Chapter 5

What a rejoicing there was at his return!--how radiant and level the long Road of the Future seemed to open before him!--everywhere friends, prospects, felicitations. Then his first serious love;--and the night of the ball at St. Martinsville,--the vision of light! Gracile as a palm, and robed at once so simply, so exquisitely in white, she had seemed to him the supreme realization of all possible dreams of beauty ... And his passionate jealousy; and the slap from Laroussel; and the humiliating two-minute duel with rapiers in which he learned that he had found his master. The scar was deep. Why had not Laroussel killed him then? ... Not evil-hearted, Laroussel,--they used to salute each other afterward when they met; and Laroussel's smile was kindly. Why had he refrained from returning it? Where was Laroussel now?

For the death of his generous father, who had sacrificed so much to reform him; for the death, only a short while after, of his all-forgiving mother, he had found one sweet woman to console him with her tender words, her loving lips, her delicious caress. She had given him Zouzoune, the darling link between their lives,--Zouzoune, who waited each evening with black Eglantine at the gate to watch for his coming, and to cry through all the house like a bird, "Papa, lape vini!--papa Zulien ape vini!" ... And once that she had made him very angry by upsetting the ink over a mass of business papers, and he had slapped her (could he ever forgive himself?)--she had cried, through her sobs of astonishment and pain:--"To laimin moin?--to batte moin!" (Thou lovest me?--thou beatest me!) Next month she would have been five years old. To laimin moin?--to batte moin! ...

A furious paroxysm of grief convulsed him, suffocated him; it seemed to him that something within must burst, must break. He flung himself down upon his bed, biting the coverings in order to stifle his outcry, to smother the sounds of his despair. What crime had he ever done, oh God! that he should be made to suffer thus?--was it for this he had been permitted to live? had been rescued from the sea and carried round all the world unscathed? Why should he live to remember, to suffer, to agonize? Was not Ramirez wiser?

How long the contest within him lasted, he never knew; but ere it was done, he had become, in more ways than one, a changed man. For the first,--though not indeed for the last time,--something of the deeper and nobler comprehension of human weakness and of human suffering had been revealed to him,--something of that larger knowledge without which the sense of duty can never be fully acquired, nor the understanding of unselfish goodness, nor the spirit of tenderness. The suicide is not a coward; he is an egotist.

A ray of sunlight touched his wet pillow,--awoke him. He rushed to the window, flung the latticed shutters apart, and looked out.

Something beautiful and ghostly filled all the vistas,--frost-haze; and in some queer way the mist had momentarily caught and held the very color of the sky. An azure fog! Through it the quaint and checkered street--as yet but half illumined by the sun,--took tones of impossible color; the view paled away through faint bluish tints into transparent purples;--all the shadows were indigo. How sweet the morning!--how well life seemed worth living! Because the sun had shown his face through a fairy veil of frost! ...

Who was the ancient thinker?--was it Hermes?--who said:--

"The Sun is Laughter; for 'tis He who maketh joyous the thoughts of men, and gladdeneth the infinite world." ...

The Shadow of the Tide.

I.

Carmen found that her little pet had been taught how to pray; for each night and morning when the devout woman began to make her orisons, the child would kneel beside her, with little hands joined, and in a voice sweet and clear murmur something she had learned by heart. Much as this pleased Carmen, it seemed to her that the child's prayers could not be wholly valid unless uttered in Spanish;--for Spanish was heaven's own tongue,--la lengua de Dios, el idioma de Dios; and she resolved to teach her to say the Salve Maria and the Padre Nuestro in Castilian--also, her own favorite prayer to the Virgin, beginning with the words, "Madre santisima, toda dulce y hermosa." . . .

So Conchita--for a new name had been given to her with that terrible sea christening--received her first lessons in Spanish; and she proved a most intelligent pupil. Before long she could prattle to Feliu;--she would watch for his return of evenings, and announce his coming with "Aqui viene mi papacito?"--she learned, too, from Carmen, many little caresses of speech to greet him with. Feliu's was not a joyous nature; he had his dark hours, his sombre days; yet it was rarely that he felt too sullen to yield to the little one's petting, when she would leap up to reach his neck and to coax his kiss, with--"Dame un beso, papa!--asi;--y otro! otro! otro!" He grew to love her like his own;--was she not indeed his own, since he had won her from death? And none had yet come to dispute his claim. More and more, with the passing of weeks, months, seasons, she became a portion of his life--a part of all that he wrought for. At the first, he had had a half-formed hope that the little one might be reclaimed by relatives generous and rich enough to insist upon his acceptance of a handsome compensation; and that Carmen could find some solace in a pleasant visit to Barceloneta. But now he felt that no possible generosity could requite him for her loss; and with the unconscious selfishness of affection, he commenced to dread her identification as a great calamity.

It was evident that she had been brought up nicely. She had pretty prim ways of drinking and eating, queer little fashions of sitting in company, and of addressing people. She had peculiar notions about colors in dress, about wearing her hair; and she seemed to have already imbibed a small stock of social prejudices not altogether in harmony with the republicanism of Viosca's Point. Occasional swarthy visitors,--men of the Manilla settlements,--she spoke of contemptuously as negues-marrons; and once she shocked Carmen inexpressibly by stopping in the middle of her evening prayer, declaring that she wanted to say her prayers to a white Virgin; Carmen's Senora de Guadalupe was only a negra! Then, for the first time, Carmen spoke so crossly to the child as to frighten her. But the pious woman's heart smote her the next moment for that first harsh word;--and she caressed the motherless one, consoled her, cheered her, and at last explained to her--I know not how--something very wonderful about the little figurine, something that made Chita's eyes big with awe. Thereafter she always regarded the Virgin of Wax as an object mysterious and holy.

And, one by one, most of Chita's little eccentricities were gradually eliminated from her developing life and thought. More rapidly than ordinary children, because singularly intelligent, she learned to adapt herself to all the changes of her new environment,--retaining only that indescribable something which to an experienced eye tells of hereditary refinement of habit and of mind:--a natural grace, a thorough-bred ease and elegance of movement, a quickness and delicacy of perception.

She became strong again and active--active enough to play a great deal on the beach, when the sun was not too fierce; and Carmen made a canvas bonnet to shield her head and face. Never had she been allowed to play so much in the sun before; and it seemed to do her good, though her little bare feet and hands became brown as copper. At first, it must be confessed, she worried her foster-mother a great deal by various queer misfortunes and extraordinary freaks;--getting bitten by crabs, falling into the bayou while in pursuit of "fiddlers," or losing herself at the conclusion of desperate efforts to run races at night with the moon, or to walk to the "end of the world." If she could only once get to the edge of the sky, she said, she "could climb up." She wanted to see the stars, which were the souls of good little children; and she knew that God would let her climb up. "Just what I am afraid of!"--thought Carmen to herself;--"He might let her climb up,--a little ghost!" But one day naughty Chita received a terrible lesson,--a lasting lesson,--which taught her the value of obedience.

She had been particularly cautioned not to venture into a certain part of the swamp in the rear of the grove, where the weeds were very tall; for Carmen was afraid some snake might bite the child.

But Chita's bird-bright eye had discerned a gleam of white in that direction; and she wanted to know what it was. The white could only be seen from one point, behind the furthest house, where the ground was high. "Never go there," said Carmen; "there is a Dead Man there,--will bite you!" And yet, one day, while Carmen was unusually busy, Chita went there.

In the early days of the settlement, a Spanish fisherman had died; and his comrades had built him a little tomb with the surplus of the same bricks and other material brought down the bayou for the construction of Viosca's cottages. But no one, except perhaps some wandering duck hunter, had approached the sepulchre for years. High weeds and grasses wrestled together all about it, and rendered it totally invisible from the surrounding level of the marsh.

Fiddlers swarmed away as Chita advanced over the moist soil, each uplifting its single huge claw as it sidled off;--then frogs began to leap before her as she reached the thicker grass;--and long-legged brown insects sprang showering to right and left as she parted the tufts of the thickening verdure. As she went on, the bitter-weeds disappeared;--jointed grasses and sinewy dark plants of a taller growth rose above her head: she was almost deafened by the storm of insect shrilling, and the mosquitoes became very wicked. All at once something long and black and heavy wriggled almost from under her naked feet,--squirming so horribly that for a minute or two she could not move for fright. But it slunk away somewhere, and hid itself; the weeds it had shaken ceased to tremble in its wake; and her courage returned. She felt such an exquisite and fearful pleasure in the gratification of that naughty curiosity! Then, quite unexpectedly--oh! what a start it gave her!--the solitary white object burst upon her view, leprous and ghastly as the yawn of a cotton-mouth. Tombs ruin soon in Louisiana;--the one Chita looked upon seemed ready to topple down. There was a great ragged hole at one end, where wind and rain, and perhaps also the burrowing of crawfish and of worms, had loosened the bricks, and caused them to slide out of place. It seemed very black inside; but Chita wanted to know what was there. She pushed her way through a gap in the thin and rotten line of pickets, and through some tall weeds with big coarse pink flowers;--then she crouched down on hands and knees before the black hole, and peered in. It was not so black inside as she had thought; for a sunbeam slanted down through a chink in the roof; and she could see!

A brown head--without hair, without eyes, but with teeth, ever so many teeth!--seemed to laugh at her; and close to it sat a Toad, the hugest she had ever seen; and the white skin of his throat kept puffing out and going in. And Chita screamed and screamed, and fled in wild terror,--screaming all the way, till Carmen ran out to meet her and carry her home. Even when safe in her adopted mother's arms, she sobbed with fright. To the vivid fancy of the child there seemed to be some hideous relation between the staring reptile and the brown death's-head, with its empty eyes, and its nightmare-smile.

The shock brought on a fever,--a fever that lasted several days, and left her very weak. But the experience taught her to obey, taught her that Carmen knew best what was for her good. It also caused her to think a great deal. Carmen had told her that the dead people never frightened good little girls who stayed at home.

--"Madrecita Carmen," she asked, "is my mamma dead?"

--"Pobrecita! .... Yes, my angel. God called her to Him,--your darling mother."

--"Madrecita," she asked again,--her young eyes growing vast with horror,--"is my own mamma now like That?" ... She pointed toward the place of the white gleam, behind the great trees.

--"No, no, no! my darling!" cried Carmen, appalled herself by the ghastly question,--"your mamma is with the dear, good, loving God, who lives in the beautiful sky, above the clouds, my darling, beyond the sun!"

But Carmen's kind eyes were full of tears; and the child read their meaning. He who teareth off the Mask of the Flesh had looked into her face one unutterable moment:--she had seen the brutal Truth, naked to the bone!

Yet there came to her a little thrill of consolation, caused by the words of the tender falsehood; for that which she had discerned by day could not explain to her that which she saw almost nightly in her slumber. The face, the voice, the form of her loving mother still lived somewhere,--could not have utterly passed away; since the sweet presence came to her in dreams, bending and smiling over her, caressing her, speaking to her,--sometimes gently chiding, but always chiding with a kiss. And then the child would laugh in her sleep, and prattle in Creole,--talking to the luminous shadow, telling the dead mother all the little deeds and thoughts of the day.... Why would God only let her come at night?

... Her idea of God had been first defined by the sight of a quaint French picture of the Creation,--an engraving which represented a shoreless sea under a black sky, and out of the blackness a solemn and bearded gray head emerging, and a cloudy hand through which stars glimmered. God was like old Doctor de Coulanges, who used to visit the house, and talk in a voice like a low roll of thunder.... At a later day, when Chita had been told that God was "everywhere at the same time "--without and within, beneath and above all things,--this idea became somewhat changed. The awful bearded face, the huge shadowy hand, did not fade from her thought; but they became fantastically blended with the larger and vaguer notion of something that filled the world and reached to the stars,--something diaphanous and incomprehensible like the invisible air, omnipresent and everlasting like the high blue of heaven ....

II.

... She began to learn the life of the coast.

With her acquisition of another tongue, there came to her also the understanding of many things relating to the world of the sea She memorized with novel delight much that was told her day by day concerning the nature surrounding her,--many secrets of the air, many of those signs of heaven which the dwellers in cities cannot comprehend because the atmosphere is thickened and made stagnant above them--cannot even watch because the horizon is hidden from their eyes by walls, and by weary avenues of trees with whitewashed trunks. She learned, by listening, by asking, by observing also, how to know the signs that foretell wild weather:--tremendous sunsets, scuddings and bridgings of cloud,--sharpening and darkening of the sea-line,--and the shriek of gulls flashing to land in level flight, out of a still transparent sky,--and halos about the moon.

She learned where the sea-birds, with white bosoms and brown wings, made their hidden nests of sand,--and where the cranes waded for their prey,--and where the beautiful wild-ducks, plumaged in satiny lilac and silken green, found their food,--and where the best reeds grew to furnish stems for Feliu's red-clay pipe,--and where the ruddy sea-beans were most often tossed upon the shore,--and how the gray pelicans fished all together, like men--moving in far-extending semicircles, beating the flood with their wings to drive the fish before them.

And from Carmen she learned the fables and the sayings of the sea,--the proverbs about its deafness, its avarice, its treachery, its terrific power,--especially one that haunted her for all time thereafter: Si quieres aprender a orar, entra en el mar (If thou wouldst learn to pray, go to the sea). She learned why the sea is salt,--how "the tears of women made the waves of the sea,"--and how the sea has ii no friends,--and how the cat's eyes change with the tides.

What had she lost of life by her swift translation from the dusty existence of cities to the open immensity of nature's freedom? What did she gain?

Doubtless she was saved from many of those little bitternesses and restraints and disappointments which all well-bred city children must suffer in the course of their training for the more or less factitious life of society:--obligations to remain very still with every nimble nerve quivering in dumb revolt;--the injustice of being found troublesome and being sent to bed early for the comfort of her elders;--the cruel necessity of straining her pretty eyes, for many long hours at a time, over grimy desks in gloomy school-rooms, though birds might twitter and bright winds flutter in the trees without;--the austere constrains and heavy drowsiness of warm churches, filled with the droning echoes of a voice preaching incomprehensible things;--the progressively augmenting weariness of lessons in deportment, in dancing, in music, in the impossible art of keeping her dresses unruffled and unsoiled. Perhaps she never had any reason to regret all these.

She went to sleep and awakened with the wild birds;--her life remained as unfettered by formalities as her fine feet by shoes. Excepting Carmen's old prayer-book,--in which she learned to read a little,--her childhood passed without books,--also without pictures, without dainties, without music, without theatrical amusements. But she saw and heard and felt much of that which, though old as the heavens and the earth, is yet eternally new and eternally young with the holiness of beauty,--eternally mystical and divine,--eternally weird: the unveiled magnificence of Nature's moods,--the perpetual poem hymned by wind and surge,--the everlasting splendor of the sky.

She saw the quivering pinkness of waters curled by the breath of the morning--under the deepening of the dawn--like a far fluttering and scattering of rose-leaves of fire;--

Saw the shoreless, cloudless, marvellous double-circling azure of perfect summer days--twin glories of infinite deeps inter-reflected, while the Soul of the World lay still, suffused with a jewel-light, as of vaporized sapphire;--

Saw the Sea shift color,--"change sheets,"--when the viewless Wizard of the Wind breathed upon its face, and made it green;--

Saw the immeasurable panics,--noiseless, scintillant,--which silver, summer after summer, curved leagues of beach with bodies of little fish--the yearly massacre of migrating populations, nations of sea-trout, driven from their element by terror;--and the winnowing of shark-fins,--and the rushing of porpoises,--and the rising of the grande-ecaille, like a pillar of flame,--and the diving and pitching and fighting of the frigates and the gulls,--and the armored hordes of crabs swarming out to clear the slope after the carnage and the gorging had been done;--

Saw the Dreams of the Sky,--scudding mockeries of ridged foam,--and shadowy stratification of capes and coasts and promontories long-drawn out,--and imageries, multicolored, of mountain frondage, and sierras whitening above sierras,--and phantom islands ringed around with lagoons of glory;--

Saw the toppling and smouldering of cloud-worlds after the enormous conflagration of sunsets,--incandescence ruining into darkness; and after it a moving and climbing of stars among the blacknesses,--like searching lamps;--

Saw the deep kindle countless ghostly candles as for mysterious night-festival,--and a luminous billowing under a black sky, and effervescences of fire, and the twirling and crawling of phosphoric foam;--

Saw the mesmerism of the Moon;--saw the enchanted tides self-heaped in muttering obeisance before her.

Often she heard the Music of the Marsh through the night: an infinity of flutings and tinklings made by tiny amphibia,--like the low blowing of numberless little tin horns, the clanking of billions of little bells;--and, at intervals, profound tones, vibrant and heavy, as of a bass viol--the orchestra of the great frogs! And interweaving with it all, one continuous shrilling,--keen as the steel speech of a saw,--the stridulous telegraphy of crickets.

But always,--always, dreaming or awake, she heard the huge blind Sea chanting that mystic and eternal hymn, which none may hear without awe, which no musician can learn,--

Heard the hoary Preacher,--El Pregonador,--preaching the ancient Word, the word "as a fire, and as a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces,"--the Elohim--Word of the Sea! ...

Unknowingly she came to know the immemorial sympathy of the mind with the Soul of the World,--the melancholy wrought by its moods of gray, the reverie responsive to its vagaries of mist, the exhilaration of its vast exultings--days of windy joy, hours of transfigured light.

She felt,--even without knowing it,--the weight of the Silences, the solemnities of sky and sea in these low regions where all things seem to dream--waters and grasses with their momentary wavings,--woods gray-webbed with mosses that drip and drool,--horizons with their delusions of vapor,--cranes meditating in their marshes,--kites floating in the high blue.... Even the children were singularly quiet; and their play less noisy--though she could not have learned the difference--than the play of city children. Hour after hour, the women sewed or wove in silence. And the brown men,--always barefooted, always wearing rough blue shirts,--seemed, when they lounged about the wharf on idle days, as if they had told each other long ago all they knew or could ever know, and had nothing more to say. They would stare at the flickering of the current, at the drifting of clouds and buzzard:--seldom looking at each other, and always turning their black eyes again, in a weary way, to sky or sea. Even thus one sees the horses and the cattle of the coast, seeking the beach to escape the whizzing flies;--all watch the long waves rolling in, and sometimes turn their heads a moment to look at one another, but always look back to the waves again, as if wondering at a mystery....

How often she herself had wondered--wondered at the multiform changes of each swell as it came in--transformations of tint, of shape, of motion, that seemed to betoken a life infinitely more subtle than the strange cold life of lizards and of fishes,--and sinister, and spectral. Then they all appeared to move in order,--according to one law or impulse;--each had its own voice, yet all sang one and the same everlasting song. Vaguely, as she watched them and listened to them, there came to her the idea of a unity of will in their motion, a unity of menace in their utterance--the idea of one monstrous and complex life! The sea lived: it could crawl backward and forward; it could speak!--it only feigned deafness and sightlessness for some malevolent end. Thenceforward she feared to find herself alone with it. Was it not at her that it strove to rush, muttering, and showing its white teeth, ... just because it knew that she was all by herself? ... Si quieres aprender a orar, entra en el mar! And Concha had well learned to pray. But the sea seemed to her the one Power which God could not make to obey Him as He pleased. Saying the creed one day, she repeated very slowly the opening words,--"Creo en un Dios, padre todopoderoso, Criador de cielo y de la tierra,"--and paused and thought. Creator of Heaven and Earth? "Madrecita Carmen," she asked,--"quien entonces hizo el mar?" (who then made the sea?).