An Oldport Romance
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson >> An Oldport Romance
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The storm had blown itself out by sunrise; the wind had
shifted, beating down the waves; it seemed as if everything in
nature were exhausted. The very tide had ebbed away. The
light-ship rested between the rocks, helpless, still at the
mercy of the returning waves, and yet still upright and with
that stately look of unconscious pleading which all shipwrecked
vessels wear. it is wonderfully like the look I have seen in
the face of some dead soldier, on whom war had done its worst.
Every line of a ship is so built for motion, every part, while
afloat, seems so full of life and so answering to the human
life it bears, that this paralysis of shipwreck touches the
imagination as if the motionless thing had once been animated
by a soul.
And not far from the vessel, in a chamber of the seaside
farm-house, lay the tenderer and fairer wreck of Emilia. Her
storms and her passions were ended. The censure of the world,
the anguish of friends, the clinging arms of love, were nothing
now to her. Again the soft shelter of unconsciousness had
clasped her in; but this time the trance was longer and the
faintness was unto death.
From the moment of her drifting ashore, it was the young
boatman who had assumed the right to care for her and to direct
everything. Philip seemed stunned; Harry was his usual
clear-headed and efficient self; but to his honest eyes much
revealed itself in a little while; and when Hope arrived in the
early morning, he said to her, "This boatman, who once saved
your life, is Emilia's Swiss lover, Antoine Marval."
"More than lover," said the young Swiss, overhearing. "She was
my wife before God, when you took her from me. In my country,
a betrothal is as sacred as a marriage. Then came that man, he
filled her heart with illusions, and took her away in my
absence. When my brother was here in the corvette, he found her
for me. Then I came for her; I saved her sister; then I saw the
name on the card and would not give my own. I became her
servant. She saw me in the yacht, only once; she knew me; she
was afraid. Then she said, 'Perhaps I still love you,--a
little; I do not know; I am in despair; take me from this home
I hate.' We sailed that day in the small boat for
Narragansett,--I know not where. She hardly looked up or
spoke; but for me, I cared for nothing since she was with me.
When the storm came, she was frightened, and said, 'It is a
retribution.' I said, 'You shall never go back.' She never
did. Here she is. You cannot take her from me."
Once on board the light-ship, she had been assigned the
captain's state-room, while Antoine watched at the door. She
seemed to shrink from him whenever he went to speak to her, he
owned, but she answered kindly and gently, begging to be left
alone. When at last the vessel parted her moorings, he
persuaded Emilia to come on deck and be lashed to the mast,
where she sat without complaint.
Who can fathom the thoughts of that bewildered child, as she
sat amid the spray and the howling of the blast, while the
doomed vessel drifted on with her to the shore? Did all the
error and sorrow of her life pass distinctly before her? Or did
the roar of the surf lull her into quiet, like the unconscious
kindness of wild creatures that toss and bewilder their prey
into unconsciousness ere they harm it? None can tell. Death
answers no questions; it only makes them needless.
The morning brought to the scene John Lambert, just arrived by
land from New York.
The passion of John Lambert for his wife was of that kind which
ennobles while it lasts, but which rarely outlasts marriage. A
man of such uncongenial mould will love an enchanting woman
with a mad, absorbing passion, where self-sacrifice is so
mingled with selfishness that the two emotions seem one; he
will hungrily yearn to possess her, to call her by his own
name, to hold her in his arms, to kill any one else who claims
her. But when she is once his wife, and his arms hold a body
without a soul,--no soul at least for him,--then her image is
almost inevitably profaned, and the passion which began too
high for earth ends far too low for heaven. Let now death
change that form to marble, and instantly it resumes its virgin
holiness; though the presence of life did not sanctify, its
departure does. It is only the true lover to whom the breathing
form is as sacred as the breathless.
That ideality of nature which love had developed in this man,
and which had already drooped a little during his brief period
of marriage, was born again by the side of death. While Philip
wandered off silent and lonely with his grief, John Lambert
knelt by the beautiful remains, talking inarticulately, his
eyes streaming with unchecked tears. Again was Emilia, in her
marble paleness, the calm centre of a tragedy she herself had
caused. The wild, ungoverned child was the image of peace; it
was the stolid and prosperous man who was in the storm. It was
not till Hope came that there was any change. Then his
prostrate nature sought hers, as the needle leaps to the iron;
the first touch of her hand, the sight of her kiss upon
Emilia's forehead, made him strong. It was the thorough
subjection of a worldly man to the higher organization of a
noble woman, and thenceforth it never varied. In later years,
after he had foolishly sought, as men will, to win her to a
nearer tie, there was no moment when she had not full control
over his time, his energies, and his wealth.
After it was all ended, Hope told him everything that had
happened; but in that wild moment of his despair she told him
nothing. Only she and Harry knew the story of the young Swiss;
and now that Emilia was gone, her early lover had no wish to
speak of her to any but these two, or to linger long where she
had been doubly lost to him, by marriage and by death. The
world, with all its prying curiosity, usually misses the key to
the very incidents about which it asks most questions; and of
the many who gossiped or mourned concerning Emilia, none knew
the tragic complication which her death alone could have
solved. The breaking of Hope's engagement to Philip was
attributed to every cause but the true one. And when the storm
of the great Rebellion broke over the land, its vast calamity
absorbed all minor griefs.
XXIII.
REQUIESCAT.
THANK God! it is not within the power of one man's errors to
blight the promise of a life like that of Hope. It is but a
feeble destiny that is wrecked by passion, when it should be
ennobled. Aunt Jane and Kate watched Hope closely during her
years of probation, for although she fancied herself to be
keeping her own counsel, yet her career lay in broad light for
them. She was like yonder sailboat, which floats conspicuous by
night amid the path of moonbeams, and which yet seems to its
own voyagers to be remote and unseen upon a waste of waves.
Why should I linger over the details of her life, after the
width of ocean lay between her and Malbone, and a manhood of
self-denying usefulness had begun to show that even he could
learn something by life's retributions? We know what she was,
and it is of secondary importance where she went or what she
did. Kindle the light of the light-house, and it has nothing
to do, except to shine. There is for it no wrong direction.
There is no need to ask, "How? Over which especial track of
distant water must my light go forth, to find the wandering
vessel to be guided in?" It simply shines. Somewhere there is
a ship that needs it, or if not, the light does its duty. So
did Hope.
We must leave her here. Yet I cannot bear to think of her as
passing through earthly life without tasting its deepest bliss,
without the last pure ecstasy of human love, without the kisses
of her own children on her lips, their waxen fingers on her
bosom.
And yet again, is this life so long? May it not be better to
wait until its little day is done, and the summer night of old
age has yielded to a new morning, before attaining that acme of
joy? Are there enough successive grades of bliss for all
eternity, if so much be consummated here? Must all novels end
with an earthly marriage, and nothing be left for heaven?
Perhaps, for such as Hope, this life is given to show what
happiness might be, and they await some other sphere for its
fulfilment. The greater part of the human race live out their
mortal years without attaining more than a far-off glimpse of
the very highest joy. Were this life all, its very happiness
were sadness. If, as I doubt not, there be another sphere,
then that which is unfulfilled in this must yet find
completion, nothing omitted, nothing denied. And though a
thousand oracles should pronounce this thought an idle dream,
neither Hope nor I would believe them.
It was a radiant morning of last February when I walked across
the low hills to the scene of the wreck. Leaving the road
before reaching the Fort, I struck across the wild
moss-country, full of boulders and footpaths and stunted cedars
and sullen ponds. I crossed the height of land, where the
ruined lookout stands like the remains of a Druidical temple,
and then went down toward the ocean. Banks and ridges of snow
lay here and there among the fields, and the white lines of
distant capes seemed but drifts running seaward. The ocean was
gloriously alive,--the blackest blue, with white caps on every
wave; the shore was all snowy, and the gulls were flying back
and forth in crowds; you could not tell whether they were the
white waves coming ashore, or bits of snow going to sea. A
single fragment of ship-timber, black with time and weeds, and
crusty with barnacles, heaved to and fro in the edge of the
surf, and two fishermen's children, a boy and girl, tilted upon
it as it moved, clung with the semblance of terror to each
other, and played at shipwreck.
The rocks were dark with moisture, steaming in the sun. Great
sheets of ice, white masks of departing winter, clung to every
projecting cliff, or slid with crash and shiver into the surge.
Icicles dropped their slow and reverberating tears upon the
rock where Emilia once lay breathless; and it seemed as if
their cold, chaste drops were sent to cleanse from her memory
each scarlet stain, and leave it virginal and pure.
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