of interceding with Capt. Lane in your behalf. Then, too, I am neither of the North nor the South-I have ceased to be an American-- I have long been an Englishwoman. On this account, I thought I could go between the two contending SURPRISE. 557 parties and secure your release. I thought also that perhaps you might desire to intrust some message to your aged mother, and that I could forward it to her more safely than a stranger might do. It was these motives--these only- that prompted me to come. Otherwise, Anthony, we might never have met again in this world." In a white rage, Cammeyer, as if now meditating a simultaneous vengeance on both Lucy and Barbara, ex- claimed "1 could strangle you both, and laugh in doing it!"And he chuckled as if he were already in the sweet and delicious act of murder. "Accursed be your name!-accursed be hers!-accursed be all your sex!" "Men's curses," said Lucy,-her voice softening into a pitying tone, "have no lodgment in God's heart; otherwise on you, Anthony, the wrath of heaven would have fallen long ago--for my father cursed you on his death-bed. But fear not-for Ilive to forgive you; which I do freely, both for all the past, and for to-day." Lucy was about to speak further, but ,a horrible impre- cation suddenly burst from Cammeyer's lips, smiting the tender and charitable-woman as a simoon smites a flower- stalk. "May God, whom this wretched man blasphemes," sighed Lucy, " pity and pardon his frenzied mind." Lucy, feeling that her continued presence would only excite Cammeyer to renewed oaths and fury, dropped her veil over her face, and hastily retired, saying the -simple words- - "Anthony, farewell." The close student of human nature will hardly need to be reminded, in reviewing Cammeyer's apparently uncharacter- istic behavior, that the chief part which Lucy played in this drama of incipient madness was merely to be the mirror in which this defeated villain saw himself revealed in such hideous lineaments that he was now again unpoised at the self-contemplation-as he had often been before. page: 558-559[View Page 558-559] 558 TEMPEST-TOSSED. As for Lucy's motive in visiting her false lover in his adversity, whom for thirteen years she had not sought in his prosperity,-she had stated it to him honestly; and in acting on the motive which she had thus stated, she simply did as many another injured woman has done before, and will do again ; for be it known, to the honor of all womankind, that no man who has never been in sorrow and friendlessness -no man who has never become his own worst enemy-no man who has not, in some way, suffered the chief agonies of human life-can possibly know the almost divine omnipo- tence of woman's sympathy, loyalty, and love., Lucy Wilmerding was one of a type of women who, I though not multitudinous in the world, are yet neither few I nor far between-women who love once, and once only- women who, having once loved, and found their love unre- 3 quited or disappointed, have no recourse but to love still-- giving forth to the same false lover the same true love i Among the high and holy principles to which Lucy had devoted her heart-broken years, and which had led her into - a religious life, was a saying spoken of Him who spake as never man spake-a text engraven in small letters on a gold cross that she wore-and the inscription ran thus :I "Having loved His own, He loved them to the end." No sooner had Lucy retired from the frenzied man's X presence, than he drew a pistol-leaped toward the door ] which she had, just closed behind her-put his hand on the 1 knob as if about to pursue and kill her-suddenly paused- changed his mind-cocked the pistol-thrust the barrel into his right ear-and pulled the trigger. The weapon snapped. This accident saved the raving man from self-destruction; for at the next moment his courage failed him; he trembled at his act-the cold sweat burst out on his brow-he put his small weapon back into his pocket-he gasped for breath at the horrible thought of having attempted suicide-he thrust both his hands into his hair-and, in a vain attempt to tear f himself to pieces, he flung himself to the floor. SURPRISE. 559 "My dear Lucy,5 asked Barbara, "what did Lieut. Cam- meyer say to you?" "My dear Barbara," said Lucy, "he mistook me for your mother, and begged me to plead with you in his behalf." Madam," asked Lane, surprised, " are you not then this young lady's mother?" "No," said Lucy, "I am the daughter of Lawrence Wil- merding-you knew my father, I believe." Capt. Lane then staggered as if struck by a handspike! All his past career seemed rushing upon him at once, to bring him to judgment. Two great clouds had shadowed Capt. Lane's name for many years ;-one a breach of commercial trust, for which he would have suffered legal sentence by a court, save for the clemency of Lawrence Wilmerding; and the other, the still more powerful sentence of public opinion for deserting the Coromandel. Both these clouds now seemed rising afresh into the sky, ready to smite Lane with their thunder- bolts once more. He instantly determined to send the two ladies back to their own ship. To make this act seem all the more gracious, and his disposition all the more honorable, he resolved to send back Robson and Carter also; for as these two men had come on board his ship while she lay in neutral waters, he felt apprehensive that -their forced detention, which could do him little good, might possibly do him great harm. Capt. Lane thus shrewdly sought to put not only the two women and the two men, but all the Vail family and both the Chantillys besides, under an obligation to credit him with fair dealing. The Tamaqua's boat, which had been captured with Cam- meyer, was now got ready; Robson and Carter were ordered into it; and the two ladies were gently handed down by Capt. Lane, who said to Barbara, "Miss Vail, I neglected while on the Coromandel to congratulate your father on his rescue: please convey to page: 560-561[View Page 560-561] 560 TEMPEST-TOSSED. him my good wishes, and say that on our arriving in Barbados I shall take pleasure in giving an entertainment on board the Good Hope to your father and his family in welcome of their arrival, and in honor of the old ship which I commanded before you were born. Say that we shall probably be favored with the presence of Sir Richard Wil. kinson, the new governor, who in former days was interested in your father's anticipated labors in Cape Town. Ladies, I hope we shall arrive before nightfall until then, good day." The rebel captain stood with lifted cap while Robson and Carter dextrously manoeuvred the little boat back from the Good Hope to the Coromandel. Great was the joy of the Coromandel's company at the return of Lucy and Barbara. "Welcome! my daughter!" exclaimed Dr. Vail, em- bracing her fondly. "Welcome! my son!" cried Capt. Chantilly, pointing to Philip's ship which was just emerging from behind one of the northerly Grenadines. ' At the next moment the Tamaqua was in full sight about four miles off. The spectacle was ominous of battle and blood-of death and fate. CHAPTER XXVIII. BATTLE. A sight of the Tamaqua confronting the Good Hope, the agitation on the Coromandel was greater than on either of the war-ships. The face of Capt. Chantilly, which had worn a scowl since daybreak, was now radiant with glee. Old Scaw shook his aged heels in his customary ponderous dance, diversified with shakings of his fist at the Good Hope. Mrs. Vail, who during the previous excitements had not left her room, was now more than ever disposed to remain "it-and Jezebel with her. Lucy and Barbara stood clinging to each other on deck, watching the situation without understanding the move- ments. "Vengeance is mine, I will repay! saith the Lord." Capt. Chantilly quoted these words to Rodney Vail. "Look yonder!" exclaimed Rodney. "What are they doing on the Good Hope?" "They are casting off the hawser," replied Oliver. "Lane is cutting us loose. He is setting the Coromandel adrift. There!-the line is gone! We are free! He means either to fight or run: in either case he cannot drag a dead weight behind him." "Merciful heaven!" exclaimed Barbara, " is there to be a battle? What if Philip should be slain?" The agitated girl burst into tears. I page: 562-563[View Page 562-563] 562 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Tut, tut, -tut!" exclaimed old Scaw, taking out a red silk handkerchief, and offering to wipe her eyes ;-a courtesy which she 'declined-for the reason, perhaps, that since her tears were for Philip's sake, she preferred not to brush them away. 'That Lane fight?" cried Scaw. "No, demnmlt, no- that rogue will run. There's no fight in 'im."1 But Scarborough was wrong; for the Good Hope now sped straight toward the Tamaqua;., Capt. Ghantilly's practiced eye saw that the rebel gunboat meant to give a challenge., Barbara looked first at the war-ships and then at Oliver's face-trying to interpret the action of the former by the exl pression on the latter ;-at least, sufficiently to learn whether X the maneuvering was propitious or adverse to Philip. It was Capt. Chantilly's habit, when danger came, to be calm and reticent. A singular nonchalance now marked his intrepid spirit. - He walked leisurely into the cabin brought up a willow-chair-put it on the top of the binnacle-sat in' it with crossed legs-and thrummed his larboard knee with his starboard fingers. X "Now we shall see," he said to Rodney, "what kind o' i timber the boy is built of." The battle was already raging in the agitations that shook g Barbara's breast. "O my dear father," she cried, "when you and I found the little boat Good Hope-and when I planted vines and flowers about it-who would have thought it an enemy in disguise?" "The little boat," said he, "has had the roses--perhaps the big one will feel the thorns." Capt. Lane's steamer, having cut off the encumbering Coromandel, was already well on her way toward her distant foe. Her once cowardly captain now certainly meant to fight. Two different motives prompted him to this resolve. On the one hand, the imputation of cowardice which had been! BATTLE. - 568 made against him years before for his desertion of the Coromandel, would in all probability be revived on that ship's restoration to the world; and as he felt that he must efface this stigma by some piece of courageous behavior such as would put his manliness above suspicion, so he now nerved himself, as many a timorous man has done, with the courage of desperation. On the other hand, from Cam- meyer's representations to him, he believed that the Good Hope was more than a match for the Tamaqua, either in fight or flight. Both these considerations now impelled Lane to. a trial of conclusions with Philip. "What a splendid rebel she is!" said Capt. Chantilly, surveying the hostile craft as she made her swift departure from the Coromandel. The Good Hope was an English steam-propeller of 970 tons; built at the Liverpool dockyards; armed with English guns of the latest rifled-bores; manned by an English crew who had been trained on her Majesty's gunnery-ship Saracen; paid for with the money of an English baronet at Cape Town; and was one of not a few light, agile, and formidable cruisers which a certain class of Englishmen-against the better genius of their country--supplied to a rebellion in the interest of human slavery in the United States. Sir Richard Wilkinson, in giving this evil-minded gun- boat a charitable name, took pains to equip her with an armament such as would blast human charity with a fiery breath. From all the English foundries, he chose their best metal -here one gun, there another. Her armament, thus picked for perfection, consisted of eight guns in all ;-among which was a rifled 110-pounder, cast after the only pattern which had then proved successful with guns of this calibre in the British service; also a 68-pounder bf that famous Blakely mould, whose thun- derous praise had been many times self-spoken in the royal navy; together with a formidable battery of what were known as 32-pounders of 57 hundredweight.-- page: 564-565[View Page 564-565] 564 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Is not Philip's ship as good as Capt. Lane's? ' asked Barbara, with alarm. "The best ship," retorted Oliver, "is that which carries the best man on her quarter-deck." The Tamaqua was a steam-propeller, a trifle smaller than the Good Hope,-her tonnage being, instead of 970, only 890; carrying, not eight guns, but seven; and accomplish- ing, when under a full head of steam, a maximum speed of "! or 12 knots an hour, while the Good Hope had repeat- edly attained 13, The Tamaqua was an American vessel throughout,-in model, in metal, and in men. Her armament included four broadside 32-pounders, one 28-pound rifle-bore, and two 11-inch thunderers carrying each a projectile of 160 pounds. The two armaments, though somewhat differently distrib- uted, showed no great disparity in the total weight of metal which each could fling at a foe. The two steamers, though small, and looking at a dis- tance more like steamryachts or revenue-cutters than war- waging spitfires, were nevertheless rendered by their new style of armament far more formidable than the stateliest line-of-battle ships of the obsolete type of 74 lighter-. weighted guns. The Good Hope would ordinarily have been the swifter sailor of the two-able to creep ahead of the Tamaqua by i at least a mile an hour. But the rebel ship had just been coaling at St. Vincent, and was now full-freighted with 800 tons of coal, that weighed her low down in the water; while the Tamaqua's lean and hollow coal-bunkers contained hardly more than 90 tons ;-an accidental circumstance which rendered her, for the timie being, the superior in speed, and enabled Philip to surprise and astonish his rival-and particularly Cammeyer by the agility of the Tamaqua's manoeuvres. The Good Hope's officers and crew numbered 142 men- augmented by the presence of Cammeyer, who was the most ! s Xt. ado important man among them. The Tamaqua's numbered 138-reduced by the absence of Capt.- Chantilly, Lieut. Cammeyer, and the two ordinary seamen-leaving Philip's working force 134 in all; or eight men less than his enemy. Philip took a precaution which Lane neglected. This was to chain-coat his vessel amidships ;-in other words, to hang the chain-cables up and down the Tamaqua's sides from the deck to the water, doubling and re-doubling the chains as many times as their length would permit, and " stopping " them fast into a solid coat of armor-thus turning his wooden ship into an extemporized iron-clad. "Both ships,"' said Scaw, 1' are goin' to give us a wide berth." From the moment the two warriors came in sight of each other, Philip steered eastward to the open sea. He bore in mind his father's injunction against committing a hostile act in neutral waters. The prudent young man resolved that if a battle was to be fought, it should be fought be- yond the legal league from land. The Tamaqua's apparent flight drew the Good Hope to follow her at a hounding speed. "They are going to sea," said Capt. Clantilly, "and we are going ashore.". This remark drew Rodney Vail's attention to a prospec- tive peril to his own ship, and he immediately provided a safeguard. The Coromandel, having been cast loose about two miles to windward of the little isle on which she had conferred her name, was rapidly drifting back toward it-wafted by a slight wind and a strong current, both from the east. The old ship, which had lost one anchor at sea, and had been robbed of another that morning in the cove, had only one remaining-a river-kedge which would not have been a safe reliance in rough weather, but would probably serve well enough in the smooth sea on which the old hulk was now once more lazily floating as in the Calms of Capricorn. The kedge was at once lowered from the bow and allowed page: 566-567[View Page 566-567] 566 TEMPEST-TOSSED. to hang at forty fathoms, in order to find bottom as soon as the ship should drift into water not shoaler than that safe depth. ' By this expedient the Coromandel soon afterward an. chored herself off the breakers, just beyond their riot and roar, and lay a calm spectator of the coming storm of shot and shell about to burst forth in the sunshiny dis- tance. Meanwhile, on both gunboats, warlike preparations were in swift progress-plainly visible to Capt. Chantilly through the glass. "Can you see Philip?" asked Barbara. "Ah," replied the young man's father, with a provoking levity, "Philip is not one of those good boys in the maxim, who are to be seen, not heard; he is to be heard, not seen." "Let me look!" said Barbara, borrowing the glass. But her hand shook so violently that the Tamaqua danced a mad caper across the lens, and the whole ocean seemed jumping up and down like a harlequin. Now let me try," said Lucy, who fixed a steady focus on the Good Hope. i "Did you see him?" asked Barbara. "No," replied Lucy, quietly, with a tone of disappoint- ment. "But," said Barbara, "how could you expect to see him? -you were looking at the wrong ship." Lucy made no reply. Could Capt. Chantilly now have beheld the lieutenant of that name, he would have been proud of that young man, not only as a son but as an officer. Philip walked calmly through the Tamaqua and spoke a few manly words to each group of men at their posts:- marines, gunners, engineers, fire-men, coal-heavers, and powder-boys. He was everywhere saluted with a cheer; for of all the ship's officers he was the best beloved. J X arm'. n567 Nor did any man on that gunboat, that day--except only Philip himself-feel any misgiving at the absence of Capt. Chantilly. But it is the strongest soul that best knows its own weakness; and Philip would have given his right hand for his father's presence, and counsel. Nevertheless he needed neither; the young man's hour had come when the , on must be equal to the sire. Lieut. Chantilly pivoted his guns to the starboard, and gave orders to the gunners to aim the heavy ordnance below, rather than above, the enemy's water-line-reserving the lighter guns to sweep the enemy's deck. He unshipped the bulwarks at the port-guns, making a wide space exempt from accidents otherwise possible by splinters. Hle hastily prepared the fore-hold for the accommodation of the wounded, if there should be any. He ordered the men to take off their jackets and fight in their shirt-sleeves. He put two assistant-engineers in charge of hot-water hose, to be used if the ship should catch fire. He went to the men on the sick-list, and without giving them any command received from them their voluntary offer to return to their posts-there to render such service as each man might find himself able to perform. "Forsyth," said Philip, turning to his young brother- officer who had served with him on the Fleetwing, "let the marines fight the rifle-gun on the top-gallant forecastle; put the acting-master's-mate in command." After giving a few directions concerning the manning of the other guns, he said, "Forsyth, I think the enemy wants to fight at long range -which determines me to fight at short." The two vessels were now six or seven miles from shore still steaming eastward to the sea. "Forsyth, how far away from us do yo u judge the Good Hope to be at this moment?" "Two miles," replied Forsyth. page: 568-569[View Page 568-569] 5(8 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "I should say a trifle less than that," rejoined Philip, "and I mean to diminish the distance to a half-mile." Whereupon Lieut. Chantilly suddenly wheeled his vessel squarely round, and under a full head of steam made a bee. line toward the enemy as if to run him down. The Good Hope's course continued unchanged. The two war-dogs were now rapidly approaching each other, but neither had yet opened his mouth to bark. When the narrowing interval was abridged to a mile, the Good Hope, determining now to bring her guns to bear, sheered so as to present her starboard battery-then slowed her engines so as not to pass the Tamaqua too quickly-and suddenly delivered her full broadside; the shot cutting Philip's rigging as if a dozen pairs of scissors had clipped here a ratlin and there a stay. "Forsyth," said Philip, who stood taking an observation through a spy-glass, " those guns must have been pointed at a range of two thousand yards. That is proof positive that the rascal wants to play this game at arm's length, so as to leave room for running away, if discretion should prove the better part of valor. Forsyth, hold back our fire till we are within half a mile-or less." A second broadside came from the rebel cruiser; and then a third; the interval between them being about two-and-a- half minutes. .! "That's quick work," said Philip, quietly. "Now it's our turn. Forsyth!-caution--fire low!" The Tamaqua then bravely trembled under her own bellowing guns, and made the enemy stagger at their penetrating and explosive shells. The jar was felt even on the Coromandel. "O Capt. Chantilly," cried Barbara, agonizingly "how can you sit here smiling while Philip is in such peril? I shall go mad!" and she clasped her hands against her tem- ples, moaned, and sank at Oliver's feet. "What!" he exclaimed, " striking your colors? Then I must hoist 'em again." BATTLE. 569 Whereat, without rising from his chair, he gently lifted her tresses and waved them over her head. "4'If you surrender in that way," said he, gayly, "Philip will take you for the enemy, for it is only the enemy that surrenders." ( What a piece o' hice for coolness is Holiver Chantilly!" whispered old Scaw to Dr. Vail. "The captain's a werry strange man. Why, a little puff o' wind makes him fidgetty and hanxious consarnin' 'is ship. But when it blows a tor- nado, he jist takes a chair and henjoys 'imself. He ain't never at the 'appiest except when he's in powerful trouble." The Good Hope, having hitherto fired solid shot, now resorted to shell-some of the hollow missiles bursting against the chain-coated sides of the Tamaqua, driving the chain-links into the solid wood, but not extending the damage beyond this disfiguration. As Capt. Lane's ship, notwithstanding the slowing of her engines, was still moving with considerable speed eastward, and as the Tamaqua was steaming at nine or ten knots west- ward, it was evident that the two ships, if they continued in their present opposite courses, could remain only a few moments broadside to broadside, and would speedily be out of each other's fire. "By the gods!" cried Capt. Chantilly quietly, varying his position in his chair by flinging his starboard leg over his larboard knee, " just see how the boy is running round under the stern of the Good Hope to rake her from end to end!" Perceiving this danger, Capt. Lane steered his vessel so as to keep his broadside still parallel with the other ship. The scene, as witnessed from the Coromandel, was pic- turesque and exciting. "Rodney," said Oliver, " you used to have a taste for the fine arts. Just look yonder-that's a manceuvre that appeals to a cultivated taste. See those two ships chasing each other round and round like two kittens each after the other's tail," page: 570-571[View Page 570-571] 570 TEMPEST-TOSSED. Capt. Chantilly's description of the manoeuvre was figura. tive but accurate. The Tamaqua's persistent attempt to get across the enemy's stern, and the Good Hope's perpetual evasion of this stratagem, resulted in the two ships following each other in a circle-both steaming round a common centre- keeping about half a mile apart-and blasting each other with broadsides as fast as their sweaty and begrimed gun. ners could fulfil their fiery tasks. "Barbara," said Capt. Chantilly, turning to the prostrate maiden, "you seem to think the firing disagreeable ; but if you will look up, you will call the smoke pretty." Capt. Chantilly's reference was to a singular spectacle that now presented itself. In sailing the circles, the two ships left their visible wakes not only in the water but in the air; for each vessel's smoke rose above her in the form of a huge wreath or ring,-the fumes showing different colors, being the tints of different coals. When the firing became swift and close, the white and fldecy powder-smoke-which is unlike any other cloud that ever floated over the world-added its profuse festoons to the solemn drapery with which the battle was enshroud- ing the sky. "Is war so beautiful?" exclaimed Barbara, who now stood surveying the spectacle. "But, O how horrible!" And the young maid's heart made a cannonading against her breast, as if borrowing an inward thunder from the out- ward scene. "My dear Barbara!" replied Lucy, looking pale, calm, and beautiful,-" the worst part of a battle is after it is over-in the hospital. My heart bleeds to think of the wounded men who must suffer to-day." The action consisted of successive broadsides, mainly of shells, delivered by the rotating ships at intervals of two or three minutes, for a space of three-quarters of an hour ;- during which time, hell seemed to have burst up through BATTLE. 1 the sea, and the shining heaven to have beclouded itself in order to shield its holy eyes from gazing at the unholy scene. Philip Chantilly was inspired to a superhuman energy and activity. He was omnipresent in the ship. A fine rage burned in his blood. He was an aroused hero who did not know whether he was climbing to the summit of glory or sinking to the abyss of death. In the unbalanced scale of battle, he knew not what a moment might bring forth. In the affair at Savannah, he had not thought of death for at that time death could not have sundered him from Barbara; and he now distinctly remembered how, during that former scene of carnage, Barbara and the Coromandel had passed before him only like a mere film or vision. But now the same ship and the same maiden-neither of them existing any longer as shadows, but both transmuted into substantial and precious realities-were near at hand, on the very edge of the contest, almost in the midst of it, awaiting its issue;-an issue involving the earthly fate of Philip Chantillyand Barbara Vail. Danger has a strange respect for those, who defy it. Philip clothed himself with courage as with a crusader's nail. He felt anew his old faith that Barbara was the Guardian angel of his life, whose guardianship would still xtend its spell to him over the waters. The battle was hot and short-soon self-consumed in its wn fires. After the rotating ships had made five successive circles, he two combatants-though both partially veiled from he Coromandel's view by each other's smoke-would to a earer inspection have given sad evidence that they had een fighting a battle of giants. The Tamaqua had received through her starboard bul- arks a 68-pound Blakely shell, entering below the main aging, exploding on the quarter-deck, and wounding three on at a pivot-gun. A solid shot had struck her sternpost early in the action, page: 572-573[View Page 572-573] 572 TEMPEST-TOSSED. jamming the rudder so that the strength of four men wag required at the wheel throughout the remainder of the fight. i The top of her engine-room had been cut completely [ across by a flying and rough-edged fragment of a shell. The smoke-pipe showed a perforation through both sec [ ltions by an angry missile that exploded in passing through, tearing out a ragged hole two feet in diameter, and carrying [ away three of the chain-guys. No spar had been shot down, yet the foretopmost back. stay had been snapped. Moreover, the loosely-furled foretopsail had been pierced [ by a solid ball transversely through its matted folds, severing M the ropes which bound it, so that the imprisoned sail was set i free in a moment, falling down without the touch of a hand, [ and exhibiting the singular spectacle of five round holes [ made in one sheet of canvas by a single shot. The only casualties to the crew were the wounding of three gunners and two firemen, the latter mortally. In the midst of the fury, Lieut. Chantilly, while in the act of giving an order, was smitten suddenly to the deck. The men, as they beheld his fall, thought him killed, and : gave a universal groan; but in a moment afterward he leaped to his feet. It was then noticed that two seamen, who had fallen with him, rose with him. They had all been d blown down by the wind of a passing shell. [i This escape was instantly accepted by the imaginative minds of the crew as a token that their young leader had a charmed life, and that his own good luck would impart J itself to his ship and shipmates. X From that moment, Philip's hundred and thirty grim 3 dragons, reeking and smirched, fought like good devils against bad. The Good Hope, during the same period-that is, up to [ the time of accomplishing her fifth and final circuit,-had apparently (as surveyed from the CoromandeD received less 'injury than the Tamaqua; for the rebel's rigging ;, BATTLE, 573 remained unscathed, her bulwarks unsplintered, and her smoke-stack safe and sound. But a ship's heart is not in her rigging; it is in her hull. The Good Hope had been pierced through the hull to the heart. Philip's order to aim at the enemy's water-line had been mercilessly obeyed. Shot after shot, shell after shell, had gone slanting thither with amphibian and fatal aim. Early in the fray a heavy ball went crashing through the Good Hope's stern, breaking out a beam which became immediately entangled in the propelling screw, threatening to stop the ship's motive power and render her unman- igeable; but in a few minutes the buoyant water, pressing ip against the submerged beam, dislodged it from its mis- chievous place; and the great flanges once more revolved ,heir powerful fins. A shell had entered her coal-bunkers, exploding and Illing her engine-room with litter. An 11-inch projectile had cut its way completely through ler starboard side three feet above her water-line, followed inmmediately by another shell from the same gun, striking so early in the same place that the two fractures overlapped ach other, making one doubly-gaping wound. Her whale-boat, gig, and dingy had been knocked to ieces. The blade of her fan had been carried away. One of her water-tight compartments had been ripped pen, and the fire-room flooded with water. The havoc to the Good Hope's crew consisted of five aled and nine wounded-a slightness of casualty due to e fact that the Tamaqua's shots, having been aimed low the hull, were mortal to the ship rather than to the men. Notwithstanding all this destruction, the first sign visible the Coromandel that the rebel ship was suffering, was the rrying away of her steam-pipe, followed by the emission clouds of steam that rose in the air to diversify still fur- er the interwreathing garlands of coal-fumes and powder- page: 574-575[View Page 574-575] 574 TEMPEST-TOSSED. smoke which crowned the two combatants with halos in the sky. A still more manifest sign of distress then appeared in'the hoisting of the rebel's sails, and her squaring away for the shore:-evidently hoping that with the light breeze to assist the feeble engines-whose fires the intruding water was rapidly quenching-she might yet creep so far away from the battle as to take refuge within the neutral league from land. Philip, perceiving this stratagem, steered off from his circle in a tangent shoreward-steamed ahead of the Good Hope-sheered directly across her path-and presented his broadside so as to rake her fore and aft. "Beautiful! beautiful, my lad!" said Capt. Chantilly quietly, still sitting cross-legged, and admiring the tactics-- his heart burning within him, but his face as calm as if looking at a rainbow. "Barbara, that boy is behaving well enough to be kissed." Before Philip could deliver his fire-which, from such a position of advantage, must have gone through the enemy's ship with a bloody horror- the white flag of surrender appeared; and at the next moment all the guns on both sides of the combat came to a strange hush; which, from its suddenness, seemed hardly less startling than the'ir sound. In a few minutes the only cloud in the sky was the single uprolling leaden-colored coil of smoke from Philip's chimney -ever fading, ever renewing-emitted upward as from Vulcan's smithy or from Pluto's fires. The din-bewildered ears of both crews soon became reconciled to the stillness-which was now like the silence with which men stand by a grave to witness a burial. It was indeed a deep grave that was about to open, and a stately burial that was about to take place i The Good Hope hove up into the wind-- her white wall of canvas wrinkling like a curtain, and her headway checked l to a dead pause. t BATTLE. 575 Her only remaining boat was then hastily lowered to bear to her conqueror the news that the ship ~was fast settling and soon must sink. Philip guessed the purport of this message before receiv- ing the messengers, and prepared instantly for rescuing his enemy's imperiled crew. Just as he was stepping into one of his relief-boats, he turned to his young colleague who was stepping into another, and said with quiet emotion, " Forsyth, this it the chief trophy of war-to push your enemy into the very clutch of death, and then to seize him back from it." The spectators on the Coromandel were at a fever-heat of eagerness. " Is the battle done ?" asked Barbara, who could not see why the Good Hope, with all sail set, was not just as for- midable and fearful as ever. "God be thanked! " cried Capt. Chantilly, in a ringing voice. He rose from his chair, and gave way for the first time to his long-suppressed feeling. He seized first Dr. Vail and then old Scaw, embracing each in turn, as if one were his brother and the other his father. - "Look, Rodney !" he exclaimed, pointing to the staggering ship. "Look! the bird has wings enough, but she cannot fly-she is going to plunge. Do you see ?" " She seems unmanageable ! " exclaimed Dr. Vail. " She has not many minutes to swim," said Capt. Chan- tilly. "Then, demmit," cried old Scaw, swinging his hat, and tripping on what might be called the heavy fantastic toe, "she'll 'ave hall the more leisure to sink-and I Mope Lane will sink with her, like Pharo' in the Red ! I say, Holiver, let's lend an 'and to save the demned coward from drownin'.g "See!" exclaimed Oliver, "the Good Hope is half way under water already--she seems to have no more boats left to lower-they must have been all knocked to pieces-the men are climbing into the rigging for refuge." page: 576-577[View Page 576-577] 57 0TEMPEST-TOSSED. Capt. Chantilly instantly ordered Robson and Carter to get into their boat; and he and Dr. Vail followed. "O heaven!" cried Lucy,with a moan, "theship is sinking!" The Good Hope's masts and sails began to slant over from their erectness, bending slowly toward her wounded side. The stricken ship was pitifully poised between life and death. Her agony was short. She gave a plunge back. ward, submerging her stern and lifting her bow in the air. Then, with a mad rush to her fate, she went down. The great ocean inurned her in its sepulchre. She was sailing a voyage to the bottom of the sea. "O God," cried Barbara, "the vessel is swallowed up!" -The scene of this majestic disaster was about two miles from the Coromandel. The water, at the spot where the Good Hope sunk, was covered with struggling men, floating spars, splinters, and various scattered fragments of the great wreck. "Quick, boys, to your oars!" said Capt. Chantilly; and he and Dr. Vail sped on their way to rescue some of the imperiled men. Lucy was so overcome with the sight that she fell to the deck, and though she did not swoon, she turned as pale as from a mortal wound. "What I what! what!" exclaimed the herculean Scaw; and he took off his hat and swung it violently to and fro across her face for a fan. Barbara stood erect-looking proud and beautiful. "My dear sister," said Lucny, "have you Capt. Chantilly's glass in your hand?" "Yes." "Tell me then-for I cannot see-the sunlight dazzles me blind-tell me if any of the men are saved." Miss Wilmerdifig's favorite poet had said, "The past rolls forward on the sun And makes all-night." And it was the blackness of this darkness that now, at midday, blinded the tearless eyes of Lucy Wilmerding. BATTLE. 5" Barbara, watching through the glass, reported to Lucy the situation. "Dear Lucy, do not give way to such anxiety. Philip's ship is sailing up close to the men in the water. His little boats are all lowered-one-two-three-four. He is in one of them. I can see him quite distinctly. O how brave and noble he looks I He is now taking some drowning men into his boat-his sailors are dragging them in over the sides. Philip's boat has picked up five- seven men-yes, eight, nine-and now another-that's ten. And there's another in the water-they can't get him on board-he seems to be fighting his rescuers-he is shaking his fist at Philip. O what does it mean?-they have now drawn this rough man into the boat-he has a blue uniform. O Lucy, it is Lieut. Cammeyer-I can see his face-it is he-and he refuses to be saved. There! he has jumped back again into the water -but Philip has caught him by the arm and is holding him fast. Capt. Chantilly's boat has just gone up to Philip's help. Philip has saved Lieut. Cammeyer again, and is put- ting him into his father's boat. O Lucy, my father now has hold of a man in the water-a dead man I What a-horrible thing it is to drown I When I was overboard, what agony I suffered! Heaven save these men from such a death! No, the man whom my father has seized is not dead-but he is white as a ghost.' His eyes are shut and his head hangs down on his shoulder. They have lifted him into the boat. O Lucy, it looks like Capt. Lane-yes, I am sure it is he. There! Lieut. Cammeyer is trying to leap over- board again-but the men are holding him-he cannot get away. O that traitor--he is so ashamed of his treachery that he wants to die! 0O Lucy, Lucy, was there ever a man so base? But I am glad that his life is saved-it must be horrible for a wicked man to die! O I Wonder how many of the poor creatures are lost. All the little boats seem loaded. Some of the men have gashes and look bloody. The boats will not hold them all-many of the victims are still in the water-but they are clinging to the sides of the 25 page: 578-579[View Page 578-579] 578 TEMPEST-TOSSED. boats. They will be saved-all saved. O how strange is war!-how very strange that men should be one moment trying to kill each other, and the next moment trying to save the very men they have just tried to kill! Philip's boat is coming this way-no, that is not hAis boat; that is Capt. Chantilly?s; Philip's boat is going back to the Tamaqua, and Capt. Chantilly's is coming hither-with Capt. Lane and Lieut. Cammeyer in it." Lucy Wilmerding, at the announcement of Cammeyer's approach, immediately requested Scarborough to assist her into the cabin, which the old Nautilus did with such a pro- found flutter of feeling that in his flustered walk by her side he kept treading on her dress. Barbara stood gazing at the Tamaqua. "O0 my brave, my noble Philip!" she exclaimed, apos- trophizing that absent hero, "you wanted a victory, and you have won it. You came at first to capture a prize and found it the Coromandel instead; but you then said our old hulk was a dearer prize. O Philip, in this hour of your glory, do you remember me? Heaven bless you, Philip, dear Philip!" The excited girl found her eyes filling so fast with joyful tears, that her spy-glass became useless again, and she sat down to await the approaching boat. The interval was one of powerful excitement to her mind. The slow years of her strange life on the ship all passed before her in a momentary review-including her long- cherished and ideal devotion for Philip ;- and she was proud- aye, to the supreme summit of woman's possible pride-at finding her lover still more heroic than the hero whom her fancy had painted. Her heart danced at the thought of his splendid valor-of his nobility of bearing- of his personal comeliness and gifted mind-of his long search for her and his finding her at last-and of his deep love for her which he had so beautifully expressed. She then thought of the traitor who had tried to come between Philip and herself-of the conspiracy to get possession of BATTLE. 579 the Coromandel-of the murder of Beaver, at which she shuddered whenever it came into her mind-of the sudden change of that day's fortunes from ill to good-of the near prospect of looking into Philip's beloved face once more ;- of all these things did Barbara think in that aroused hour, until, under the windy rush of these wild thoughts,- she sat down in a strange, pleased distraction on the deck, with her hands on her temples that were now throbbing like her heart. page: 580-581[View Page 580-581] CHAPTER XXIX. EXIT AND ENTRANCE. HLE yet the oar-blades glittered afar-off, Barbara bethought herself to announce to her mother the boat's approach. The agitated maid, hastening from her station at the ship's bow, passed the spot where Beaver was killed. He was no longer lying there. Dr. Vail had given him the burial of a true sailor-in the s6a. '0 Beaver!" exclaimed his mourning mistress, "you used to run all over this deck-your feet went pattering everywhere. How I miss you! I intended to show you to all the people, and say to them, ' This is Beaver my dog- the brave dog that saved my life! ' O Beaver! I could not save yours!" Barbara had long recognized in Beaver the Hercules that had snatched her, like Alcestis, from the grave; and she now saw in herself the helplessness which the same tender Alcestis would have pitifully deplored had she afterward seen Hercules in need of a like deliverance, herself unable to be his deliverer. Capt. Scarborough was coming up from the cabin as Bar- bara was going down into it. They met on the stairs. The white-haired giant stood still, and towered up before her like & snow-clad mountain in her path. "Goin' hafter Miss Lucy?" he asked. "Then hoblige a hold man by takin' to my leddy this 'ankerchief; you see it-is Canton sillk-soft to the 'ands, and gentle to the heyes. Miss Lucy's a cryin' and sighin' because that devil's imp, EXIT AND ENTRANCE. 581 Lane, has been knocked to smithereens. Demmit, rather than see my leddy a givin' tears to that man, I'd like to see 'er a givin' smiles to me." Barbara sped to her mother's room, expecting to find Lucy with her; but her mother was alone. "My dear daughter," said Mrs. Vail, "even the strong are shaken by such excitements; for Lucy herself is pros- trated, and has gone to your room." Lucy Wilmerding had suffered as much from the battle as if she had received a wound in it. Old Scaw's attempts to soothe her grief had been so stentorian, elephantine, and inopportune that they had grated harshy upon her delicate sensibilities. Hence she had fled with her sorrow into solitude. Barbara would have pursued Lucy to her hiding-place, had not Dr. Vail's voice now come sounding down into the cabin. Ship ahoy!" cried he, coming alongside the Coro- mandel. Scarborough threw a rope to the boat and scrutinized the prisoners on board. "Halive or dead?" he inquired. "One is ( nearly dead," replied Dr. Tail, "and the other is trying to kill himself." Capt. Chantilly's two captives were Lane and Cam- meyer. Lane was lying in the bottom of the boat in total uncon- sciousness, having been rescued in the last stage of drown- ing, his eyes now closed, and his body showing no other sign of life than a faint sighing-just sufficient to indicate the vital breath. Cammeyer, who seemed hardly more alive, except that his eyes were open, was tightly held in the grip of Robson, from whom he had made previous struggles to escape, resulting in his present exhaustion. "What a precious pair o' willains! cried Scaw, " but- look out there!-don't let 'em fall-sick men must be page: 582-583[View Page 582-583] 582 - TEMPEST-TOSSED. 'andled with care. Demmit, Robson, don't scratch or bruise that wilted white flesh." Capt. Scaw's hard tongue and soft heart were always giving each other the lie. Dr. Vail and Capt. Chantilly now lifted Lane; whom Scarborough, bending down, received and drew up carefully to the deck. "Lie there, you Hay-One scoundrel," cried the old man, as he stretched the limp and unconscious body gently on the deck. "Goin' to Davy Jones? Dunno go with a lie in your throat. Holiver, this scamp swore a haffidavy, he did, that he saw his ship sink, he did. That haffidavy stands kerrect-hall but the name o' the said sunken wessel. I say, Holiver, mebbe it would 'elp 'im to die heasier jist to 'ave that haffidavy kerrected and the right name put in.- Wait a minute, Robson, till I cover his face from the sun. There!" The violent and benevolent Scaw accompanied these words by taking off his gigantic blue flannel jacket and gently spreading it over the pallid face of a man whose name he had sworn at, every day for seventeen years. "Cammeyer, desist from your struggles," said Capt. Chantilly; " you renew them at the risk of your life." Cammeyer had just regained a little strength and flung it away again in another effort to leap overboard. So great a faintness immediately followed in his limbs that a sick child would not have been weaker. He made no resistance. He spoke no word. He looked utterly abject and woe-begone, except that a wild brightness glittered in his cold grey eyes. The boat's company were now all on deck. "Bring both men down into the cabin at once,?' said Dr. Vail, who instantly went forward to prepare the way. Robson and Carter then took up Lane, like a dead body. Scarborough and Chantilly at the same time assisted Cammeyer, who rallied strength enough to walk between them. 1 1 ace ar 1 is An.583 "Mary," said Dr. Vail to his tender-hearted wife, "this is Capt. Lane-he is nearly dead from drowning--there's no time to be lost." Mrs. Vail, who had just emerged from her state-room, was so shocked at the deathly look of the drowned man that she exclaimed, " O bring him at once into this room-quick!-put him on the bed." So it happened that Mary Vail saw Capt. Lane lying as one dead in the same spot in which he once saw her in the same unconscious state. "Take Cammeyer to No. 1," said Rodney, pointing to the D'Arblay room. The two men who had plotted to capture the Coromandel were now the old ship's prisoners-safe against all escape- except escape through death. Capt. Chantilly, leaving them under Dr. Vail's care, promptly returned with Robson and Carter to the Tamaqua; which had now closely approached the Coromandel, and was attaching a hawser to her as the Good Hope had done. "Will Capt. Lane die?" whispered Barbara to her father.. "No ; he has no bruise-no wound;but he was long under water, and almost dead when we picked him up; he will rally very slowly. Cammeyer is in more danger than Lane." "What, in danger of dying?" asked Barbara, who had not thought of such a contingency: nor had any such apprehension occurred to Mrs. Vail or Jezebel. "Yes," said the physician, "Cammeyer is delirious, and in the present weakness of his body he cannot bear this ominous fever in his brain." It was with a revived professional pride that Dr. Vail found himself resuming his function as a physician; and it was with a still more profound satisfaction-such as is known only to lofty natures-that he stood over the bed- page: 584-585[View Page 584-585] 584: TEMPEST-TOSSED. side of Capt. Lane, seeking the safety of the man who had left him to destruction. There are few compensations in life greater than recompensing evil with good. The women-except Lucy, who still imprisoned herself in Barbara's room-were ceaseless in their ministrations to Lane;--stroking his brow, chafing his hands, holding re- storatives to his nostrils, and watching his pulse ;--show- ing altogether an assiduity which Capt. Scaw violently de- nounced and heartily approved. "Demmit," he cried, " this pirate bought to be strangled; -there, let me rub his feet." Old Scaw felt that Lane had taken an unfair advantage of him by being in distress; and the vengeful curmudgeon secretly determined that the wrath which he could not visit on Lane should be wreaked on Lane's master, Sir Richard Wilkinson. Lieut. Cammeyer sighed, groaned, and tossed about in a wild and feverish sleep. Dr. Vail anxiously noted the motions of his face, con- sisting of strange expressions, coming, going, and constantly changing. Some were pitiful appeals-others, angry frowns. The prostrate man seemed personating two characters at once--one soliciting something which the other was deny- ing; one full of grief, the other of rage. The best medicine for his wayward brain," thought the troubled physician, " would be sleep-real sleep-if he could get it; but this excited sleep has no rest in it." Cammeyer's frame was relaxed, but his mind was chorded to an extreme pitch. His vital forces, as they left his limbs, appeared to withdraw into his brain, rendering his facul- ties preternaturally active. His tall, fine, manly body, having been violently heated with fever, lay like a fagot burning away in its own fire, He smiled and scowled-he gnashed his teeth-he bit his lips. At intervals, he kept stretching forth his right hand, as if offering a gift to some imaginary person standing by; -a gift apparently of flowers, for he frequently ejaculated the word- "Violets!" A ringing cheer now filled the vault of heaven-sent up from the hoarse throats of the Tamaqua's crew on success- fully hitching a hawser to the Coromandel and taking her in tow. Barbara, whose blood tingled at this animating sound, started to run up stairs to witness the spectacle, but was intercepted by Lucy, who now for the first time opened her room-door. She beckoned Barbara to enter. "My dear sister," asked Lucy, with great agitation, "is Lieut.-Lane dead?" "You mean Capt. Lane," said Barbara; "he is not dead he will recover."' "Is Lieut. Cammeyer dead?" "No, Lucy, but he is worse than dead." "What?" exclaimed Lucy, startled. " O Barbara, what do you mean?" "I mean that he is out of his wits. His mind is running wild. A little while ago he picked his watch to pieces twisted the hands together like a fly's legs-held them up between his thumb and forefinger-and said, 'Take these violets'-offering them to somebody whom he fancied at the foot of the bed." "My sweet Barbara," said Lucy, pale as death, "I am rested now-I will take your place as Lieut. Cammeyer's nurse. Tell your father that I was at Scutari-I have heard men groan, and seen them die. O it is a mournful world, and its chief need is mercy!" Lucy Wilmerding proposed to show mercy to Anthony Cammeyer. "Miss Wilmerding," said Dr. Vail, eagerly, "have you ever nursed a madman?" Lucy trembled-but not with fright. "Cammeyer is crazed," said Dr. Vail. "He has been page: 586-587[View Page 586-587] 686 ' TEMPEST-TOSSED. holding the state-room lamp in his hahds, thinking it lighted, and trying to blow it out. In spite of the sunshine that streams into his window, he says it is now midnight. He just called for some absent person by the name of Lucette, and wants to give her some imaginary violets." Lucy made no reply, but entered the sick man's chamber. The Coromandel, as soon as she was in tow of the Tama- qua, began to sheer to right and left; so Capt. Chantilly sent a boat with several men to see if the old ship's rusty rudder could be turned in its bed and made to steer the I wayward hulk. Among these men was the negro, Peter Collins, assistant- gunner's mate. i- Jezebel, who happened to observe through the cabin-window this one dusky face among a boat's crew of sunburnt Cauca- sians, said to herself with glad surprise, "Wall, I declar! Dat's a cullud man! Didn't know dere was any more o' dat kind left-s'posed de white folks had S cuffed and jostled and banged 'em all out o' dis world by dis time. Dat looks like ole Bruno afore he took to drink. What's de good book say? ' I am de rose ob Sharon and de lily ob de walley."' Jezebel had been so intent in watching this black and comely face that she did not discover in the boat's stern the noble figure of the young naval officer who ranked on the Tamaqua second to Capt. Chantilly. Barbara now heard, first the tramping of many heavy feet across the deck, and then the creaking of one man's lithe footsteps flying down the cabin stairs. "Who comes?" she eagerly cried-her heart beating in expectancy. "It is I, Jason, seeking the golden fleece," replied Philip Chantilly, " and I find it here." Saying which, Philip audaciously plunged his right hand infito Barbara's tresses, and immediately afterward, out- stretching both his eager arms, clasped her wildly to his EXIT AND ENTRANCE. 587 breast-kissing her on her brow, her cheeks, and her lips in a passion of love. Jezebel, who was starting to go up stairs, found herself an accidental intruder on this furtive scene. "Lawks a-massy!" cried the astonished dame. "Is dis what dey do in war? Guess de war is ober. What's de good book say? 'Mercy and truf shall meet togedder, and righteousness and peace shall kiss each udder."' No sooner had the two lovers loosed themselves from their mutual grasp, than they immediately yearned like the Hebrews for their first captivity, and eagerly returned to it. Philip was aglow with excitement, as if he still bore the fire of battle in his face. ' "O Philip," exclaimed the proud girl whom he held in his arms, "you wanted a victory, and you have won it!" "This is my victory," said Philip, and he pressed her i again and again to his heart. "O Philip," how dreadful is war! And how grateful I am to heaven that you are unhurt! What if you had been. killed!" And Barbara's eyes instantly filled with the same tears with which she would have endlessly mourned Philip's death. "If I had been killed," said he, "I would have lost the i ransom which I live to exact from the prisoners." "What prisoners?" "Your father and mother." "My father and mother?-are they prisoners still? I thought they were now free." "Your father and mother are captives of mine, but they hall be freely ransomed for as much gold as I can hold in ny two hands." And he once more gathered up the precious metal of her 3hining tresses. Philip, who had never in his life known what it was to "Sport with Amaryllis in the shade," fas now all the more bewitched with "The tangles of Nesera's hair." , '-o ' page: 588-589[View Page 588-589] 588 TEMPEST-TOSSED. "Barbara," said he, suddenly, "is that traitor Cammeyei alive or dead? My father told me of his treason to the ship, and his treason to you! The dastard! Had I suspected his villainy when I was lifting him into the boat, I would have flung him back into the sea!-I would hlave held down his cowardly head under the water till I had seen him choke -strangle--thrice drown-and go ten times to' death! The wretch!" And Philip clenched his hands, and quivered with wrath. "How beautiful he looks!" thought Barbara. "How fierce and strong!" She saw in him a fire of feeling-a white heat of soul-- capable of the utmost intensity of pride, scorn, hate, aadd love, "O Philip," she cried, calming him with her own calm- ness, "I am glad that Lieut. Cammeyer owes to you his life. It is better to save than to destroy. O why should there be war in the world? Dear Philip, you shall never go into battle again--no, no!" At this moment a loud cry was heard on deck. Hark!" exclaimed Barbara, putting her hand to her ear, " that is Jezebel's voice. Only a moment ago she was here in the cabin. What can have happened to her?" Barbara ran to the deck, Philip following. There are some tones of the human voice so seldom heard, and full of such unusual emotion, that it is impossible to tell at first whether they indicate despair, grief, or joy. Jezebel's cry was one of these; and Barbara interpreted it as full of pain and woe. But this interpretation was ludicrously wrong; for at the next moment Barbara and Philip discovered Jezebel stand- ing in a picturesque and dramatic attitude, clasping her heavy arms round a young black man, and hugging him to her breast. "Is that you, Peter Collins?" exclaimed Philip, "and do you know this woman?" EXIT AND ENTRANCE. Q89 "i Yes, sir," replied the assistant-gunner's mate, who still remained a captive in the solid arms of the ancient sybil. "Where did you become acquainted with her?" "In Salem, sir." "How long have you known her?" "Ever since I was born, sir.' "Is she one of your kith and kin?" "She is my mother, sir." "O wonderful!" cried Barbara. "Dear Bel, is it true? Tell me-speak!" Jezebel made no reply, but stood holding Peter Collins in a close prison from which, unlike the more yielding dungeon of the original Peter for whom he was named, there was no deliverance. "Dear Aunt Bel," cried the impatient Barbara, "tell me the truth!" "'Sh " muttered Bel, softly. "Dear Bel," cried Barbara, "I shall not hush-tell me." "'Sh! 'Sh!" murmured Bel. "No," cried Barbara; "speak, I say." "Hush, my chillen," replied Bel, in a low but mandatory tone. "Don't be a makin' sich a worldly noise-de Lord is tryin' to say somefin. Don't you hear him? I hab been axin' de Lord if dis yer is Pete-de real Pete-my boy Pete. And O blessed answer!-hark! What's de good book say? 'Woman, behold dy son!" The aged mother, with renewed conviction, and with revived affection, now locked her son still more closely in her maternal and gigantic arms. "Your true name is Bamley," said Philip; "how then came it to be Collins?" "Because" replied that young man, "de Bamleys on de men's side, was a mis'able set. Bruno Bamley-dat was de ole man-lihe nebber earned a cent for de folks. Dat gib him a bad name. ]Now a bad name's 'nuff to sink a frigate. Dat's way I changed from Bamley to Collins." Capt. Scaw, who overheard this colloquy while assisting page: 590-591[View Page 590-591] 590 TEMPEST-TOSSED. the men at the rudder, now ran forward on his ponderous tip-toes-caught hold of Jezebel's hands- unwound her arms from Pete -and compelled her to dance a few steps on deck ;-a caper in which Scaw did all the capering, while Jezebel knew not whether to be angry or pleased. "Well done, Mrs. Bamley," cried her aged partner in the dance, who now handed her back in triumph to her son. "Don't Bamley me," cried Bel, with huffy emphasis. "I int no Bamley no more. Didden you hear what Pete said? Now, what am de sense ob an ole woman like me a stayin' named after a lazy-bones of a husband who is dead and gone, and who never did nuffin' for his folks,-when I hab got a son like Pete-look at him! Ole Bel is agwine to be named after dis yer boy, she is! Let me hear no more Bamleyin' ob me in dis world. Dis ole woman am Mrs. Peter Collins. What's de good book say? 'And de Lord shall write a new name on deir forrid!" After Bel had been suitably congratulated on her re-union with her long-parted Pete, Lieut. Chantilly, who had not yet seen either Mrs. Vail, or Rodney, or Lucy, now returned to the cabin and received the greetings of all. He then inquired after the condition of Lane and Cam- meyer. "Capt. Lane is in my room," said Mrs. Vail; " come with me. He is not conscious-the noise of talking will not disturb him." Philip took a seat at Lane's bed-side, reflecting that the very ship which that captain had-abandoned at sea was now conveying her deserter to land. Mrs. Vail and Philip talked tenderly about Rosa and the early days. "My dear Philip," said she, purposely giving the conver- sation a sudden turn, " do you think this a cosy room?" "It is larger than mine on the Tamaqua," he replied. "You told me, Philip, you had a sacred feeling for the room in which you were born." EXIT AND ENTRANCE. 591 "Yes," he replied-" every son owes that tribute to his mother." "In this room," said Mary, looking round at it, "my daughter Barbara was born." Philip rose, and bowed as in a sanctuary. "Philip, I want to whisper something in your ear." He bent low to listen. "Did you not tell me, on the island, that Barbara had dwelt in your thoughts for years and years?" "Yes." "Now that you have seen her, does she look like the image you had formed of her?" "No, she is far lovelier."5 "How well do you love her?" "Better than life itself." "Do you love any other woman?" , No." "Have you ever loved any other?" "Never except one-my mother." "Philip, ever since you first cherished Barbara's image in your fancy, have you been faithful to her in your heart,?" "Yes." "Will you be faithful to her always?" "Forever and ever." "Philip, bend lower." He put his head near hers. "My dear motherless boy, when my tiny Barbara was only three days old, lying in my arms in this room, and when I thought the Coromandel had arrived at Cape Town, I sent word to your mother to bring you on board. You were then a child of seven years. I meant to say to her, 'Rosa, let us train up these children to love one another, and to live their lives together.' Philip, that was an ex- pectation which I long ago thought heaven had forever thwarted. But no-heaven has never thwarted me in any- thing. Philip, my son, my only son, as I gave Barbara to page: 592-593[View Page 592-593] 592 TEMPEST-TOSSED. you so long, long ago,-I ought to say to you now-that- that-I do not need to give her to you again." Philip knelt and kissed her hand. His heart was full of reverence toward two mothers at the same moment; one on earth, the other in heaven. Then at a turn in the talk he said, "I have brought you a packet of souvenirs of my dead mother." And he took from his pocket a red morocco case. "Here," said he, c is a lock of her hair; and here is the letter from Lucy Wilmerding which my mother saved for you and which I promised to bring. Look at the post-mark. It is dated August 16, 1847." "Philip," said Mrs. Vail, " our dear Barbara is so fond of opening letters that I will give her the pleasure of break- ing this seal. She has gone up stairs-you may take her the letter at once." Philip, putting it into his pocket, went to the deck. Barbara was standing at the bow, watching the rushing waters-a sight which she never saw before; for during all the years of the gir's sea-faring life, the Coromandel had merely drifted at a snail's pace; but the old ship was now going at a fine speed in a compulsory pursuit of the power- ful gunboat whose great wheel was floundering and splash- ing at a rope's length beyond the Coromandel's plunging prow. "O Philip," she exclaimed, beckoning to him, " come and look at the sparkling water as it dashes up. How fast we go! The dear old ship leaps like a dolphin." Philip, clasping Barbara's hand, looked first at the foaming waves, and then into her blushing face. That lovely face was now slightly sprinkled by the dash- ing spray-just enough to make the little salty drops sting her cheeks into a beauty so fresh and fair that, as Philip gazed at it, he felt abashed at the Sight, and wondered whether heaven could ever permit so radiant a being to become his own. EXIT AND ENTRANCE. 593 But a true lover, in proportion as he prostrates his poor and lowly merits before the celestial virtues of his soul's idol, in that very proportion aspires to possess forever the divine image of which- he acknowledges himself to be so unworthy;-just as the most contrite saint on earth is most brave in daring to ask for all that is in heaven above. Philip, yearning from the depths of his self-abasement, stood before the shining angel of his fancy, and said to her, "O Barbara, heaven knows that I am not worthy of you -no, no man on this poor globe could be; but I love you as I love God; and by this love emboldened, which aspires beyond its desert,"-(and here his voice quivered), "-O fair maid of the sea "-(and here they both trembled), "I dare to offer you a sailor's heart whose future happiness in the wide world that lies before us will depend on your answer to one question :-Barbara, will you be my wife?" This overwhelming question struck Barbara's soul like a flaw of wind against her face. It was sudden-violent- unexpected at the moment-and altogether staggering. It choked her utterance, and frustrated all her attempts to stammer forth an answer. At length, rallying from her surprise, she gave to her lover the one look which a maiden gives to but one man once in her lifetime, and exclaimed, "O Philip- my husband!" Having said these few words-which seemed to Barbara wholly inadequate, yet which Philip accepted as quite suffi- cient-she wept and smiled, and felt wholly confused and abashed at her tempest-tossed behavior that knew not how to quell itself into calm. Many low whispers then passed between the two lovers, which the wind caught up and diffused like a flowery sweet- ness through the earth ;-just as the breath of true love is the chief perfume of heaven itself. Barbara's old and familiar question now recurred to her mind: page: 594-595[View Page 594-595] 594 TEMPEST-TOSSED.. "Is it a reality or only a dream?" "No, not a dream," said Philip: "this hand "-(and he lifted hers to his lips) "is more real than the poet's song sings of- ' The soft white hand that was a woman of itself.' Barbara,' he continued, quoting poetry to her, "you are a calm angel standing in the esun." Barbara did not object to be at that moment in the sun- light, for she knew the proverb, "Happy is the bride the sun shines on." Her hair was now turned to very gold in the glittering rays of the low afternoon sun that was getting ready to set. "Barbara, look!" said Philip, "the sun is about to take with him his last message to the other side of the world. Do you know what he will say after he goes down?" "What?" asked Barbara. "He will say," replied the dear maid's lover, "that the last thing he saw on this happy day was the happiest sailor who ever sailed the sea." "Philip, who is that sailor?" "It is I," said he. "No, Philip, it is I," said she, "for I have been a sailor longer than you-I have been a sailor all my life. Look! Philip, let me tell you what the sun is already saying before he goes down-and see! he grows all the brighter while he says it. He is saying, 'Why, that's the dear old Coro- mandel, the same old ship that I have left alone for many a night on the dreary seas, to find her drifting there in the morning.' He is saying,' Of all the fleets and navies in the world, I know that old wreck the best.' He is say- ing, ' There used to be a little brown girl on her deck, who laughed every night and morning in my face ;-and when- ever I was hidden by clouds, the first little eyes that watched for my return were that same little maid's ;-and whenever the pelting rains wet her fat cheeks, it was I EXIT AND ENTRANCE. '595 that came out to dry them for her.' He is saying, 'I have known many children in my time, but never one that kept me company so many hours of the day, or so many days of the year, as that same child.' He is saying, At last I missed her from the sea, and saw her hiding away from my beams in the cool shadows of a green island. There I lost her, but there her true lover found her, and he has brought her back again out upon the same old ocean-and here she is, rocking and rolling in the same old ship!' Yes, Philip, that is what the sun is now saying.-But O why does heaven permit such happiness to me when it ordains such sorrow to Lucy?" At this allusion to Lucy, Philip handed to Barbara the letter which Lucy had written from London seventeen years before. Barbara opened it with eager pleasure, reading it to her- self with profound astonishment at the following passages: Perhaps I did not mention in my last that while we were in Berlin (where we lived for seven months) a young American gentleman was very attentive to papa and me. . . My papa's young friend is to be first a midshipman, and by and by an admirai. He is tall and splendid, and his name is Anthony Cammeyer. . . . How would that name sound for a lady? I don't mean now. O dear no-a long way off in the future. (Please keep this a great secret.) . . To- day is my sixteenth birthday. The English violet that I enclose is one from a beautiful bunch which Anthony brought me this morning. "Philip," exclaimed Barbara, after having silently read the letter, "I must go to Lucy at once." Whereupon, without stopping to, make any other expla- nation tfian simply to show great distress in her face, Bar- bara fled away toward the cabin; leaving Philip first to wonder at, and then to follow her. As the perplexed young man knew neither the contents of the letter, nor the facts which the letter narrated, his curiosity was sharpened to a feather-edge. page: 596-597[View Page 596-597] 596 . TEMPEST-TOSSED. Lucy Wilmerding had meanwhile been in attendance on Anthony Cammeyer, who rapidly grew weaker in body and wilder in mind. "O Lucy, dear Lucy!" exclaimed Barbara, running to her where she sat by the Leaning Tower within a few steps of the sick man's door. "I know at last the secret of your grief. Here is the letter you wrote to my mother at Cape Town before I was born. I have just read it, and in it you say "- "Silence!" ejaculated 'Lucy, turning deathly pale, and speaking with a tone of command that fell with less mys- tery on Barbara than on all the rest. "Dear Barbara, added Lucy, trying to recover herself, "Lieut. Cammeyer has been quiet for the last half hour, but a loud voice will disturb his rest." This was a poor subterfuge on Lucy's part to secure Bar- bara's silence; and it was only partially effectual with that irrepressible maiden; who now flung her soft arms round her sorrowing companion, and in the midst of blinding tears, exclaimed, "O angel of mercy I Agatha! Lucy! Sister! sweet, dear heart!" This passionate exclamation by Barbara was an unac- countable enigma, both to Philip and her parents. But they had no time to solve the riddle; for at that moment they heard a loud noise in Cammeyer's room, sounding like the wrenching of the brass window-frame from its hinges. The deranged man immediately opened the door and came forth with a glaring and excited look, brandishing the brazen rim in his hand, stalking up and down the cabin, and talking to himself--apparently oblivious of the presence of others. "O pitiful!" cried Lucy, burying her face in her hands. Barbara flung herself down at Lucy's side. "What is all this mystery?" thought Dr. Vail, noticing Lucy's distress. Cammeyer carefully scrutinized the brass rim and put it on and off his neck several times like a collar. After which, thrusting his arm into it, he exclaimed, "It is hot!-it will burn you!-it boils!-take your arm out!" And Barbara knew that his mind was reverting to the boiling spring. He suddenly dropped the heavy circlet, which grazed against his foot, and he exclaimed, "4 A scorpion!-a mortal wound-I .am a dead man!" He then seemed picking his way agonizingly among mul- titudinous serpents which were biting him at every turn, and when this fancy grew insupportable he fell to the floor at Lucy's feet. Lifting himself partly up, his vagrant mind wandered into another mood, and he gently toyed with the green flounce of Lucy's dress, and whispered, "Yes, what pretty vines-they hide the name-here it is -Good Hope." This hallucination soon led him to believe himself on board the real Good Hope, bargaining with Lane; and he rose to his feet and stood leering at the mizzen-mast as if he were face to face with his fellow-conspirator. The expression on his countenance now changed into one horrible to behold, for with glaring eyes he gazed down at his two open hands, which he suddenly clutched, and he enacted before Lucy and Barbara the role of strangling them both, calling them by their names, heaping impreca- tions on their souls, and gloating over their apparent murder with fiendish delight. Seize him," said Dr. Vail to Philip, who was standing just behind Cammeyer; and Philip dextrously closed his strong arms round the frevzied man. "He has no strength," said Philip, surprised at the ex- haustion which had overcome the poor witless wretch. Cammeyer's face was toward one of the cabin-windows at the stern, and as he stood bound in Philip's arms, he C page: 598-599[View Page 598-599] 598 -TEMPEST-TOSSED. gazed through the thick glass out upon the sea, beckoning as if he saw some one approach., "Lucette!" muttered the sick man, in a pitiful and plain- tive tone.-"Lucette I " and he kept calling her name over and over again - his voice sinking gradually to a mild whisper, like a child's cry.-"Lucette!" Dr. Vail now resorted to a physician's stratagem, and beckoning Barbara, said to her with a loud and commanding voice, "My dear Lucette, here is Lieut. Cammeyer who wishes to see you. Will you speak to him? He is waiting." Cammeyer's attention was roused by the forceful utter- ance of these words, and as Barbara, in obedience to her father's suggestion, stepped forth to salute the bewildered man he eyed her with-an intense look. "Mr. Cammeyer," she asked, " do you know me? Am I not Lucette?" "No," he exclaimed, with a sudden and vacant laugh- half of anger, half of ridicule : "No-ha! ha!-no! Lu- cette has black eyes.. She is sixteen. It is her birthday. I have brought her some violets. Where is she? pall her. Lucette!-Lucette!-Lucette!" I And he breathed forth her name as softly as if his memory of it were sweetened by the violets with which he was now associating it. Cammeyer, on showing thus a melted mood, was Allowed his freedom from Philip's grasp. Lucy continued to sit with her face buried in her hands, suffering the chief agony of all her life. "He is tottering," said Philip-" catch him or he will fall." No sooner had these words escaped Philip's lips, than Cammeyer fainted and fell to the floor. Such a pallor instantly passed over his countenance that Lucy, in beholding it, could no longer disguise her grief, but bent down beside him and lifted his head into her lap. The last rays of the sun were now streaming in through both windows at the stern. EXIT AND ENTRANCE. 599 The light fell on his haggard face, and lent to it a flush of warmth and life. This transformation made him appear to Lucy as he did in his youth. She wept bitterly. Cammeyer, whose eyes had been closed, now opened them, and fixed their gaze on the dead geranium in the terra-cotta vase. His dull orbs brightened at the sight. He pointed his forefinger to the dead plant and smiled. Lucy, not knowing what he was pointing at, turned her head to ascertain. By this movement, her face received the level sunbeams full against it. Cammeyer caught a glimpse of that lovely, mournful face. He did not see it as it was, but recognized in it the youthful countenance of a former time-not Lucy but Lucette. His eyes then wandered back and forth between the dead flower-stalk and Lucy's liv ing face. Smiles played about his features, and made him appear full of pleasure and peace. "Yes, sixteen," said he, "you shall have them-I promised to bring them. Wait." Summoning his feeble strength, he staggered toward the flower-vase-plucked up the dead stalk by the roots- brought it back between his thumb and forefinger-and offered it to Lucy, who had now risen and was standing before him face to face. "Violets-!" said he. "They are for your hair. Take them!" She took thedead stalk, and in so doing, her hand touched his; and she found his flesh so cold and deathly that she started back in fright. A corresponding shock passed at the same moment through the trembling man, and stunned him into sanity. Calling then into his wayward brain the little life that remained in his fainting body, he stood erect during a few lucid moments, and evidently recognized the real, mature, page: 600-601[View Page 600-601] 600 TEMPEST-TOSSEDt and heart-broken woman whom he was confronting for the lest time in his life. Overwhelmed by the spectacle, he gave her one long look of hopelessness and anguish-lifted his hands into the air like a drowning man when there is no help-sobbed out a strong sigh that seemed to cleave like a knife through his breast - struggled to speak but was unable- and at last shrieked forth with piteous pathos the single word- "Lucette!" While the echo of Cammeyer's agonizing voice was ringing in all ears, he reeled-clutched at the air with empty hands -fell to the floor-and was dead. A strange Nemesis had literally burst ,his heart:-as if Nature had taken revenge on him for breaking the heart of another. At first no one knew the secret of Lucy's agony, except Barbara. While Barbara was showing the letter to Philip and the other eager readers, Lucy sank down on the dead body, and with a saint's anguish moaned forth a speechless prayer for the safe passage of the soul. Night stealthily fell "on the sea-darkness crept into the ship-and dumbness reigned on all tongues. In the midst of the solemn hush, the beating of the Tamaqua's powerful wheel was plainly heard in the Coro- mandel's cabin ; and the rushing waters at the old hulk's bow grew louder than ever-as if the inanimate craft had caught the expiring life of her dead passenger, and had thereby quickened her plunge from Xave to wave in her eager way back to the world. At length the evening lamp was lighted, and as it shone down on the solid mahogany table beneath-that was now transformed into a bier-the dim rays revealed the figure of a dead man lying in state, clothed in a uniform which he had dishonored, covered with a flag that he had betrayed, and watched by a woman whom he had wronged. A few flowers that Barbara had brought with her from EXIT AND ENTRANCE. 601 the island-already wilted, yet still fragrant-were lying on his breast. In the midst of them was a dried and shriveled geranium-stalk, placed there by Lucy, whose own blighted life was equally blasted and seared. Amid the dying blos- soms, the ominous herb seemed the fittest funeral-flower with which the dead could bury the dead. Then came the midnight and found the two maidens sitting clasped in each other's arms, marveling at each other's fate :-one, after long exile from human society, eagerly entering it-the other, after long sorrow in it, solemnly quitting it; one going to her hearths bridal-the other, to her heart's burial; one seeking to open the world's great gate before her-the other to close it behind her forever. "O Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!" exclaimed Barbara, weeping tears of sympathy. "No, my sweet Barbara, call me by that name no more. Lucy is dead. It is Agatha only who survives. Call me Agatha-your sister Agatha." "O Agatha, my sister, my darling!" said Barbara sob- bing as if the chief sorrow were hers rather than Lucy's* Then these maidens, unclasping each other's arms, turned each to her lover-each to her own heart's idol; and to their maidenly eyes the two manly forms now looked more beautiful than ever :-one glowing with the radiance of life-the other shadowed by the majesty of death. Love that seeks long shall find at last. But, ah! love, seek as it may, knows not what it shall find : it may be hap- piness-it may be heart-break. Barbara had found the one; Lucy, the other. They had loved with equal faithfulness, but with unequal recompense. O the merciless fickleness of that undivine providence which men call fate! Nay, fate too can be just: for these two men-one a true lover, and the other a false-had each reaped as he had sown, and gathered as he had strown. One was rewarded with the chief blessing, the other punished with the chief penalty, that can be meted out to mortal man. 26 page: 602-603[View Page 602-603] 602 TEMPEST-TOSSED, Meanwhile, in sacred silence, the sisterly maids, in holy rivalry, vied with one another in bestowing each on her lover, according to his desert, one of the two greatest gifts which women can borrow from God to confer on men: One gave love-the other, pardon. Both gifts must be accounted of equal preciousness, and to both givers must be rendered equal praise. So all night long the Coromandel-the cradle of one love, the sepulchre of another -all night long, the good old ship-bearing her strange burden of life and death, of love and grief, of hope and despair, of faith and treachery, of honor and ignominy,-holding thus within her narrow walls all the elements that composed the great world to which she was bound ;--all night long, amid the noise of the beating wheel-with which the beating of all hearts kept company, save one that could beat no more-the hoary hulk pursued her final voyage, through the darkness of night and the shadow of death, toward the golden morning and the living world. , EPILOGUE. EFORE daybreak on Saturday, September 24, 1864;- while the birds of Barbados were yet in their nests asleep, and while the beacon-lights of St. Anne's Castle and Needham's Point were still ablaze ;-the Coromandel, after the longest voyage that any vessel ever made- except the endless wanderings of sunken wrecks that drift about the bottom of the sea-entered at last one of the world's ports, dropped her anchor, and waited for day. It was slow in dawning; for human wishes cannot haste the sun. Meanwhile a thick sea-fog floated over the anxious watch- ers on deck-like the mystic future that overhung their lives. , The Tamaqua was moored nearby; and the two ships were dimly visible to each other in the darkness. Numerous other vessels lay in the channel-some of corn- merce, others of war; among which the Coromandel had come to pursue neither the greeds of men nor the hatreds of nations; for her consecrated hulk, having already the sick and the dead on board, was to remain a Marine Hos- pital-to be put in holy commission as Agatha's flag-ship of the Sisters of Mercy. The first echo from the shore to the listening ears on board was the dismal howling of a dog-mournfully remind- ing the exiles how the aged Beaver, like the archetypal patriarch, who was forbidden to enter the promised land, had died without the sight. page: 604-605[View Page 604-605] ]04i TEMPEST-TOSSED. Oliver Chantilly, eager to be the first human being to welcome Rodney Vail to the world of mankind, pushed off in the darkness from the Tamaqua and boarded the Coro- mandel: on whose ancient deck the two friends stood locked in a long and proud embrace- in token of a friendship which had kept its faith, fulfilled its duty, and achieved its reward. Old John Scarborough, otherwise Scawherry, otherwise Scaw, was unable to wait quietly for dawn, but burst out into irrepressible joy and rage; roaring forth jubilant con- gratulations to Rodney and Oliver, and doubling his mam- moth fist in rehearsal of the menacing gestures with which he meant to browheat Sir Richard Wilkinson a few hours hence. Jezebel, as soon as she heard the rattling anchor plunge to its bed, hobbled up stairs and put her arms once more about the assistant-gunner's mate:-piously reconciling herself to re-enter the wicked world, since it offered her a career of unexpected distinction as Mrs. Peter Collins, mother of her son. Mary Vail was hardly yet aware of the ship's arrival, but continued ministering to Capt. Lane ;-who was just then murmuring a broken utterance of his gratitude to that gentle woman for nursing him back to life in the room in which he had left her to die. Lucy Wilmerding sat watching the bier of Anthony Cammeyer-gazing with sorrowing eyes at the closed lids to which the expected dawn could bring no light. Out of the stiff, stark, comely body, the soul-which had been its only base element-had now departed, leaving the mortal remainder stainless and pure. That which life had marred, death had perfected. At last, with woman's love, that faileth not, the maidenly mourner knelt beside the flower- strewn form, wedded it for her own, clasped it in her arms as a vain possession, and lingered in the unreturned em- brace ;-a prostrate worshipper, bending to a more prostrate idol, her own broken hope the most prostrate of all. EPILOGUE. 605 Philip and Barbara stood side by side in the ship's bow- the place of their betrothal-searching the dark East for its first flush. Never did any bridegroom bring to his bride such a bridal gift as Philip had in store for Barbara; for he was about to give her the whole world. Into the fair maid's eyes came mists to meet the sea's mist; yet her tears were not of joy for the gift, but of love for the giver; for she who had yearned all her lifetime to possess the world, now at last, when she was to receive it, saw it shrink into nothingness in comparison with that true love which alone is the chief desire of life and supreme fortune of the soul. At length came the wished-for morning-cool, blue, and beautiful. It brought with it the singing of birds, the firing of salutes, the waving of flags, and the cheering of crews. In the midst of these tokens, the exiles-whose arrival had been noised about the harbor before they left the ship-now embarked in a boat and began to glide shoreward for a triumphal entry into the civilized world. Before them was the tumult of their welcome,-with its joys, hopes, wonders, glories, friends, home. Behind them was the ship of their wanderings,-fringed with sea-grass, green as the destined memory of her name; fast-anchored in a tranquillity superior to all the heart-beat- ing perturbations of her little band ; lying in her new harbor quietly as in the calms of Capricorn-safely as in the cove of cocoa-trees-sacredly as if already moored within the hallowed shadow of the House of Mercy. The company stood lingering in the boat in order to waft a prolonged and affectionate farewell to the ship; gazing at her until she seemed to swim in the tears that filled their fond eyes; waving to her their hands like a flock of flying birds-;-Barbara's fair hand fluttering among them -whitest of all-gleaming in the sunlight like a dove's white wing. page: 606-607 (Advertisement) [View Page 606-607 (Advertisement) ] 606 TEMPEST-TOSSED. At last the exiles turned from the ship to the shore; -carrying with them into the world the pleasant thought that whatever storms might gather about their own future fate, yet the dear old ship, though remaining a refuge for the weather-beaten, was herself nevermore to be TEMPEST- TOSSED. FINIS. FINIS. . Soo's published by Sheldon Company. \ NEW NOVELS. Tempest-Tossed. A charming Novel by THEODORE TILTON. Mr. Tilton wields a very graceful pen, and possesses a vivid imagination. The story is one of marked power and poetic beauty. 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