"Sally, you are a right n.o.ble girl. I never knew what you were till now," said Moses, looking at her with admiration.

"It's the first time for all these six months that we have either of us spoken a word of truth or sense to each other. I never did anything but trifle with you, and you the same. Now we've come to some plain dry land, we may walk on and be friends. So now help me up these rocks, and I will go home."

"And you'll not come home with me?"

"Of course not. I think you may now go home and have one talk with Mara without witnesses."

CHAPTER x.x.xII

THE BETROTHAL

Moses walked slowly home from his interview with Sally, in a sort of maze of confused thought. In general, men understand women only from the outside, and judge them with about as much real comprehension as an eagle might judge a canary-bird. The difficulty of real understanding intensifies in proportion as the man is distinctively manly, and the woman womanly. There are men with a large infusion of the feminine element in their composition who read the female nature with more understanding than commonly falls to the lot of men; but in general, when a man pa.s.ses beyond the mere outside artifices and unrealities which lie between the two s.e.xes, and really touches his finger to any vital chord in the heart of a fair neighbor, he is astonished at the quality of the vibration.

"I could not have dreamed there was so much in her," thought Moses, as he turned away from Sally Kittridge. He felt humbled as well as astonished by the moral lecture which this frisky elf with whom he had all summer been amusing himself, preached to him from the depths of a real woman's heart. What she said of Mara's loving him filled his eyes with remorseful tears,--and for the moment he asked himself whether this restless, jealous, exacting desire which he felt to appropriate her whole life and heart to himself were as really worthy of the name of love as the generous self-devotion with which she had, all her life, made all his interests her own.

Was he to go to her now and tell her that he loved her, and therefore he had teased and vexed her,--therefore he had seemed to prefer another before her,--therefore he had practiced and experimented upon her nature? A suspicion rather stole upon him that love which expresses itself princ.i.p.ally in making exactions and giving pain is not exactly worthy of the name. And yet he had been secretly angry with her all summer for being the very reverse of this; for her apparent cheerful willingness to see him happy with another; for the absence of all signs of jealousy,--all desire of exclusive appropriation. It showed, he said to himself, that there was no love; and now when it dawned on him that this might be the very heroism of self-devotion, he asked himself which was best worthy to be called love.

"She did love him, then!" The thought blazed up through the smouldering embers of thought in his heart like a tongue of flame. She loved him! He felt a sort of triumph in it, for he was sure Sally must know, they were so intimate. Well, he would go to her, and tell her all, confess all his sins, and be forgiven.

When he came back to the house, all was still evening. The moon, which was playing brightly on the distant sea, left one side of the brown house in shadow. Moses saw a light gleaming behind the curtain in the little room on the lower floor, which had been his peculiar sanctum during the summer past. He had made a sort of library of it, keeping there his books and papers. Upon the white curtain flitted, from time to time, a delicate, busy shadow; now it rose and now it stooped, and then it rose again--grew dim and vanished, and then came out again. His heart beat quick.

Mara was in his room, busy, as she always had been before his departures, in cares for him. How many things had she made for him, and done and arranged for him, all his life long! things which he had taken as much as a matter of course as the shining of that moon. His thought went back to the times of his first going to sea,--he a rough, chaotic boy, sensitive and surly, and she the ever thoughtful good angel of a little girl, whose loving-kindness he had felt free to use and to abuse.

He remembered that he made her cry there when he should have spoken lovingly and gratefully to her, and that the words of acknowledgment that ought to have been spoken, never had been said,--remained unsaid to that hour. He stooped low, and came quite close to the muslin curtain.

All was bright in the room, and shadowy without; he could see her movements as through a thin white haze. She was packing his sea-chest; his things were lying about her, folded or rolled nicely. Now he saw her on her knees writing something with a pencil in a book, and then she enveloped it very carefully in silk paper, and tied it trimly, and hid it away at the bottom of the chest. Then she remained a moment kneeling at the chest, her head resting in her hands. A sort of strange, sacred feeling came over him as he heard a low murmur, and knew that she felt a Presence that he never felt or acknowledged. He felt somehow that he was doing her a wrong thus to be prying upon moments when she thought herself alone with G.o.d; a sort of vague remorse filled him; he felt as if she were too good for him. He turned away, and entering the front door of the house, stepped noiselessly along and lifted the latch of the door. He heard a rustle as of one rising hastily as he opened it and stood before Mara. He had made up his mind what to say; but when she stood there before him, with her surprised, inquiring eyes, he felt confused.

"What, home so soon?" she said.

"You did not expect me, then?"

"Of course not,--not for these two hours; so," she said, looking about, "I found some mischief to do among your things. If you had waited as long as I expected, they would all have been quite right again, and you would never have known."

Moses sat down and drew her toward him, as if he were going to say something, and then stopped and began confusedly playing with her work-box.

"Now, please don't," said she, archly. "You know what a little old maid I am about my things!"

"Mara," said Moses, "people have asked you to marry them, have they not?"

"People asked me to marry them!" said Mara. "I hope not. What an odd question!"

"You know what I mean," said Moses; "you have had offers of marriage--from Mr. Adams, for example."

"And what if I have?"

"You did not accept him, Mara?" said Moses.

"No, I did not."

"And yet he was a fine man, I am told, and well fitted to make you happy."

"I believe he was," said Mara, quietly.

"And why were you so foolish?"

Mara was fretted at this question. She supposed Moses had come to tell her of his engagement to Sally, and that this was a kind of preface, and she answered,--

"I don't know why you call it foolish. I was a true friend to Mr. Adams.

I saw intellectually that he might have the power of making any reasonable woman happy. I think now that the woman will be fortunate who becomes his wife; but I did not wish to marry him."

"Is there anybody you prefer to him, Mara?" said Moses.

She started up with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes.

"You have no right to ask me that, though you are my brother."

"I am not your brother, Mara," said Moses, rising and going toward her, "and that is why I ask you. I feel I have a right to ask you."

"I do not understand you," she said, faintly.

"I can speak plainer, then. I wish to put in my poor venture. I love you, Mara--not as a brother. I wish you to be my wife, if you will."

While Moses was saying these words, Mara felt a sort of whirling in her head, and it grew dark before her eyes; but she had a strong, firm will, and she mastered herself and answered, after a moment, in a quiet, sorrowful tone, "How can I believe this, Moses? If it is true, why have you done as you have this summer?"

"Because I was a fool, Mara,--because I was jealous of Mr.

Adams,--because I somehow hoped, after all, that you either loved me or that I might make you think more of me through jealousy of another. They say that love always is shown by jealousy."

"Not true love, I should think," said Mara. "How _could_ you do so?--it was cruel to her,--cruel to me."

"I admit it,--anything, everything you can say. I have acted like a fool and a knave, if you will; but after all, Mara, I do love you. I know I am not worthy of you--never was--never can be; you are in all things a true, n.o.ble woman, and I have been unmanly."

It is not to be supposed that all this was spoken without accompaniments of looks, movements, and expressions of face such as we cannot give, but such as doubled their power to the parties concerned; and the "I love you" had its usual conclusive force as argument, apology, promise,--covering, like charity, a mult.i.tude of sins.

Half an hour after, you might have seen a youth and a maiden coming together out of the door of the brown house, and walking arm in arm toward the sea-beach.

It was one of those wonderfully clear moonlight evenings, when the ocean, like a great reflecting mirror, seems to double the brightness of the sky,--and its vast expanse lay all around them in its stillness, like an eternity of waveless peace. Mara remembered that time in her girlhood when she had followed Moses into the woods on just such a night,--how she had sat there under the shadows of the trees, and looked over to Harpswell and noticed the white houses and the meeting-house, all so bright and clear in the moonlight, and then off again on the other side of the island where silent ships were coming and going in the mysterious stillness. They were talking together now with that outflowing fullness which comes when the seal of some great reserve has just been broken,--going back over their lives from day to day, bringing up incidents of childhood, and turning them gleefully like two children.

And then Moses had all the story of his life to relate, and to tell Mara all he had learned of his mother,--going over with all the narrative contained in Mr. Sewell's letter.

"You see, Mara, that it was intended that you should be my fate," he ended; "so the winds and waves took me up and carried me to the lonely island where the magic princess dwelt."

"You are Prince Ferdinand," said Mara.

"And you are Miranda," said he.

"Ah!" she said with fervor, "how plainly we can see that our heavenly Father has been guiding our way! How good He is,--and how we must try to live for Him,--both of us."