Had the kinsfolk of James North any hope that their visit might revive
some lingering desire he still combated to enter once more the world
they represented, that hope would have soon died. Whatever effect this
episode had upon the solitary,—and he had become so self-indulgent of
his sorrow, and so careless of all that came between him and it, as to
meet opposition with profound indifference,—the only appreciable
result was a greater attraction for the solitude that protected him,
and he grew even to love the bleak shore and barren sands that had
proved so inhospitable to others. There was a new meaning to the roar
of the surges, an honest, loyal sturdiness in the unchanging
persistency of the uncouth and blustering trade-winds, and a mute
fidelity in the shining sands, treacherous to all but him. With such
bandogs to lie in wait for trespassers, should he not be grateful?
If no bitterness was awakened by the repeated avowal of the
unfaithfulness of the woman he loved, it was because he had always made
the observation and experience of others give way to the dominance of
his own insight. No array of contradictory facts ever shook his belief
or unbelief; like all egotists, he accepted them as truths controlled
by a larger truth of which he alone was cognizant. His simplicity,
which was but another form of his egotism, was so complete as to baffle
ordinary malicious cunning, and so he was spared the experience and
knowledge that come to a lower nature, and help debase it.
Exercise and the stimulus of the few wants that sent him hunting or
fishing kept up his physical health. Never a lover of rude freedom or
outdoor life his sedentary predilections and nice tastes kept him from
lapsing into barbarian excess; never a sportsman he followed the chase
with no feverish exaltation. Even dumb creatures found out his secret,
and at times, stalking moodily over the upland, the brown deer and elk
would cross his path without fear or molestation, or, idly lounging in
his canoe within the river bar, flocks of wild fowl would settle within
stroke of his listless oar. And so the second winter of his hermitage
drew near its close, and with it came a storm that passed into local
history, and is still remembered. It uprooted giant trees along the
river, and with them the tiny rootlets of the life he was idly
fostering.
The morning had been fitfully turbulent, the wind veering several
points south and west, with suspicions lulls, unlike the steady onset
of the regular southwest trades. High overhead the long manes of
racing cirro stratus streamed with flying gulls and hurrying
water-fowl; plover piped incessantly, and a flock of timorous
sand-pipers sought the low ridge of his cabin, while a wrecking crew of
curlew hastily manned the uprooted tree that tossed wearily beyond the
bar. By noon the flying clouds huddled together in masses, and then
were suddenly exploded in one vast opaque sheet over the heavens. The
sea became gray, and suddenly wrinkled and old. There was a dumb,
half-articulate cry in the air,—rather a confusion of many sounds, as
of the booming of distant guns, the clangor of a bell, the trampling of
many waves, the creaking of timbers and soughing of leaves, that sank
and fell ere you could yet distinguish them. And then it came on to
blow. For two hours it blew strongly. At the time the sun should have
set the wind had increased; in fifteen minutes darkness shut down, even
the white sands lost their outlines, and sea and shore and sky lay in
the grip of a relentless and aggressive power.
Within his cabin, by the leaping light of his gusty fire, North sat
alone. His first curiosity passed, the turmoil without no longer
carried his thought beyond its one converging centre. SHE had come to
him on the wings of the storm, even as she had been borne to him on the
summer fog-cloud. Now and then the wind shook the cabin, but he heeded
it not. He had no fears for its safety; it presented its low gable to
the full fury of the wind that year by year had piled, and even now was
piling, protecting buttresses of sand against it. With each succeeding
gust it seemed to nestle more closely to its foundations, in the whirl
of flying sand that rattled against its roof and windows. It was
nearly midnight when a sudden thought brought him to his feet. What if
SHE were exposed to the fury of such a night as this? What could he do
to help her? Perhaps even now, as he sat there idle, she—Hark! was not
that a gun—No? Yes, surely!
He hurriedly unbolted the door, but the strength of the wind and the
impact of drifted sand resisted his efforts. With a new and feverish
strength possessing him he forced it open wide enough to permit his
egress when the wind caught him as a feather, rolled him over and over,
and then, grappling him again, held him down hard and fast against the
drift. Unharmed, but unable to move, he lay there, hearing the
multitudinous roar of the storm, but unable to distinguish one familiar
sound in the savage medley. At last he managed to crawl flat on his
face to the cabin, and refastening the door, threw himself upon his bed.
He was awakened from a fitful dream of his Cousin Maria. She with a
supernatural strength seemed to be holding the door against some
unseen, unknown power that moaned and strove without, and threw itself
in despairing force against the cabin. He could see the lithe
undulations of her form as she alternately yielded to its power, and
again drew the door against it, coiling herself around the log-hewn
doorpost with a hideous, snake-like suggestion. And then a struggle
and a heavy blow, which shook the very foundations of the structure,
awoke him. He leaped to his feet, and into an inch of water! By the
flickering firelight he could see it oozing and dripping from the
crevices of the logs and broadening into a pool by the chimney. A
scrap of paper torn from an envelope was floating idly on its current.
Was it the overflow of the backed-up waters of the river? He was not
left long in doubt. Another blow upon the gable of the house, and a
torrent of spray leaped down the chimney, scattered the embers far and
wide, and left him in utter darkness. Some of the spray clung to his
lips. It was salt. The great ocean had beaten down the river bar and
was upon him!
Was there aught to fly to? No! The cabin stood upon the highest point
of the sand spit, and the low swale on one side crossed by his late
visitors was a seething mass of breakers, while the estuary behind him
was now the ocean itself. There was nothing to do but to wait.
The very helplessness of his situation was, to a man of his peculiar
temperament, an element of patient strength. The instinct of
self-preservation was still strong in him, but he had no fear of death,
nor, indeed, any presentiment of it; yet if it came, it was an easy
solution of the problem that had been troubling him, and it wiped off
the slate! He thought of the sarcastic prediction of his cousin, and
death in the form that threatened him was the obliteration of his home
and even the ground upon which it stood. There would be nothing to
record, no stain could come upon the living. The instinct that kept
him true to HER would tell her how he died; if it did not, it was
equally well. And with this simple fatalism his only belief, this
strange man groped his way to his bed, lay down, and in a few moments
was asleep. The storm still roared without. Once again the surges
leaped against the cabin, but it was evident that the wind was abating
with the tide.
When he awoke it was high noon, and the sun was shining brightly. For
some time he lay in a delicious languor, doubting if he was alive or
dead, but feeling through every nerve and fibre an exquisite sense of
peace—a rest he had not known since his boyhood—a relief he scarcely
knew from what. He felt that he was smiling, and yet his pillow was
wet with the tears that glittered still on his lashes. The sand
blocking up his doorway, he leaped lightly from his window. A few
clouds were still sailing slowly in the heavens, the trailing plumes of
a great benediction that lay on sea and shore. He scarcely recognized
the familiar landscape; a new bar had been formed in the river, and a
narrow causeway of sand that crossed the lagoon and marshes to the
river bank and the upland trail seemed to bring him nearer to humanity
again. He was conscious of a fresh, childlike delight in all this, and
when, a moment later, he saw the old uprooted tree, now apparently
forever moored and imbedded in the sand beside his cabin, he ran to it
with a sense of joy.
Its trailing roots were festooned with clinging sea-weed and the long,
snaky, undulating stems of the sea-turnip; and fixed between two
crossing roots was a bamboo orange crate, almost intact. As he walked
toward it he heard a strange cry, unlike anything the barren sands had
borne before. Thinking it might be some strange sea bird caught in the
meshes of the sea-weed, he ran to the crate and looked within. It was
half filled with sea-moss and feathery algae. The cry was repeated.
He brushed aside the weeds with his hands. It was not a wounded sea
bird, but a living human child!
As he lifted it from its damp enwrappings he saw that it was an infant
eight or nine months old. How and when it had been brought there, or
what force had guided that elfish cradle to his very door, he could not
determine; but it must have been left early, for it was quite warm, and
its clothing almost dried by the blazing morning sun. To wrap his coat
about it, to run to his cabin with it, to start out again with the
appalling conviction that nothing could be done for it there, occupied
some moments. His nearest neighbor was Trinidad Joe, a "logger," three
miles up the river. He remembered to have heard vaguely that he was a
man of family. To half strangle the child with a few drops from his
whisky flask, to extricate his canoe from the marsh, and strike out
into the river with his waif, was at least to do something. In half an
hour he had reached the straggling cabin and sheds of Trinidad Joe, and
from the few scanty flowers that mingled with the brushwood fence, and
a surplus of linen fluttering on the line, he knew that his surmise as
to Trinidad Joe's domestic establishment was correct.
The door at which he knocked opened upon a neat, plainly-furnished
room, and the figure of a buxom woman of twenty-five. With an
awkwardness new to him, North stammered out the circumstances of his
finding the infant, and the object of his visit. Before he had
finished, the woman, by some feminine trick, had taken the child from
his hands ere he knew it; and when he paused, out of breath, burst into
a fit of laughter. North tried to laugh too, but failed.
When the woman had wiped the tears from a pair of very frank blue eyes,
and hidden two rows of very strong white teeth again, she said:—
"Look yar! You're that looney sort a' chap that lives alone over on
the spit yonder, ain't ye?"
North hastened to admit all that the statement might imply.
"And so ye've had a baby left ye to keep you company? Lordy!" Here she
looked as if dangerously near a relapse, and then added, as if in
explanation of her conduct,—
"When I saw ye paddlin' down here,—you thet ez shy as elk in
summer,—I sez, 'He's sick.' But a baby,—Oh, Lordy!"
For a moment North almost hated her. A woman who, in this pathetic,
perhaps almost tragic, picture saw only a ludicrous image, and that
image himself, was of another race than that he had ever mingled with.
Profoundly indifferent as he had always been to the criticism of his
equals in station, the mischievous laughter of this illiterate woman
jarred upon him worse than his cousin's sarcasm. It was with a little
dignity that he pointed out the fact that at present the child needed
nourishment. "It's very young," he added. "I'm afraid it wants its
natural nourishment."
"Whar is it to get it?" asked the woman.
James North hesitated, and looked around. There should be a baby
somewhere! there MUST be a baby somewhere! "I thought that you," he
stammered, conscious of an awkward coloring,—"I—that is—I—" He
stopped short, for she was already cramming her apron into her mouth,
too late, however, to stop the laugh that overflowed it. When she found
her breath again, she said,—
"Look yar! I don't wonder they said you was looney! I'm Trinidad
Joe's onmarried darter, and the only woman in this house. Any fool
could have told you that. Now, ef you can rig us up a baby out o' them
facts, I'd like to see it done."
Inwardly furious but outwardly polite, James North begged her pardon,
deplored his ignorance, and, with a courtly bow, made a movement to
take the child. But the woman as quickly drew it away.
"Not much," she said, hastily. "What! trust that poor critter to you?
No, sir! Thar's more ways of feeding a baby, young man, than you knows
on, with all your 'nat'ral nourishment.' But it looks kinder logy and
stupid."
North freezingly admitted that he had given the infant whisky as a
stimulant.
"You did? Come, now, that ain't so looney after all. Well, I'll take
the baby, and when Dad comes home we'll see what can be done."
North hesitated. His dislike of the woman was intense, and yet he knew
no one else and the baby needed instant care. Besides, he began to see
the ludicrousness of his making a first call on his neighbors with a
foundling to dispose of. She saw his hesitation, and said,—
"Ye don't know me, in course. Well, I'm Bessy Robinson, Trinidad Joe
Robinson's daughter. I reckon Dad will give me a character if you want
references, or any of the boys on the river."
"I'm only thinking of the trouble I'm giving you, Miss Robinson, I
assure you. Any expense you may incur—"
"Young man," said Bessy Robinson, turning sharply on her heel, and
facing him with her black brows a little contracted, "if it comes to
expenses, I reckon I'll pay you for that baby, or not take it at all.
But I don't know you well enough to quarrel with you on sight. So
leave the child to me, and, if you choose, paddle down here to-morrow,
after sun up—the ride will do you good—and see it, and Dad thrown in.
Good by!" and with one powerful but well-shaped arm thrown around the
child, and the other crooked at the dimpled elbow a little
aggressively, she swept by James North and entered a bedroom, closing
the door behind her.
When Mr. James North reached his cabin it was dark. As he rebuilt his
fire, and tried to rearrange the scattered and disordered furniture,
and remove the debris of last night's storm, he was conscious for the
first time of feeling lonely. He did not miss the child. Beyond the
instincts of humanity and duty he had really no interest in its welfare
or future. He was rather glad to get rid of it, he would have
preferred to some one else, and yet SHE looked as if she were
competent. And then came the reflection that since the morning he had
not once thought of the woman he loved. The like had never occurred in
his twelvemonth solitude. So he set to work, thinking of her and of
his sorrows, until the word "Looney," in connection with his suffering,
flashed across his memory. "Looney!" It was not a nice word. It
suggested something less than insanity; something that might happen to
a common, unintellectual sort of person. He remembered the loon, an
ungainly feathered neighbor, that was popularly supposed to have lent
its name to the adjective. Could it be possible that people looked
upon him as one too hopelessly and uninterestingly afflicted for
sympathy or companionship, too unimportant and common for even
ridicule; or was this but the coarse interpretation of that vulgar girl?
Nevertheless, the next morning "after sun up" James North was at
Trinidad Joe's cabin. That worthy proprietor himself—a long, lank
man, with even more than the ordinary rural Western characteristics of
ill health, ill feeding, and melancholy—met him on the bank, clothed
in a manner and costume that was a singular combination of the
frontiersman and the sailor. When North had again related the story of
his finding the child, Trinidad Joe pondered.
"It mout hev been stowed away in one of them crates for safe-keeping,"
he said, musingly, "and washed off the deck o' one o' them Tahiti brigs
goin' down fer oranges. Least-ways, it never got thar from these
parts."
"But it's a miracle its life was saved at all. It must have been some
hours in the water."
"Them brigs lays their course well inshore, and it was just mebbe a
toss up if the vessel clawed off the reef at all! And ez to the child
keepin' up, why, dog my skin! that's just the contrariness o' things,"
continued Joe, in sententious cynicism. "Ef an able seaman had fallen
from the yard-arm that night he'd been sunk in sight o' the ship, and
thet baby ez can't swim a stroke sails ashore, sound asleep, with the
waves for a baby-jumper."
North, who was half relieved, yet half awkwardly disappointed at not
seeing Bessy, ventured to ask how the child was doing.
"She'll do all right now," said a frank voice above, and, looking up,
North discerned the round arms, blue eyes, and white teeth of the
daughter at the window. "She's all hunky, and has an appetite—ef she
hezn't got her 'nat'ral nourishment.' Come, Dad! heave ahead, and tell
the stranger what you and me allow we'll do, and don't stand there
swappin' lies with him."
"Weel," said Trinidad Joe, dejectedly, "Bess allows she can rar that
baby and do justice to it. And I don't say—though I'm her
father—that she can't. But when Bess wants anything she wants it all,
clean down; no half-ways nor leavin's for her."
"That's me! go on, Dad—you're chippin' in the same notch every time,"
said Miss Robinson, with cheerful directness.
"Well, we agree to put the job up this way. We'll take the child and
you'll give us a paper or writin' makin' over all your right and title.
How's that?"
Without knowing exactly why he did, Mr. North objected decidedly.
"Do you think we won't take good care of it?" asked Miss Bessy, sharply.
"That is not the question," said North, a little hotly. "In the first
place, the child is not mine to give. It has fallen into my hands as a
trust,—the first hands that received it from its parents. I do not
think it right to allow any other hands to come between theirs and
mine."
Miss Bessy left the window. In another moment she appeared from the
house, and, walking directly towards North, held out a somewhat
substantial hand. "Good!" she said, as she gave his fingers an honest
squeeze. "You ain't so looney after all. Dad, he's right! He shan't
gin it up, but we'll go halves in it, he and me. He'll be father and
I'll be mother 'til death do us part, or the reg'lar family turns up.
Well—what do you say?"
More pleased than he dared confess to himself with the praise of this
common girl, Mr. James North assented. Then would he see the baby? He
would, and Trinidad Joe having already seen the baby, and talked of the
baby, and felt the baby, and indeed had the baby offered to him in
every way during the past night, concluded to give some of his valuable
time to logging, and left them together.
Mr. North was obliged to admit that the baby was thriving. He moreover
listened with polite interest to the statement that the baby's eyes
were hazel, like his own; that it had five teeth; that she was, for a
girl of that probable age, a robust child; and yet Mr. North lingered.
Finally, with his hand on the door-lock, he turned to Bessy and said,—
"May I ask you an odd question, Miss Robinson?"
"Go on."
"Why did you think I was—'looney'?"
The frank Miss Robinson bent her head over the baby.
"Why?"
"Yes, why?"
"Because you WERE looney."
"Oh!"
"But—"
"Yes—"
"You'll get over it."
And under the shallow pretext of getting the baby's food, she retired
to the kitchen, where Mr. North had the supreme satisfaction of seeing
her, as he passed the window, sitting on a chair with her apron over
her head, shaking with laughter.
For the next two or three days he did not visit the Robinsons, but gave
himself up to past memories. On the third day he had—it must be
confessed not without some effort—brought himself into that condition
of patient sorrow which had been his habit. The episode of the storm
and the finding of the baby began to fade, as had faded the visit of
his relatives. It had been a dull, wet day and he was sitting by his
fire, when there came a tap at his door. "Flora;" by which juvenescent
name his aged Indian handmaid was known, usually announced her presence
with an imitation of a curlew's cry: it could not be her. He fancied
he heard the trailing of a woman's dress against the boards, and
started to his feet, deathly pale, with a name upon his lips. But the
door was impatiently thrown open, and showed Bessy Robinson! And the
baby!
With a feeling of relief he could not understand he offered her a seat.
She turned her frank eyes on him curiously.
"You look skeert!"
"I was startled. You know I see nobody here!"
"Thet's so. But look yar, do you ever use a doctor?"
Not clearly understanding her, he in turn asked, "Why?"
"Cause you must rise up and get one now—thet's why. This yer baby of
ours is sick. We don't use a doctor at our house, we don't beleeve in
'em, hain't no call for 'em—but this yer baby's parents mebbee did.
So rise up out o' that cheer and get one."
James North looked at Miss Robinson and rose, albeit a little in doubt,
and hesitating.
Miss Robinson saw it. "I shouldn't hev troubled ye, nor ridden three
mile to do it, if ther hed been any one else to send. But Dad's over
at Eureka, buying logs, and I'm alone. Hello—wher yer goin'?"
North had seized his hat and opened the door. "For a doctor," he
replied amazedly.
"Did ye kalkilate to walk six miles and back?"
"Certainly—I have no horse."
"But I have, and you'll find her tethered outside. She ain't much to
look at, but when you strike the trail she'll go."
"But YOU—how will YOU return?"
"Well," said Miss Robinson, drawing her chair to the fire, taking off
her hat and shawl, and warming her knees by the blaze, "I didn't reckon
to return. You'll find me here when you come back with the doctor.
Go! Skedaddle quick!"
She did not have to repeat the command. In another instant James North
was in Miss Bessy's seat—a man's dragoon saddle,—and pounding away
through the sand. Two facts were in his mind: one was that he, the
"looney," was about to open communication with the wisdom and
contemporary criticism of the settlement, by going for a doctor to
administer to a sick and anonymous infant in his possession; the other
was that his solitary house was in the hands of a self-invited,
large-limbed, illiterate, but rather comely young woman. These facts
he could not gallop away from, but to his credit be it recorded that he
fulfilled his mission zealously, if not coherently, to the doctor, who
during the rapid ride gathered the idea that North had rescued a young
married woman from drowning, who had since given birth to a child.
The few words that set the doctor right when he arrived at the cabin
might in any other community have required further explanation, but Dr.
Duchesne, an old army surgeon, was prepared for everything and
indifferent to all. "The infant," he said, "was threatened with
inflammation of the lungs; at present there was no danger, but the
greatest care and caution must be exercised. Particularly exposure
should be avoided." "That settles the whole matter, then," said Bessy
potentially. Both gentlemen looked their surprise. "It means," she
condescended to further explain, "that YOU must ride that filly home,
wait for the old man to come to-morrow, and then ride back here with
some of my duds, for thar's no 'day-days' nor picknicking for that baby
ontil she's better. And I reckon to stay with her ontil she is."
"She certainly is unable to bear any exposure at present," said the
doctor, with an amused side glance at North's perplexed face. "Miss
Robinson is right. I'll ride with you over the sands as far as the
trail."
"I'm afraid," said North, feeling it incumbent upon him to say
something, "that you'll hardly find it as comfortable here as—"
"I reckon not," she said simply, "but I didn't expect much."
North turned a little wearily away. "Good night," she said suddenly,
extending her hand, with a gentler smile of lip and eye than he had
ever before noticed, "good night—take good care of Dad."
The doctor and North rode together some moments in silence. North had
another fact presented to him, i. e. that he was going a-visiting, and
that he had virtually abandoned his former life; also that it would be
profanation to think of his sacred woe in the house of a stranger.
"I dare say," said the doctor, suddenly, "you are not familiar with the
type of woman Miss Bessy presents so perfectly. Your life has been
spent among the conventional class."
North froze instantly at what seemed to be a probing of his secret.
Disregarding the last suggestion, he made answer simply and truthfully
that he had never met any Western girl like Bessy.
"That's your bad luck," said the doctor. "You think her coarse and
illiterate?"
Mr. North had been so much struck with her kindness that really he had
not thought of it.
"That's not so," said the doctor, curtly; "although even if you told
her so she would not think any the less of you—nor of herself. If she
spoke rustic Greek instead of bad English, and wore a cestus in place
of an ill-fitting corset, you'd swear she was a goddess. There's your
trail. Good night."
