CHAPTER XXXII.
Under the plea that, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour, Jonathan might still possibly put in an appearance, Adam lingered in his aunt's cheerful-looking kitchen until after the clock had struck eleven: then he very reluctantly got up, and, bidding Mrs. Tucker and Sammy good-night, betook himself to the mill-house, in which, with regard to his greater safety, a bed had been made up for him.
Adam felt that, court it as he might, sleep was very far from his eyes, and that, compared to his own society and the torment of thought which harassed and racked him each time he found himself alone, even Sammy Tucker's company was a boon to be grateful for. There were times during these hours of dreary loneliness when Adam's whole nature seemed submerged by the billows of love—cruel waves, which would toss him hither and thither, making sport of his hapless condition, to strand him at length on the quicksands of fear, where a thousand terrible alarms would seize him and fill him with dread as to how these disasters might end. What would become of him? how would it fare with Eve and himself? where could they go? what could they do?—questions ever swallowed up by the constantly-recurring, all-important bewilderment as to what could possibly have brought about this dire disaster.
On this night Adam's thoughts were more than usually engrossed by Eve: her form seemed constantly before him, distracting him with images as tempting and unsatisfying as is the desert spring with which desire mocks the thirst of the fainting traveller. At length that relaxation of strength which in sterner natures takes the place of tears subdued Adam, a softened feeling crept over him, and, shifting his position so that he might rest his arms against the corn-bin near, a deep-drawn sigh escaped him.
"Hist!"
Adam started at the sound, and without moving turned his head and looked rapidly about him. Nothing was to be seen: with the exception of the small radius round the lantern all was darkness and gloom.
"Hist!" was repeated, and this time there was no more doubt but that the sound came from some one close by.
A clammy sweat stood on Adam's forehead, his tongue felt dry and so powerless that it needed an effort to force it to move. "Who's there?" he said.
"'Tis me—Jonathan."
Adam caught up the lantern, and, turning it in the direction whence the voice came, found to his relief that the rays fell upon Jonathan's face. "Odds rot it, lad!" he exclaimed, "but you've gived me a turn! How the deuce did you get in here? and why didn't ye come inside to the house over there?"
"I've a bin scrooged down 'tween these 'ere sacks for ever so long," said Jonathan, trying to stretch out his cramped limbs: "I reckon I've had a bit o' a nap too, for the time ha'n't a took long in goin', and when I fust come 'twasn't altogether dark."
"'Tis close on the stroke o' twelve now," said Adam. "But come, what news, eh? Have ye got hold o' anything yet? Are they devils off for good? Is that what you've come to tell me?"
"Iss, they's off this time, I fancy," said Jonathan; "but 'twasn't that broffed me, though I should ha' comed to tell 'ee o' that too."
"No? What is it then?" demanded Adam impatiently, turning the light so that he could get a better command of Jonathan's face.
"'Twas 'cos o' this," said Jonathan, his voice dropping to a whisper, so that, though the words were trembling on his lips, his agitation and excitement almost prevented their utterance: "I've found it out—all of it—who blowed the gaff 'pon us."
Adam started forward: his face all but touched Jonathan's, and an expression of terrible eagerness came into his eyes.
"'Twas she!" hissed Jonathan—"she—her from London—Eve;" but before the name was well uttered Adam had thrown himself upon him and was grasping at his throat as if to throttle him, while a volley of imprecations poured from his mouth, denouncing the base lie which Jonathan had dared to utter. A moment more, and this fit of impotent rage over, he flung him violently off, and stood for a moment trying to bring back his senses; but the succession of circumstances had been too much for him: his head swam round, his knees shook under him, and he had to grasp hold of a beam near to steady himself.
"What for do 'ee sarve me like that, then?" muttered Jonathan. "I ain't a-tellin' 'ee no more than I've a-heerd, and what's the truth. Her name's all over the place," he went on, forgetful of the recent outburst and warming with his narration. "Her's a reg'lar bad wan; her's a-carr'ed on with a sodger-chap so well as with Jerrem; her's a—"
"By the living Lord, if you speak another word I'll be your death!" exclaimed Adam.
"Wa-al, and so you may," exclaimed Jonathan doggedly, "if so be you'll lave me bide 'til I'se seed the end o' she. Why, what do 'ee mane, then?" he cried, a sudden suspicion throwing a light on Adam's storm of indignation. "Her bain't nawthin' to you—her's Jerrem's maid: her bain't your maid? Why," he added, finding that Adam didn't speak, "'twas through the letter I carr'ed from he that her'd got it to blab about. I wishes my hand had bin struck off"—and he dashed it violently against the wooden bin—"afore I'd touched his letter or his money."
"What letter?" gasped Adam.
"Wa-al, I knaws you said I warn't to take neither wan; but Jerrem he coaxes and persuades, and says you ain't to knaw nawthin' about it, and 'tain't nawthin' in it, only 'cos he'd a got a letter fra' she to Guernsey, and this was t' answer; and then I knawed, 'cos I seed em, that they was sweetheartin' and that, and—"
"Did you give her that letter?" said Adam; and the sound of his voice was so strange that Jonathan shrank back and cowered close to the wall.
"Iss, I did," he faltered: "leastwise, I gived un to Joan, but t'other wan had the radin' in it."
There was a pause, during which Adam stood stunned, feeling that everything was crumbling and giving way beneath him—that he had no longer anything to live for, anything to hope, anything to fear. As, one after another, each former bare suggestion of artifice now passed before him clothed in the raiment of certain deceit, he made a desperate clutch at the most improbable, in the wild hope that one falsehood at least might afford him some ray of light, however feeble, to dispel the horrors of this terrible darkness.
"And after she'd got the letter," he said, "what—what about the rest?"
"Why 'twas this way," cried Jonathan, his eyes rekindling in his eagerness to tell the story: "somebody dropped a bit of paper into the rendevoos winder, with writin' 'pon it to say when and where they'd find the Lottery to. Who 'twas did it none knaws for sartain, but the talk's got abroad 'twas a sergeant there, 'cos he'd a bin braggin' aforehand that he'd got a watch-sale and that o' her'n'."
"Her'n?" echoed Adam.
"Iss, o' Eve's. And he's allays a-showin' of it off, he is; and when they axes un questions he doan't answer, but he dangles the sale afront of 'em and says, 'What d'ee think?' he says; and now he makes his brag that he shall hab the maid yet, while her man's a-dancin' gallus-high a top o' Tyburn tree."
The blood rushed up into Adam's face, so that each vein stood a separate cord of swollen, bursting rage.
"They wasn't a-manin' you, ye knaw," said Jonathan: "'twar Jerrem. Her's played un false, I reckon. Awh!" and he gave a fiendish chuckle, "but us'll pay her out for't, woan't us, eh? Awnly you give to me the ticklin' o' her ozel-pipe;" and he made a movement of his bony fingers that conveyed such a hideous embodiment of his meaning that Adam, overcome by horror, threw up his arms with a terrible cry to heaven, and falling prone he let the bitterness of death pass over the love that had so late lain warm at his heart; while Jonathan crouched down, trembling and awestricken by the sight of emotion which, though he could not comprehend nor account for, stirred in him the sympathetic uneasiness of a dumb animal. Afraid to move or speak, he remained watching Adam's bent figure until his shallow brain, incapable of any sustained concentration of thought, wandered off to other interests, from which he was recalled by a noise, and looking up he saw that Adam had raised himself and was wiping his face with his handkerchief. Did he feel so hot, then? No, it must be that he felt cold, for he shivered and his teeth seemed to chatter as he told Jonathan to stoop down by the side there and hand him up a jar and a glass that he would find; and this got, Adam poured out some of its contents, and after tossing it off told Jonathan to take the jar and help himself, for, as nothing could be done until daylight, they might as well lie down and try and get some sleep. Jonathan's relish for spirit once excited, he made himself tolerably free of the permission, and before long had helped himself to such purpose that, stretched in a heavy sleep, unless some one roused him he was not likely to awake for some hours to come.
Then Adam got up and with cautious movements stole down the ladder, undid the small hatch-door which opened out on the mill-stream, fastened it after him, and leaping across stood for a few moments asking himself what he had come out to do. He didn't know, for as yet, in the tumult of jealousy and revenge, there was no outlet, no gap, by which he might drain off any portion of that passionate fire which was rapidly destroying and consuming all his softer feelings. The story which Jonathan had brought of the betrayal to the sergeant, the fellow's boastings and his possession of the seal Adam treated as an idle tale, its possibility vanquished by his conviction that Eve could have had no share in it. It was the letter from Jerrem which was the damnatory proof in Adam's eyes—the proof by which he judged and condemned her; for had not he himself seen and wondered at Jerrem's anxiety to go to Guernsey, his elation at finding a letter waiting him, his display of wishing to be seen secretly reading it, and now his ultimate betrayal of them by sending an answer to it?
As for Jerrem—oh he would deal with him as with a dog, and quickly send him to that fate he so richly deserved. It was not against Jerrem that the depths of his bitterness welled over: as the strength of his love, so ran his hate; and this all turned to one direction, and that direction pointed toward Eve.
He must see her, stand face to face with her, smite her with reproaches, heap upon her curses, show her how he could trample on her love and fling her back her perjured vows. And then? This done, what was there left? From Jerrem he could free himself. A word, a blow, and all would be over: but how with her? True, he could kill the visible Eve with his own hands, but the Eve who lived in his love, would she not live there still? Ay; and though he flung that body which could court the gaze of other eyes than his full fathoms deep, the fair image which dwelt before him would remain present to his vision. So that, do what he would, Eve would live, must live. Live! Crushing down on that thought came the terrible consequences which might come of Jonathan's tale being told—a tale so colored with all their bitterest prejudices that it was certain to be greedily listened to; and in the storm of angry passion it would rouse everything else would be swallowed up by resentment against Eve's baseness; and the fire once kindled, what would come of it?
The picture which Adam's heated imagination conjured up turned him hot and cold; an agony of fear crept over him; his heart sickened and grew faint within him, and the hands which but a few minutes before had longed to be steeped in her blood now trembled and shook with nervous dread lest a finger of harm should be laid upon her.
These and a hundred visions more or less wild coursed through Adam's brain as his feet took their swift way toward Polperro—not keeping along the open road, but taking a path which, only known to the inhabitants, would bring him down almost in front of his own house.
The night was dark, the sky lowering and cloudy. Not a sound was to be heard, not a soul had he seen, and already Adam was discussing with himself how best, without making an alarm, he should awaken Joan and obtain admittance. Usually bars and bolts were unknown, doors were left unfastened, windows often open; but now all would be securely shut, and he would have to rely on the possibility of his signal being heard by some one who might chance to be on the watch.
Suddenly a noise fell upon his ear. Surely he heard the sound of footsteps and the hum of voices. It could never be that the surprise they deemed a possibility had turned out a certainty. Adam crouched down, and under the shadow of the wall glided silently along until he came opposite the corner where the house stood. It was as he feared. There was no further doubt. The shutters were flung back, the door was half open, and round it, easing their tired limbs as best they might, stood crowded together a dozen men, the portion of a party who had evidently spread themselves about the place.
Fortunately for Adam, the steps which led up to the wooden orrel or balcony—at that time a common adornment to the Polperro houses—afforded him a tolerably safe retreat, and, screened here, he remained a silent watcher, hearing only a confused murmur and seeing nothing save an occasional movement as one and the other changed posts and passed in and out of the opposite door. At length a general parley seemed to take place: the men fell into rank and at a slow pace moved off down the street in the direction of the quay. Adam looked cautiously out. The door was now closed. Dare he open it? Might he not find that a sentinel had been left behind? How about the other door? The chances against it were as bad. The only possible way of ingress was by a shutter in the wall which overlooked the brook and communicated with the hiding-place in which his father lay secreted. This shutter had been little used since the days of press-gangs. It was painted in so exact an imitation of the slated house-wall as to defy detection, and to mark the spot to the initiated eye a root of house-leek projected out below and served to further screen the opening from view. The contrivance of this shutter-entrance was well known to Adam, and the mode of reaching it familiar to him: therefore if he could but elude observation he was certain of success.
The plan once decided on, he began putting it into execution, and although it seemed half a lifetime to him, but very few minutes had elapsed before he had crossed the road, ran waist-high into the brook, scaled the wall and scrambled down almost on top of old Zebedee, who, stupefied by continual drink, sleep and this constant confinement, took the surprise in a wonderfully calm manner.
"Hist, father! 'tis only me—Adam."
"A' right! a' right!" stammered Zebedee, too dazed to take in the whole matter at once. "What is it, lad, eh? They darned galoots ha'n't a tracked 'ee, have 'em? By the hooky! but they'm givin' 't us hot and strong this time, Adam: they was trampin' 'bout inside here a minit agone, tryin' to keep our sperrits up by a-rattlin' the bilboes in our ears. Why, however did 'ee dodge 'em, eh? What's the manin' o' it all?"
"I thought they was gone," said Adam, "so I came down to see how you were all getting on here."
"Iss, iss, sure. Wa-al, all right, I s'pose, but I ha'n't a bin let outside much: Joan won't have it, ye knaw. Poor Joan!" he sighed, "her's terrible moody-hearted 'bout 't all; and so's Eve too. I never see'd maids take on as they'm doin'; but there! I reckon 'twill soon be put a end to now."
"How so?" said Adam.
"Wa-al, you mustn't knaw, down below, more than you'm tawld," said the old man with a significant wink and a jerk of his head, "but Jerrem he let me into it this ebenin' when he rinned up to see me for a bit. Seems one o' they sodger-chaps is carr'in' on with Eve, and Jerrem's settin' her on to rig un up so that her'll get un not to see what 'tain't maned for un to look at."
"Well?" said Adam.
"Iss," said Zebedee, "but will it be well? That's what I keeps axin' of un. He's cock sure, sartain, that they can manage it all. He's sick, he says, o' all this skulkin', and he's blamed if he'll go on standin' it, neither."
"Oh!" hissed Adam, "he's sick of it, is he?" and in the effort he made to subdue his voice the veins in his face rose up to be purple cords. "He'd nothing to do with bringing it on us all? it's no fault of his that the place is turned into a hell and we hunted down like a pack o' dogs?"
"Awh, well, I dawn't knaw nuffin 'bout that," said old Zebedee, huffily. "How so be if 'tis so, when he's got clane off 'twill be all right agen."
"All right?" thundered Adam—"how all right? Right that he should get off and we be left here?—that he shouldn't swing, but we must stay to suffer?"
"Awh, come, come, come!" said the old man with the testy impatience of one ready to argue, but incapable of reasoning. "'Tain't no talk o' swingin', now: that was a bit o' brag on the boy's part: he's so eager to save his neck as you or me either. Awnly Jonathan's bin here and tawld up summat that makes un want to be off to wance, for he says, what us all knaws, without he's minded to it you can't slip a knot round Jonathan's clapper; and 'tain't that Jerrem's afeared o' his tongue, awnly for the keepin' up o' pace and quietness he fancies 'twould be better for un to make hisself scarce for a bit."
Adam's whole body quivered as a spasm of rage ran through him; and Zebedee, noting the trembling movement of his hands, conveyed his impression of the cause by bestowing a glance, accompanied with a pantomimic bend of his elbow, in the direction of a certain stone bottle which stood in the corner.
"Did Jonathan tell you what word 'twas he'd brought?" Adam managed to say.
"Noa: I never cast eyes on un. He warn't here 'bove a foo minits 'fore he slipped away, none of 'em knaws where or how. He was warned not to go anighst you," he added after a moment's pause; "so I reckon you knaws no more of un than us does."
"And Eve and Joan? were they let into the secret?" asked Adam; and the sound of his harsh voice grated even on Zebedee's dulled ears.
"Iss, I reckon," he said, half turning, "'cos Eve's got to do the trick: her's to bamfoozle the sodger.—Odds rot it, lad!" he cried, startled at the expression which leaped into Adam's haggard face, "what's come to 'ee that you must turn round 'pon us like that? Is it the maid you's got a spite agen? Lors! but 'tis a poor stomach you's got to'rds her if you'm angered by such a bit o' philanderin' as I've tawld 'ee of. What d'ee mane, then?" he added, his temper rising at such unwarrantable inconsistency. "I've knawed as honest women as ever her is that's a done that, and more too, for to get their men safe off and out o' way—iss, and wasn't thought none the wus of, neither. You'm growed mighty fancikul all to wance 'bout what us is to do and what us dussn't think o'. I'm sick o' such talk. 'Taint nawthin' else fra' mornin' to night but Adam this and Adam that. I'm darned if 'tis to be wondered at if the maid plays 'ee false: by gosh! I'd do the trick, if I was she, 'fore I'd put up with such fantads from you or either man like 'ee. So there!"
Adam did not answer, and old Zebedee, interpreting the silence into an admission of the force of his arguments, forbore to press the advantage and generously started a fresh topic. "They's a tawld 'ee, I reckon, 'bout the bill they's a posted up, right afore the winder, by the Three Pilchards," he said. "Iss," he added, not waiting for an answer, "the king's pardon and wan hunderd pound to be who'll discover to 'em the man who 'twas fired the fatal shot. Wan hunderd pound!" he sneered. "That's a fat lot, surely; and as for t' king's pardon, why 'twudn't lave un braithin'-time to spend it in—not if he war left here, 'twudn't. No fear! Us ain't so bad off yet that either wan in Polperro 'ud stink their fingers wi' blid-money. Lord save un! sich a man 'ud fetch up the divil hisself to see un pitched head foremost down to bottom o' say, which 'ud be the end I'd vote for un, and see it was carr'd out too—iss, tho' his bones bore my own flesh and blid 'pon 'em, I wud;" and in his anger the old man's rugged face grew distorted with emotion.
But Adam neither spoke nor made comment on his words. His eyes were fixed on mid-air, his nostrils worked, his mouth quivered. Within him a legion of devils seemed to have broken loose, and, sensible of the mastery they were gaining over him, he leaped up and with the wild despair of one who catches at a straw to save him from destruction, it came upon him to rush down and look once more into the face of her whom he had found so fair and proved so false.
"What is it you'm goin' to do, then?" said Zebedee, seeing that Adam had stooped down and was raising the panel by which exit was effected.
"Goin' to see if the coast's clear," said Adam.
"Better bide where you be," urged Zebedee. "Joan or they's sure to rin up so soon as 'tis all safe."
But Adam paid no heed: muttering something about knowing what he was about, he slipped up the partition and crept under, cautiously ascertained that the outer room was empty, and then, crossing the passage, stole down the stairs.
The door which led into the room was shut, but through a convenient chink Adam could take a survey of those within. Already his better self had begun to struggle in his ear, already the whisper which desire was prompting asked what if Eve stood there alone and—But no, his glance had taken in the whole: quick as the lightning's flash the details of that scene were given to Adam's gaze—Eve, bent forward, standing beside the door, over whose hatch a stranger's face was thrust, while Joan, close to the spot where Jerrem still lay hid, clasped her two hands as if to stay the breath which longed to cry, "He's free!"... The blow dealt, the firebrand flung, each evil passion quickened into life, filled with jealousy and mad revenge, Adam turned swiftly round and backward sped his way.
"They'm marched off, ain't 'em?" said old Zebedee as, Adam having given the signal, he drew the panel of the door aside. "I've a bin listenin' to their trampin' past.—Why, what's the time, lad, eh?—must be close on break o' day, ain't it?"
"Just about," said Adam, pushing back the shutter so that he might look out and see that no one stood near enough to overlook his descent.
"Why, you bain't goin' agen, be 'ee?" said Zebedee in amazement. "Why, what for be 'ee hikin' off like this, then—eh, lad?—Lord save us, he's gone!" he exclaimed as Adam, swinging himself by a dexterous twist on to the first ledge, let the shutter close behind him. "Wa-al, I'm blamed if this ain't a rum start! Summat gone wrong with un now. I'll wager he's a bin tiched up in the bunt somehows, for a guinea; and if so be, 'tis with wan o' they. They'm all sixes and sebens down below; so I'll lave 'em bide a bit, and hab a tot o' liquor and lie down for a spell. Lord send 'em to knaw the vally o' pace and quietness! But 'tis wan and all the same—
Friends and faws,
To battle they gaws;
And what they all fights about
Nawbody knaws."
It was broad daylight when Joan, having once before failed to make her uncle hear, gave such a vigorous rap that, starting up, the old man cried, "Ay, ay, mate!" and with all speed unfastened the door.
Joan crept in and some conversation ensued, in the midst of which, as the recollection of the events just past occurred to his mind, Zebedee asked, "What was up with Adam?"
"With Adam?" echoed Joan.
"Iss: what made un start off like he did?"
Joan looked for a minute, then she lifted the stone bottle and shook its contents. "Why, whatever be 'ee tellin' up?" she said.
"Tellin' up? Why, you seed un down below, didn't 'ee? Iss you did now."
Completely puzzled what to think, Joan shook her head.
"Lor' ha' massy! don't never tell me he didn't shaw hisself. Why, the sodgers was barely out o' doors 'fore he comes tumblin' in to shutter there, and after a bit he says, 'I'll just step down below,' he says, and out he goes; and in a quarter less no time back he comes tappin' agen, and when I drawed open for un by he pushes, and 'fore I could say 'Knife' he was out and clane off."
"You haven't a bin dreamin' of it, have 'ee?" said Joan, her face growing pale with apprehension.
"Naw, 'tis gospel truth, every ward. I've a had a toothful of liquor since, and a bit o' caulk, but not a drap more."
"Jerrem's comin' up into t'other room," said Joan, not wishing to betray all the alarm she felt: "will 'ee go into un there the whiles I rins down and says a word to Eve?"
"Iss," said the old man, "and I'll freshen mysen up a bit with a dash o' cold watter: happen I may bring some more o' it to my mind then."
But, his ablutions over and the whole family assembled, Zebedee could throw no more light on the subject, the recital of which caused so much anxiety that Joan, yielding to Eve's entreaties, decided to set off with all speed for Crumplehorne.
"Mother, Adam's all right? ain't he here still, and safe?" cried Joan, bursting into the kitchen where Mrs. Tucker, only just risen, was occupied with her house-duties.
"Iss, plaise the Lord, and, so far as I knaws of, he is," replied Mrs. Tucker, greatly startled by Joan's unexpected appearance. "Why, what do 'ee mane, child, eh? But there!" she added starting up, "us'll make sure to wance and knaw whether 'tis lies or truth we'm tellin'.—Here, Sammy, off ever so quick as legs can carry 'ee, and climber up and fetch Adam back with 'ee."
Sammy started off, and Joan proceeded to communicate the cause of her uneasiness.
"Awh, my dear, is that all?" exclaimed Mrs. Tucker, at once pronouncing sentence on poor old Zebedee's known failing: "then my mind's made easy agen. There's too much elbow-crookin' 'bout that story for me to set any hold by it."
"Do 'ee think so?" said Joan, ready to catch at any straw of hope.
"Why, iss; and for this reason too. I—"
But at this moment Sammy appeared, and, without waiting for him to speak, the two women uttered a cry as they saw in his face a confirmation of their fears. "Iss, 'tis every ward true; he's a gone shure 'nuf," exclaimed Sammy; "but by his own accord, I reckon, 'cos there ain't no signs o' nothin' bein' open 'ceptin 'tis the hatch over by t' mill-wheel."
"Awh, mother," cried Joan, "whatever can be the manin' of it? My poor heart's a sinkin' down lower than iver. Oh Lord! if they should ha' cotched un, anyways!"
"Now, doan't 'ee take on like that, Joan," said Mrs. Tucker. "'Tis like temptin' o' Providence to do such like. I'll be bound for't he's safe home alongst afore now: he ain't like wan to act wild and go steppin' into danger wi' both his eyes wide open."
The possibility suggested, and Joan was off again, back on her way to Polperro, too impatient to wait while her mother put on her bonnet to accompany her.
At the door stood Eve, breathless expectation betraying itself in her every look and gesture. Joan shook her head, while Eve's finger, quick laid upon her lip, warned her to be cautious.
"They're back," she muttered as Joan came up close: "they've just marched past and gone down to the quay."
"What for?" cried Joan.
"I don't know. Run and see, Joan: everybody's flocking that way."
Joan ran down the street, and took her place among a mob of people watching with eager interest the movements of a soldier who, with much unnecessary parade and delay, was taking down the bill of reward posted outside the Three Pilchards. A visible anticipation of the effect about to be produced stirred the small red-coated company, and they wheeled round so as to take note of any sudden emotion produced by the surprise they felt sure awaited the assembly.
"Whatever is it, eh?" asked Joan, trying to catch a better sight of what was going on.
"They'm stickin' up a noo reward, 't seems," said an old man close by. "'Tain't no—"
But the swaying back of the crowd carried Joan with it. A surge forward, and then on her ear fell a shrill cry, and as the name of Jerrem Christmas started from each mouth a hundred eyes seemed turned upon her. For a moment the girl stood dazed, staring around like some wild animal at bay: then, flinging out her arms, she forced those near her aside, and rushing forward to the front made a desperate clutch at the soldier. "Speak! tell me! what's writ there?" she cried.
"Writ there?" said the man, startled by the scared face that was turned up to him. "Why, the warrant to seize for murder Jerrem Christmas, living or dead, on the king's evidence of Adam Pascal."
And the air was rent by a cry of unutterable woe, caught up by each voice around, and coming back in echoes from far and near long after Joan lay a senseless heap on the stones upon which she had fallen.
The Author of "Dorothy Fox."
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
SEVEN WEEKS A MISSIONARY.
The sights of Honolulu had not lost their novelty—the tropical foliage of palm, banana, bread-fruit, monkey-pod and algaroba trees; the dark-skinned, brightly-clad natives with flowers on their heads, who walked with bare feet and stately tread along the shady sidewalks or tore through the streets on horseback; the fine stone or wooden residences with wide cool verandas, or humbler native huts surrounded by walls of coral-rock instead of fences; the deep indigo-blue ocean on one hand and the rich green mountains on the other, dripping with moisture and alternately dark and bright with the gloom of clouds and the glory of rainbows, still wore for me their original freshness and interest—when I received an urgent request to come to Waialua, a little village on the other side of the island. My host, to whom the note was addressed, explained to me that there was a mission-school at that place, a seminary for native girls. It was conducted by Miss G——, the daughter of one of the missionaries who first came to the Hawaiian Islands fifty years before. She had been sent to this country to be educated, like most of the children of the early missionaries, and had returned to devote herself to the mental, moral and physical welfare of the native girls—a task which she was now accomplishing with all the fervor, devotion and self-sacrifice of a Mary Lyon.
At this juncture she had forty-five girls, from six to eighteen, under her care, and but one assistant. The English teacher who had assisted her for several years had lately married, and the place was still vacant. She wrote to my host, saying that she had heard there was a teacher from California at his house, and begging me, through him, to come and help her a few weeks. I signified my willingness to go, and in a few days Miss G——, accompanied by a native girl, came on horseback to meet me and conduct me to Waialua. A gentleman of Honolulu, his sister and a native woman called Maria, who were going to Waialua and beyond, joined us, so that our party consisted of six. We were variously mounted, on horses of different appearance and disposition, and carried our luggage and lunch in saddle-bags strapped on behind. Maria's outfit especially interested me. It was the usual costume for native women, and consisted of a long flowing black garment called a holoku, gathered into a yoke at the shoulders and falling unconfined to her bare feet. Around her neck she wore a bright red silk handkerchief, and on her head a straw hat ornamented with a lei, or wreath of fresh, fragrant flowers, orange or jasmine. Men, women and children wear these wreaths, either on their heads or around their necks. Sometimes they consist of the bright yellow ilimu-flowers or brilliant scarlet pomegranate-blossoms strung on a fibre of the banana-stalk—sometimes they are woven of ferns or of a fragrant wild vine called maile. Maria was seated astride on a wiry little black horse, and instead of slipping her bare feet into the stirrups she clasped the irons with her toes. Besides her long, flowing black dress she wore a width of bright red-flowered damask tied around her waist, caught into the stirrup on either side and flowing a yard or two behind.
Waialua, our destination, was about a third of the way around the island, but the road, instead of following the sea-coast all the way, took a short cut across an inland plateau, so that the distance was but twenty-seven miles. We started about one o'clock in the afternoon, the hour when the streets are least frequented, and rode past the shops and stores shaded with awnings, past the bazaars where sea-shells and white and pink coral are offered for sale, through the fish-market where shellfish and hideous-looking squid and bright fish, colored like rainbows or the gayest tropical parrots, lay on little tables or floated in tanks of sea-water. Men with bundles of green grass or hay for sale made way for us as we passed, and the fat, short-legged dogs scattered right and left.
Although it was December, the air was warm and balmy, tree and fruit and flower were in the glory of endless summer, and the ladies seated on verandas or swinging in hammocks wore white dresses. For one who dreads harsh, cold winters the climate of Honolulu is perfection. At the end of King street we crossed a long bridge over the river, which at that point widens out into a marsh bordered by reeds and rushes. Here we saw a number of native canoes resting on poles above the water. They were about twenty feet long and quite narrow, being hollowed out of tree-trunks. An outrigger attached to one side serves to balance them in the water. A fine smooth road built on an embankment of stone and earth leads across this marsh to a strip of higher land near the sea where the prison buildings stand. They are of gray stone, with miniature towers, surrounded by a wall capped with stone, the whole surmounted by a tower from which waves the Hawaiian flag. In front is a smooth lawn where grow century-plants and ornamental shrubs, including the India-rubber tree. It is much finer than the so-called palace of the king, a many-roomed, one-story wooden cottage in the centre of the city, surrounded by a large grassy yard enclosed by a high wall.
The land beyond the marshes is planted in taro and irrigated by a network of streams. Taro is the principal article of food used by the natives: the root, which looks somewhat like a gray sweet potato, is made into a paste called poi, and the tops are eaten as greens. The plant grows about two feet high, and has an arrow-shaped leaf larger than one's hand. Like rice, it grows in shallow pools of water, and a patch of it looks like an inundated garden. As we passed along we saw half-clad natives standing knee-deep in mud and water pulling the full-grown plants or putting in young ones. Reaching higher ground, we cantered along a hard, smooth road bordered with short green grass. On either side were dwellings of wood surrounded by broad-leafed banana trees, with here and there a little shop for the sale of fruit. This is a suburb of Honolulu and is called Kupalama. We met a number of natives on horseback going into town, the men dressed in shirts and trousers of blue or white cotton cloth, the women wearing the long loose gowns I have described.
At last we reached the open country, and started fairly on our long ride. On our left was the ocean with "league-long rollers thundering on the reef:" on our right, a few miles away, was a line of mountains, divided into numerous spurs and peaks by deep valleys richly clothed in tropical verdure. The country about us was uncultivated and generally open, but here and there were straggling lines of low stone walls overgrown with a wild vine resembling our morning-glory, the masses of green leaves starred with large pink flowers. The algaroba, a graceful tree resembling the elm, grew along the roadside, generally about fifteen feet high. In Honolulu, where they are watered and cared for, these trees attain a height of thirty or forty feet, sending forth long swaying branches in every direction and forming beautiful shade trees. Now and then we crossed water-courses, where the banks were carpeted with short green grass and bordered with acacia-bushes covered with feathery leaves and a profusion of yellow ball-shaped flowers that perfumed the air with their fragrance. The view up and down these winding flower-bordered streams was lovely. We rode for miles over this monotonous country, gradually rising to higher ground. Suddenly, almost at our very feet, a little bowl-shaped valley about half a mile in circumference opened to view. The upper rim all around was covered with smooth green grass, and the sides were hidden by the foliage of dark-green mango trees, light-green kukui, bread-fruit and banana. Coffee had formerly been cultivated here, and a few bushes still grew wild, bearing fragrant white flowers or bright red berries. Through the bottom of the valley ran a little stream, and on its banks were three or four grass huts beneath tufts of tall cocoanut palms. Several scantily-clad children rolled about on the ground, and in the shade of a tamarind tree an old gray-headed man was pounding taro-root. The gray mass lay before him on a flat stone, and he pounded it with a stone pestle, then dipped his hands into a calabash of water and kneaded it. A woman was bathing in the stream, and another stood at the door of one of the huts holding her child on her hip.
We passed through three other deep valleys like this, and in every case they opened suddenly to view—hidden nests of tropical foliage and color. The natives were seated in circles under the trees eating poi, or wading in the stream looking for fish, or lounging on the grass near their huts as though life were one long holiday.
Now we entered a vast sunburnt plain overgrown with huge thorny cactus twelve or fifteen feet high. Without shade or water or verdure it stretched before us to distant table-lands, upholding mountains whose peaks were veiled in cloud. The solitude of the plain was rendered more impressive by the absence of wild creatures of any kind: there were no birds nor insects nor ground-squirrels nor snakes. The cactus generally grew in clumps, but sometimes it formed a green prickly wall on either side of the road, between which we had to pass as between the bayonets of sentinels. Wherever the road widened out we clattered along, six abreast, at full speed. Maria, the native woman, presented a picturesque appearance with her black dress and long flowing streamers of bright red. She was an elderly woman—perhaps fifty years old—but as active as a young girl, and a good rider. She had an unfailing fund of good-humor, and talked and laughed a great deal. My other companions, with the exception of the native girl, were children of early missionaries, and enlivened the journey by many interesting incidents of island life. At last we crossed the cactus desert, ascended an eminence, and then sank into a valley grand and deep, shut in by walls carved in fantastic shape by the action of water. Our road was a narrow pathway, paved with stone, that wound down the face of the cliff. The natives call this place Ki-pa-pa, which signifies "paved way."
As we were making the descent on one side we saw a party of natives on horseback winding down on the opposite. First rode three men, single file, with children perched in front of them, then three or four women in black or gay-colored holokus, then a boy who led two pack-mules laden with large baskets. All wore wreaths of ferns or flowers. When we met they greeted us with a hearty "Aloha!" ("Love to you!"), and in reply to a question in Hawaiian said that they were going to Honolulu with fresh fish, bananas and oranges.
We climbed the rocky pathway rising out of the valley, and found ourselves on the high table-land toward which we had shaped our course. It was smooth as a floor and covered with short rich grass. Instead of a broad road there were about twenty parallel paths stretching on before us as far as we could see, furrowed by the feet of horses and pack-mules. Miles away on either side was a line of lofty mountains whose serrated outlines were sharply defined against the evening sky. Darkness overtook us on this plateau, and the rest of the journey is a confused memory of steep ravines down whose sides we cautiously made our way, torrents of foaming water which we forded, expanses of dark plain, and at last the murmur of the ocean on the reef. After reaching sea-level again we passed between acres and acres of taro-patches where the water mirrored the large bright stars and the arrow-shaped leaves cast sharp-pointed shadows. We rode through the quiet little village of Waialua, sleeping beneath the shade of giant pride-of-India and kukui trees, without meeting any one, and forded the Waialua River just where it flows over silver sands into the sea. As we paused to let our horses drink I looked up at the cluster of cocoanut palms that grew upon the bank, and noticed how distinctly each feathery frond was pencilled against the sky, then down upon the placid river and out upon the gently murmuring sea, and thought that I had never gazed upon a more peaceful scene. Little did I think that it would soon be associated with danger and dismay. Beyond the river were two or three native huts thatched with grass, and a little white cottage, the summer home of Princess Lydia, the king's sister. Passing these, we rode over a smooth green lawn glittering with large bright dewdrops, and dismounted in front of the seminary-gate. The large whitewashed brick house, two stories and a half high, with wide verandas around three sides, looks toward the sea. In front of it is a garden filled with flowers and vines and shrubbery, the pride and care of the school-girls. There are oleander trees with rose-colored blossoms, pomegranate trees whose flowers glow amid the dark-green foliage like coals of fire, and orange and lime trees covered with fragrant white flowers, which the girls string and wear around their necks. Besides roses, heliotrope, geraniums, sweet-pea, nasturtium and other familiar flowers, there are fragrant Japanese lilies, and also plants and shrubs from the Micronesian Islands. On one side is a grove of tamarind and kukui-nut trees, mingled with tall cocoanut palms, which stretches to the deep, still river, a few rods away: on the other is the school-house, a two-story frame, painted white, shaded by tall pride-of-India trees and backed by a field of corn. My room opened on a veranda shaded with kukui trees, and as the "coo-coo-ee coo-coo-ee" of the doves in the branches came to my ears I thought that the trees had received their name from the notes of the doves, but afterward learnt that kukui in the Hawaiian language meant "light," and that the nuts, being full of oil, were strung on bamboo poles by the natives and used as torches.
The morning after my arrival I saw the girls at breakfast, and found them of all shades of complexion from deep chocolate-brown to white. Their glossy black hair, redolent of cocoanut oil, was ornamented with fresh flowers, and their bright black eyes danced with fun or languished with sullen scorn. The younger ones were bright and happy in their expression, but the older ones seemed already to realize the curse that rests upon their decaying race, and to move with melancholy languor, as if brooding over it in stifled rebellion or resigned apathy. Some would be called beautiful anywhere: they were graceful in form, had fine regular features and lovely, expressive eyes; others were attractive only on account of their animation; while one comical little negro girl, who had somehow got mixed with the Malay race, was as ugly as a Hottentot, and a veritable imp of darkness, as I afterward learned, so far as mischief was concerned. The girls were dressed in calico, and wore no shoes or stockings. When they had eaten their beef and poi, and we had finished our breakfast, each girl got her Hawaiian Testament and read a verse: then Miss G——, the principal, offered prayer in the same language. When this was over the routine work of the day began. Some of the older girls remained in the dining-room to put away the food, wash the dishes and sweep the floor; one went to the kitchen to wash the pots and pans; and the younger ones dispersed to various tasks—to sweep and dust the parlor, the sitting-room or the school-room, to gather up the litter of leaves and branches from the yard and garden-paths, or to put the teachers' rooms in order. The second floor and attic, both filled with single beds covered with mosquito-netting, were the girls' dormitories. Each girl was expected to make her own bed and hang up her clothes or put them away in her trunk. A luna, or overseer, in each dormitory superintended this work, and reported any negligence on the part of a girl to one of the teachers.
Miss G—— was the life and soul of the institution—principal and housekeeper and accountant, all in one. She had a faithful and devoted assistant in Miss P——, a young woman of twenty-two, the daughter of a missionary then living in Honolulu. My duties were to teach classes in English in the forenoon and to oversee the sewing and some departments of housekeeping in the afternoon. Miss P—— had the smaller children, Miss G—— taught the larger ones in Hawaiian and gave music-lessons.
The routine of the school-room from nine to twelve in the forenoon and from one till four in the afternoon was that of any ordinary school, except that the girls who prepared the meals were excused earlier than the others. One day in the week was devoted to washing and ironing down on the river-bank and in the shade of the tamarind trees.
The girls had to be taught many things besides the lessons in their books. At home they slept on mats on the floor, ate poi out of calabashes with their fingers and wore only the holoku. Here they were required to eat at table with knife and fork and spoon, to sleep in beds and to adopt the manners and customs of civilization. Now and then, as a special privilege, they asked to be allowed to eat "native fashion," and great was their rejoicing and merrymaking as they sat, crowned with flowers, on the veranda-floor and ate poi and raw fish with their fingers, and talked Hawaiian. They were required to talk English usually until the four-o'clock bell sounded in the afternoon. From that until supper-time they were allowed to talk native, and their tongues ran fast.
On Wednesday afternoons the girls went to bathe in the river, and on Saturday afternoons to bathe in the sea. It usually fell to my lot to accompany them. The river, back of the house a few rods, had steep banks ten or fifteen feet high and a deep, still current. The girls would start to run as soon as they left the house, race with each other all the way and leap from the bank into the river below. Presently their heads would appear above water, and, laughing and blowing and shaking the drops from their brown faces, they would swim across the river. The older girls could dive and swim under water for some distance. They had learned to swim as soon as they had learned to walk. They sometimes brought up fish in their hands, and one girl told me that her father could dive and bring up a fish in each hand and one in his mouth. The little silver-fish caught in their dress-skirts they ate raw. The girls were always glad when the time came to go swimming in the sea, for they were very fond of a green moss which grew on the reef, and the whole crowd would sit on rocks picking and eating it while the spray dashed over them.
Waialua means "the meeting of the waters," or, literally, "two waters," and the place is named from the perpetual flow and counterflow of the river and the ocean tide. The river pours into the sea, the sea at high tide surges up the river, beating back its waters, and the foam and spray of the contending floods are dashed high into the air, bedewing the cluster of cocoanut palms that stand on the bank above watching this perpetual conflict. In calm weather and at low tide there is a truce between the waters, and the river flows calmly into the sea; but immediately after a storm, when the river is flooded with rains from the mountains and the sea hurls itself upon the reef with a shock and a roar, then the antagonism between the meeting waters is at its height and the clash and uproar of their fury are great.
Sometimes we went on picnic excursions to places in the neighborhood—to the beach of Waiamea, a mile or two distant, where thousands of pretty shells lay strewn upon the sand and branches of white coral could be had for the picking up, or to the orange-groves and indigo-thickets on the mountain-sides, where large sweet oranges ripened, coming back wreathed with ferns and the fragrant vine maile.
But we had plenty of oranges without going after them. For half a dollar we could buy a hundred large fine oranges from the natives, who brought them to the door, and we usually kept a tin washing-tub full of the delicious fruit on hand. A real (twelve and a half cents) would buy a bunch of bananas so heavy that it took two of us to lift it to the hook in the veranda-ceiling, and limes and small Chinese oranges grew plentifully in the front yard. Of cocoanuts and tamarinds we made no account, they were so common. Guavas grew wild on bushes in the neighborhood, and made delicious pies. For vegetables we had taro, sweet potatoes and something that tasted just like summer squash, but which grew in thick, pulpy clusters on a tree. The taro was brought to us just as it was pulled, roots and nodding green tops, and of the donkey who was laden with it little showed but his legs and his ears as his master led him up to the gate. Another old man furnished boiled and pounded taro, which the girls mixed with water and made into poi. He brought it in large bundles wrapped in broad green banana-leaves and tied with fibres of the stalk. He had two daughters in the school, and always inquired about their progress in their studies. One day, happening to look out of the front door, I saw him coming up the garden-walk. He had nothing on but a shirt and a malo (a strip of cloth) about his loins: the malo was all that the natives formerly wore. Neither the girls who were weeding their garden, nor the other teachers who were at work in the parlor, seemed to think that there was anything remarkable in his appearance. He talked with Miss G—— as usual about the supply of taro for the school, and inquired how his girls were doing. When he was going away she said, "Uncle, why do you not wear your clothes when you come to see us? I thought you had laid aside the heathen fashion." He replied that he had but one suit of clothes, and that he must save them to wear to church, adding that he was anxious to give his daughters an education, and must economize in some way in order to pay for their schooling.
The fuel needed for cooking was brought down from the mountains by the native boy who milked the cows for us and took Calico, Miss G——'s riding horse, to water and to pasture. One day, when one of the girls had started a fire in the stove, a fragrance like incense diffused itself through the house. Hastening to the kitchen, I pulled out a half-burned piece of sandal-wood and put it away in my collection of shells and island curiosities. A few days afterward an old native man named Ka-hu-kai (Sea-shore), who lived in one of the grass huts near the front gate, came to sell me a piece of fragrant wood of another kind. He had learned that I attached a value to such things, and expected to get a good price. He inquired for the wahine haole (foreign woman), and presented his bit of wood, saying that he would sell it for a dollar. I declined to purchase. He walked down through the garden and across the lawn, but paused at the big gate for several minutes, then retraced his steps. Holding out the wood again, he said, "This is my thought: you may have it for a real." I gave him a real, and he went away satisfied.
Every Sunday we crossed the bridge that spanned Waialua River near the ford, and made our way to the huge old-fashioned mission-church, which stood in an open field surrounded by prickly pears six or eight feet high. The thorny prickly pears were stiff and ungraceful, but a delicate wild vine grew all over them and hung in festoons from the top. While Pai-ku-li, the native minister, preached a sermon in Hawaiian, I, not understanding a word, looked at the side pews where the old folks sat, and tried to picture the life they had known in their youth, when the great Kamehameha reigned. In the pew next to the side door sat Mr. Sea-shore, straight and solemn as a deacon, and his wife, a fat old woman with a face that looked as if it had been carved out of knotty mahogany, but which was irradiated with an expression of kindness and good-nature. She wore a long black holoku, and on her head was perched a little sailor hat with a blue ribbon round it, which would have been suitable for a girl six or eight years old, but which looked decidedly comical and out of place on Mrs. Sea-shore. She was barefooted, as I presently saw. Two or three times during the sermon a red-eyed, dissipated-looking dog with a baked taro-root in his mouth had come to the door, and seemed about to enter, but Mrs. Sea-shore, without disturbing the devotions, had kept him back by threatening gestures. But when the minister began to pray and nearly every head was bowed, the dog came sneaking in. Mrs. Sea-shore happened to raise her head, and saw him. Drawing back her holoku, she extended her bare foot and planted a vigorous kick in his ribs, exclaiming at the same time in an explosive whisper, "Hala palah!" ("Get out!" or "Begone!") The dog went forth howling, and did not return.
A few days later Miss G——'s shoulder was sprained by a fall from her horse, and she sent for Mrs. Sea-shore. The old woman came and lomi-lomi-ed the shoulder—kneaded it with her hands—until the pain and stiffness were gone, then extracted the oil from some kukui-nuts by chewing them and applied it to the sprain. All the time she kept up a chatter in Hawaiian, talking, asking questions and showing her white teeth in hearty, good-humored laughs. In answer to the questions I put to her through Miss G——, she told us much about her early life, the superstitions and taboos that forbade men and women to eat together and imposed many meaningless and foolish restrictions, and about her children, who had died and gone to Po, the great shadowy land, where, as she once believed, their spirits had been eaten by the gods. We formed quite a friendship for each other, and she came often to see me, but would not come into the house any farther than the veranda or front hall, and there, refusing our offer of a chair, she would sit on the floor. I spoke of going to see her in return, but she said that her house was not good enough to receive me, and begged me not to come. Just before I left Waialua she brought a mat she had woven out of the long leaves of the pandanus or screw pine, a square of tappa, or native cloth, as large as a sheet, made from the bark of a tree, and the tappa-pounder she had made it with (a square mallet with different patterns cut on each of the four faces), and gave them to me. I offered her money in return, but she refused it, saying she had given the things out of aloha, or love for me. On my return to Honolulu I got the most gorgeous red silk Chinese handkerchief that could be found in Ah Fong and Ah Chuck's establishment and sent it to her, and Miss G—— wrote me that she wore it round her neck at church every Sunday.
One of my duties was to go through the dormitories the last thing at night, and see that the doors were fastened and that the girls had their mosquito-netting properly arranged, and were not sleeping with their heads under the bedclothes. A heathen superstition, of which they were half ashamed, still exercised an influence over them, and they were afraid that the spirits of their dead relatives would come back from Po and haunt them in the night. They would not confess to this fear, but many of them, ruled by it, covered their heads with the bedclothes every night. In my rounds, besides clouds of bloodthirsty mosquitos, I frequently saw centipedes crawling along the floor or wall or up the netting, and sometimes a large tarantula would dart forth from his hiding-place in some nook or corner. The centipedes were often six or seven inches long. They were especially numerous during or immediately after rainy weather. Little gray and green lizards (mo-o) glided about the verandas, but they were harmless. Scorpions are common in the islands, but we were not troubled with them. They frequent hot, dry places like sandbanks, and are often found in piles of lumber.
We had fine views of the scenery as we passed to and fro between the main building and the school-house—the sea, fringed with cocoanut palms; the fertile level plain, dotted with trees, on which the village stood; and the green mountains, whose tops were generally dark with rainclouds or brightened with bits of rainbows. It seemed to be always raining in that mysterious mountainous centre of the islands which human foot has never crossed, but it was usually clear and bright at sea-level. After an unusually hard rain we could see long, flashing white waterfalls hanging, like ribbons of silver, down the sides of the green cliffs. From the attic-windows the best view of the bay could be obtained, and it was my delight to lean out of them like "a blessed damosel" half an hour at a time, gazing seaward and drinking in the beauty of the scene. Waialua Bay was shaped like a half moon, the tips of which were distant headlands, and the curve was the yellow, palm-fringed beach. Into this crescent-shaped reach of water rolled great waves from the outside ocean, following each other in regular stately order with a front of milk-white foam and a veil of mist flying backward several yards from the summit. The Hawaiian name for this place is E-hu-kai (Sea-mist), and it is appropriately named, for the floating veils of the billows keep the surface of the entire bay dim with mist. Gazing long upon the scene, my eyes would be dazzled with color—the intense blue of the sky and the water, the bright yellow of the sand, the dark rich green of the trees, and, looking into the garden below, the flame-scarlet blossoms of the pomegranates, the rose-pink flowers of the oleanders and the cream-white clusters of the limes and oranges.
It seemed a land for poetry, for romance, for day-dreaming, and the transition from the attic-window to the prosaic realities of house and school-room work was like a sudden awakening. I was destined before leaving the place to have a still more violent awakening to the reality that underlies appearances. Nature in these beautiful islands is fair and lovely, but deceitful. During long months of sunny weather the waves gently kiss the shore, the green slopes smile, the mountains decorate themselves with cloud-wreaths and rainbows; but there comes a dreadful day when the green and flowery earth yawns in horrid chasms, when Mauna Loa trembles and belches forth torrents of blood-red lava, when the ocean, receding from the shore, returns in a tidal wave that sweeps to the top of the palms on the beach and engulfs the people and their homes.
And the human nature here is somewhat similar. The Hawaiians are pleasing in form and feature, graceful, polite, fond of music and dancing and wreathing themselves with flowers, and possess withal a deep fund of poetry, which finds expression in their own names, the names they have bestowed upon waterfalls and valleys and green peaks and sea-cliffs, and in the meles or native songs which commemorate events of personal interest or national importance. But they too have their volcanic outbursts, their seasons of fury and destruction. The last public display of this side of their character was on the occasion of the election of the present king. The supporters of Queen Emma, the defeated candidate, burst into the court-house, broke the heads of the electors or threw them bodily out of the windows, and raised a riot in the streets of Honolulu which was quelled only by the assistance of the crews of the men-of-war then in the harbor—the English ship Tenedos and the United States vessels Portsmouth and Tuscarora.
I come now to the rebellion which broke forth in Waialua school when I had been there three weeks. A month or two before one of the school-girls had died after a brief illness. The old heathen superstition about praying to Death had been revived by the lower class of natives in the place, who were not friendly to the school, and had been transmitted by them to the older girls. While yet ignorant of this I had noticed the scowls and dark looks, the reluctant obedience and manifest distrust, of ten or twelve girls from fifteen to eighteen, the leaders in the school. The younger girls were affectionate and obedient: they brought flowers from their gardens and wove wreaths for us; they lomi-lomi-ed our hands and feet when we were sitting at rest; if they neglected their tasks or broke any of the taboos of the school, it was through the carelessness of childhood. But it seemed impossible to gain the confidence of the older girls.
One day Miss P——, the assistant teacher, received word that her father was quite sick, and immediately set out for Honolulu on horseback. Miss G——and I carried on the work of the school as well as we could. A day or two after Miss P—— left a tropical storm burst upon us. It seemed as if the very heavens were opened. The rain fell in torrents and the air was filled with the flying branches of trees. This continued a day and a night. The next day, Sunday, the rain and wind ceased, but sullen clouds still hung overhead, and there was an oppressive stillness and languor in the air. Within, there was something of the same atmosphere: the tropical nature of the girls seemed to be in sympathy with the stormy elements. They were silent and sullen and brooding. The bridge over Waialua had been washed away, and we could not go to church. The oppressive day passed and was succeeded by a similar one. The older girls cast dark looks upon us as they reluctantly went through the round of school- and house-work. At night the explosion occurred. All the girls were at the usual study-hour in the basement dining-room. It was Miss G——'s turn to sit with them: I was in the sitting-room directly above. Suddenly I heard a loud yell, a sound as of scuffling and Miss G——'s quick tones of command. The next moment I was down stairs. There stood Miss G—— in the middle of the room holding Elizabeth Aukai, one of the largest and worst girls, by the wrist. The girl's head was bent and her teeth were buried in Miss G——'s hand. The heathen had burst forth, the volcanic eruption and earthquake had come. I tried to pull her off, but she was as strong as an ox. Loosening her hold directly and hurling us off, she poured forth a flood of abuse in Hawaiian. She reviled the teachers and all the cursed foreigners who were praying her people to death. The Hawaiian language has no "swear words," but it is particularly rich in abusive and reviling epithets, and these were freely heaped upon us. She ended her tirade by saying, "You shall not pray us to death, you wicked, black-hearted foreigners!" and her companions answered with a yell. Then, snatching up a lamp, they ran up stairs to their sleeping-rooms, screaming and laughing and singing native songs that had been forbidden in the school, and, taking their shawls and Sunday dresses from their trunks, they arrayed themselves in all their finery and began dancing an old heathen dance which is taboo among the better class of natives and only practised in secret by the more degraded class of natives and half-whites.
It sounded like Bedlam let loose. The little girls, frightened and crying, and a half-white girl of seventeen, Miss G——'s adopted daughter, remained with us. We put the younger children to bed in their sleeping-room, which was on the first floor, and held a council together. "One of us must cross the river and bring Pai-ku-li" (the native minister), said Miss G——. "He is Elizabeth Aukai's guardian—she is his wife's niece—and he can control her if anybody can, and break the hold of this superstition on the girls' minds. Nothing that we can say or do will do any good while they are in this frenzy. Which of us shall go?"
The bridge was washed away; there was no boat; Miss P—— had taken the only horse to go to Honolulu. Whoever went must ford the river. Like Lord Ullin's daughter, who would meet the raging of the skies, but not an angry father, I was less afraid to go than to stay, and volunteered to bring Pai-ku-li.
"Li-li-noe shall go with you," said Miss G——: "she is a good swimmer, and can find the best way through the river."
Just then the whole crowd of girls came screaming and laughing down the stairs, swept through the sitting-room, mocking and insulting Miss G——, then went back up the other flight of stairs, which led to the teachers' rooms and was taboo to the school-girls. They were anxious to break as many rules as possible.
With a lighted lantern hidden between us Li-li-noe and I stole down through the flower-garden and across the lawn. We were anxious to keep the girls in ignorance of our absence, lest they should attempt some violence to Miss G—— while we were gone. Stealing quietly past the grass huts of the natives, we approached the place where the bridge had been, and brought forth our lantern to shed light on the water-soaked path. Just ahead the surf showed through the darkness white and threatening, and beyond was the ocean, dim heaving in the dusk. The clash and roar of the meeting waters filled the air, and we were sprinkled by the flying spray as we stood debating on the river's edge. Li-li-noe stepped down into the water to find, if possible, a place shallow enough to ford, but at the first step she disappeared up to her shoulders. "That will never do," she said, clambering back: "you cannot cross there."
"Can we cross above the bridge?" I asked.
"No: the water is ten feet deep there; it is shallower toward the sea."
"Then let us try there;" and into the water we went, Li-li-noe first. It was not quite waist-deep, and in calm weather there would have been no danger, but now the current of the river and the tide of the inrushing sea swept back and forth with the force of a whirlpool. We had got to the middle when a great wave, white with foam, came roaring toward us from the ocean. Li-li-noe threw herself forward and began to swim. For a moment there were darkness and the roar of many waters around me, and my feet were almost swept from under me. Looking upward at the cloudy sky and the tall cocoanut trees on the bank, I thought of the home and friends I might never see again. The bitter salt water wet my face, quenched the light and carried away my shawl, but the wave returned without carrying me out to sea. Then above the noise of the waters I heard Li-li-noe's voice calling to me from the other shore, and just as another wave surged in I reached her side and sank down on the sand. After resting a few moments we rose and began picking our way toward the village, half a mile distant. Our route led along a narrow path between the muddy, watery road on one side and a still more muddy, watery taro-patch on the other. Without a light to guide our steps, we slipped, now with one foot into the road, now with the other into the taro-patch, and by the time we emerged into the level cactus-field around the church we were covered with mud to our knees.
Pai-ku-li lived nearly a mile beyond the village, but close by the church lived Mrs. W——, whose place I had taken as English teacher in the school. We knocked at her door to beg for a light, and when she found what the matter was she made us come in, muddy and dripping as we were, and put on some dry clothes, while her husband, pulling on his boots, went for Pai-ku-li. She begged me to stay all night, saying that she would not trust her life with the girls at such a time—they might attempt to poison us or to burn the house down—but I thanked her for her hospitality and lighted our lantern, and we started back as soon as Mr. W—— returned saying that Pai-ku-li would come. We listened for the sound of his horse's feet, for we had planned to ride across the river, one at a time, behind Pai-ku-li, but he did not overtake us, and we waited at the river nearly half an hour. One span of the bridge remained, and as we stood on it waiting, listening to the flapping of the cocoanut fronds in the night wind and the hoarse murmuring and occasional roar of the ocean, I thought of that line of Longfellow's—
I stood on the bridge at midnight—
and laughed to myself at the contrast between the poetical and the actual. Still, Pai-ku-li did not come, and, growing anxious on Miss G——'s account, we resolved to cross as we had before. Again we went down into the cold flood, again our light was quenched and our feet nearly swept from under us, but we reached the opposite side in safety. As we crossed the lawn we saw every window lighted, and knew by the sounds of yelling and singing and laughing that the girls were still raving. Miss G—— sat quietly in the parlor. She had been up stairs to try to reason with the girls, but they drowned her voice with hooting and reviling. Pai-ku-li came a little later, but he had no better success. He remained with us that night and all the next day. The screaming up stairs continued till two or three o'clock at night, and began again as soon as the first girl woke. Early next morning a fleet messenger started to Honolulu, and just at dusk two gentlemen, the sheriff and Mr. P——, who was Miss G——'s brother-in-law and president of the board of trustees of Waialua Seminary, rode up on foaming horses. A court was held in the school-room, many natives—a few of the better class who disapproved of the rebellion, and more of the lower class who upheld the rebels—being present as spectators, but no one interrupting the prompt and stern proceedings of Mr. P——. Elizabeth Aukai was whipped on her bare feet and legs below the knee until she burst out crying and begged for mercy and asked Miss G——'s forgiveness for biting her. Then she and the other rebels were expelled, and the sheriff took them away that night. Those who lived on other islands were sent home by the first schooner leaving Honolulu. Thus ended the rebellion at Waialua school.
The remaining month of my stay passed in peace and quietness. The need for my assistance was less after the expulsion of so many girls, but I remained in order that Miss G—— might take a short vacation and the rest she so much needed. During her absence Miss P—— and I carried on the school. A few days after the storm a little native boy brought to the seminary the shawl which had been washed from my shoulders the night I went through the river. He had found it lying on the beach half a mile below the ford. It had been washed out to sea and returned again by the waves. After that we called it "the travelled shawl." Every Monday morning the toot of the postman's horn was heard in the village, and one of us immediately went across to get the mail. The bridge being gone, we had to wade the river at the shallowest place, near the sea. When I waded across on such occasions I usually found on the opposite shore a group of half-naked little natives who drew near to watch with silent interest the process of buttoning my shoes with a button-hook. The whole school waded across to church on Sundays.
The population of the village, with the exception of two or three families, was composed of natives and half-whites of the lower class. Heathen superstition mingled with modern vice. In some instances men and women lived together without the ceremony of marriage. Beyond the village the cane-fields began, and beyond them, at the foot of the mountains, lived a better class of natives, moral and industrious. Here, too, were the cane-mills and the residences of the planters. I remember one pretty little cottage with walls of braided grass and wooden roof and floor, surrounded by cool, vine-shaded verandas. It stood in the middle of a cane-plantation, and was the home of an Englishman and his wife, both highly cultivated and genial, companionable people. He was a typical Englishman in appearance, stout and ruddy, and wore a blue flannel suit and the white head-covering worn by his countrymen in India. She was a graceful little creature with appealing dark eyes, and looked too frail to have ever borne hardship or cruelty, yet she had known little else all her early life. She had been left an orphan in England, and had been sent out to Australia to make her living as a governess. She was thrown among brutal, coarse-mannered people, and received harsh treatment and suffered many vicissitudes of fortune. Finally, her husband met and loved and married her, and lifted her out of that hard life into one which appeared by contrast a heaven of peace and kindness and affection. She often said frankly, "That was the happiest event of my life. I can never be thankful enough to him or love him enough. Sometimes I dream I am back again enduring that dreadful life in Australia, and when I wake and realize that I am here in our own little cottage, thousands of miles from Australia, I am freshly happy and grateful."
Near the foot of the mountains was a Catholic church and a school, round which a little village had grown up. The self-sacrificing efforts of the teachers have been productive of good among the natives, but there seems little hope of any co-operation between the Protestant missionaries and them.
When the time came for me to return to Honolulu, Miss P—— offered to accompany me, and suggested that instead of returning by the way I came we should take the longer way and complete the circuit of the island. As the road lay directly along the sea-coast the entire distance, there was no danger of our losing our way. Miss P—— rode Calico, the missionary steed, and I hired a white horse of Nakaniella (Nathaniel), one of the patrons of the school, choosing it in preference to a bay brought for my inspection the night before we started by a sullen-looking native from the village. When we had gone two or three miles on our way we heard the sound of furious galloping behind us, and looking back saw this native, with a face like a thunder-cloud, approaching us on his bay horse. Reaching us, he insisted on my dismounting and taking his horse, saying that I had promised to hire it the night before. Miss P——, being able to speak Hawaiian, answered for me without slackening our pace. She said, in reply to his demands, that the wahine haole had not promised to take his horse; that she would not pay him for his time and trouble in bringing over the horse that morning and riding after us; that he might ride all the way to Honolulu with us or go to law about the matter, both of which he threatened. Fuming with wrath, he rode along with us for a mile or two, breathing out threatenings and slaughter in vigorous Hawaiian: then, uttering the spiteful wish, "May your horses throw you and break your necks!" he turned and rode back toward Waialua.
We passed through the ruins of a once-populous village: stone walls bordered the road for a mile or more, and back of them were the stone foundations of native houses and heiaus (temples). Pandanus trees, with roots like stilts or props that lifted them two or three feet from the ground, grew inside the deserted enclosures: long grass waved from the chinks and crevices. It was a mournful reminder of the decay of the Hawaiian race. Just beyond the ruined village a sluggish creek flowed into the sea. At the mouth of the valley whence it issued stood two or three native huts. A man wearing a malo was up on the roof of one, thatching it with grass. Riding near, we hailed him and inquired about a quicksand which lay just ahead and which we must cross. He told us to avoid the makai side and keep to the mouka side. We followed his directions, and crossed in safety. For all practical purposes there are but two directions in the islands—mouka, meaning toward the mountains, and makai, toward the sea.
We rode all the forenoon over a level strip of grassy open country bordering the sea, with here and there a native hut near a clump of cocoanuts or a taro-patch. Toward noon we passed fenced pastures in which many horses were grazing, and came in sight of a picturesque cottage near the shore. Miss G—— had told us that on the lawn in front of this cottage were two curious old stone idols which had been discovered in a fish-pond, and we rode up to the gate intending to ask permission to enter and look at them. A Chinese servant let us in, and the owner, an Englishman who lived here during part of the year, came and showed us the idols, and then invited us inside his pretty cottage and gave us a lunch of bread and butter and guava jelly and oranges. The walls and ceilings were of native wood, of the kinds used in delicate cabinet-work and were polished until they shone. The floor was covered with fine straw matting, and around the room were ranged easy-chairs and sofas of willow and rattan. In one corner stood a piano in an ebony case, and on a koa-wood centre-table were a number of fine photographs and works of art. Hanging baskets filled with blooming plants hung in each window and in the veranda. Altogether, it was the prettiest hermitage imaginable.
Riding along that afternoon through a country much like that we had passed over in the morning, we heard from a native hut the sound of the mournful Hawaiian wail, "Auea! auea!" (pronounced like the word "away" long drawn out). To our inquiry if any one was dead within, a woman answered, "No, but that some friends had come from a distance on a visit." I have frequently seen two Hawaiian friends or relations who had not met for a long time express their emotions at seeing one another again, not by kissing and laughing and joyful exclamations, but by sitting down on the ground and wailing. Perhaps it was done in remembrance of their long separation and of the changes that had taken place during that time. The native mode of kissing consists in rubbing noses together.
Not far from this place we passed a Mormon settlement, a little colony sent out from Utah. The group of bare white buildings was some distance back from the road, and we did not stop to visit them. Near by was a hou-tree swamp, a spongy, marshy place where cattle were eating grass that grew under water. They would reach down until their ears were almost covered, take a mouthful and lift up their heads while they chewed it. Thus far on our journey there had been a level plain two or three miles wide between the sea and the mountains, but here the mountains came close down to the sea, leaving only a little strip of land along the beach. High, stern cliffs with strange profiles, such as a lion, a canoe and a gigantic hen on her nest, frowned upon us as we rode along their base. We passed a cold bubbling spring which had worn a large basin for itself in the rock. It had formerly been the bathing-place of a chief, and therefore taboo to the common people. In one of our gallops along the beach my stirrup-strap broke, and we stopped in front of a solitary hut to ask for a stout string. A squid was drying on a pole and scenting the air with its fishy odors. In answer to our call an old man in a calico shirt came out of the hut, and, taking some strips of hou-bark, twisted them into a strong string and fastened the stirrup. I gave him a real, and he exclaimed "Aloha!" with apparently as much surprise and delight as if we had enriched him for life.
We rode through a little village at the mouth of a beautiful green valley, forded a river that ran through it, and passing under more high cliffs came about four in the afternoon to Kahana, our stopping-place for the night. It was a little cluster of houses at the head of a bay or inlet of the sea, where the lovely transparent water was green as grass, and stood in the opening of a valley enclosed by high, steep mountain-walls, with sharp ridges down their sides clothed with rich forests. All around us grew delicate, luxuriant ferns, of which there are one hundred and fifty varieties in the islands. Along the shores of the bay some women were wading, their dresses held above their knees, picking shellfish and green sea-moss off the rocks for supper. We rode up to the cottage of Kekoa, a native minister who had studied under Miss P——'s father. His half-Chinese, half-native wife was in a grass hut at the back of the house, and she came immediately to take our horses, saying that her husband was at the church, but would be at home soon. Then opening the door, she told us to go inside and rest ourselves. It was a pretty cottage, with floors and walls of wood and a grass roof. Braided mats of palm and pandanus-leaves were on the floor, and on the walls hung portraits of the Hawaiian royal family and Generals Lee and Grant. It had two rooms—a sitting-room and a bedroom—the first furnished with a table and chairs, the latter with a huge high-posted bedstead with a canopy over it. Altogether, it was much above the common native houses, and was evidently not used every day, but kept for the reception of guests—travelling ministers and the like.
When Kekoa came he welcomed us warmly on account of the attachment he had for Miss P——'s father, and told us to consider the house ours as long as it pleased us to stay. He sent his wife to catch a chicken, and soon set before us on the table in the sitting-room a supper consisting of boiled chicken, rice, baked taro, coarse salt from the bay, and bananas. We overlooked the absence of bread, which the natives know not of, and shared the use of the one knife and fork between us. Our host waited on us, his wife bringing the food to the door and handing it to him. After supper other natives came in, and Miss P—— conversed with them in Hawaiian. Being tired and stiff from my long ride, I went into the next room and lay down on the bed. Mrs. Kekoa came in presently and began to lomi-lomi me. She kneaded me with her hands from head to foot, just as a cook kneads dough, continuing the process for nearly an hour, although I begged her several times to stop lest she should be tired. At the end of that time all sensation of fatigue and stiffness was gone and I felt fresh and well. Kekoa and his wife slept in a grass hut several rods farther up the valley, and Miss P—— and I had the house to ourselves. In the middle of the night we were awakened by the sound of a man talking in through the open window of our room. We both thought for a moment that it was our persecutor of the morning who had followed us as he had threatened, but it proved to be a native from the head of the valley who wanted to see Kekoa. Miss P—— directed him to the grass hut where our host slept, and he went away, and we were not disturbed again. Next morning we had breakfast like the supper, and asked for our horses. Kekoa and his wife begged us to stay longer, but we could not, and parted from them with much regret. We afterward sent them some large photographs of scenes in Honolulu, and received an affectionate message from them in return. I look back to Kahana as a sort of Happy Valley, and dream sometimes of going back and seeing again its beautiful pale-green bay, its glittering blue sea, its grand mountain-walls clothed in richest verdure, and renewing my acquaintance with its kind-hearted people. Several natives gathered to say good-bye, and two of them rode with us out of the valley and saw us fairly on our way.
We rode past cane-plantations fenced with palm-tree trunks or hedged with huge prickly pear; past thickets of wild indigo and castor bean; through guava-jungles, where we pulled and ate the ripe fruit, yellow outside and pink within; past large fish-ponds that had been constructed for the chiefs in former days; past rice-fields where Chinese were scaring away the birds; past threshing-floors where Chinese were threshing rice; past kamani trees (from Tahiti) that looked like umbrellas slanting upward; past a flock of mina-birds brought from Australia; past aloe-plants and vast thickets of red and yellow lantana in blossom, reaching as high as our horses' necks.
We dismounted in front of a little grass hut where we heard the sound of a tappa-pounder, and went to the door. An old native woman, with her arms tattooed with India-ink, was sitting on a mat spread on the ground, with a sheet of moist red tappa lying over a beam placed on the ground in front of her, and a four-sided mallet in her hand. Beside her sat a young half-white girl with a large tortoise-shell comb in her hair and a fat little dog in her arms. We asked if we could come in and see the tappa. The old woman said "Yes," and displayed it with some pride. She was making it to give to Queen Emma, hence the pains she was taking with the coloring and the pattern. The bark of a shrub resembling our pawpaw tree is steeped in water until it becomes a mass of pulp. Then it is laid on the heavy beam and beaten with the tappa-pounder, and pulled and stretched until it becomes a square sheet with firm edges, about as thick as calico and six or eight feet square. The juice of berries or dye from the bark of trees furnishes the coloring, and the pattern is determined by the figures cut in the tappa-pounder. Some fine mats rolled-up in one corner and some braided baskets on the wall were also the work of this tappa-maker.
We passed through several villages as we neared our journey's end, and the scenery grew more interesting. The palm trees on the beach framed views of little islands bathed in sea-mist which lay half a mile or more from the shore. Narrow green valleys with high steep walls, down whose sides flashed bright waterfalls, opened to view one after another on the mouka or inland side. At the mouth of one we saw a twig of ohia, or native apple tree, placed carefully between two stones. Some superstitious native had put it there as an offering, that the goddess of that valley might not roll down rocks on him and kill him. The Pali, a stupendous perpendicular cliff four thousand feet high, faces the sea a few miles from Honolulu. We came in sight of it early in the afternoon, and stopped on a grassy knoll near a clear stream to eat our lunch and allow our horses to graze. The hardest part of the whole journey lay immediately before us. A zigzag path has been cut up the face of the cliff, but it is so steep and narrow that carriages cannot pass over it, and it is with much exertion and heavy panting that it can be climbed by man or beast. The face of the cliff is hung with vines and ferns, and at its base grow palms and the rich vegetation of the tropics. It is the grandest bit of scenery on Oahu. We rode our horses to the foot of the Pali: then, out of compassion for them, dismounted and led them up the long steep path, stopping several times to rest. On the way some natives passed us on horseback, racing up the Pali! At the top we stood a while in silence, gazing at the magnificent prospect spread out below us. We could see miles of the road we had come—silvery-green cane-plantations, little villages with white church-spires, rich groves of palm, kukui and koa, and the sea rising like a dark blue wall all around the horizon. Then we mounted and turned our faces toward Honolulu. On either side were lofty mountain-walls, with perpendicular sides clothed with vivid green and hung with silvery waterfalls. We were entering the city by Nuannu ("Cold Spring") Valley, the most delightful and fashionable suburb. Here were Queen Emma's residence, set in the midst of extensive and beautiful grounds, the Botanical Gardens, the residence of the American minister, the royal mausoleum and the house and gardens once occupied by Kalumma, a former queen. Crowds of gayly-dressed natives galloped past us as we neared the city, wearing wreaths of fern and flowers. One man carried a half-grown pig in a rope net attached to his stirrup: it looked tired of life. So, under the arching algaroba and monkey-pod trees that shade Nuannu Avenue, and past the royal palms that grace the yards, we rode into beautiful Honolulu.
Louise Coffin Jones.
FINDELKIND OF MARTINSWAND: A CHILD'S STORY.
There was a little boy a year or two since who lived under the shadow of Martinswand. Most people know, I should suppose, that the Martinswand is that mountain in the Oberinnthal where, several centuries ago, brave Kaiser Max lost his footing as he stalked the chamois and fell upon a ledge of rock, and stayed there, in mortal peril, for thirty hours, till he was rescued by the strength and agility of a Tyrol hunter—an angel in the guise of a hunter, as the chronicles of the time prefer to say. The Martinswand is a grand mountain, being one of the spurs of the greater Sonnstein, and rises precipitously, looming, massive and lofty, like a very fortress for giants, where it stands right across that road which, if you follow it long enough, takes you on through Zirl to Landeck—old, picturesque, poetic Landeck, where Frederic of the Empty Pockets rhymed his sorrows in ballads to his people—and so on, by Bludenz, into Switzerland itself, by as noble a highway as any traveller can ever desire to traverse on a summer's day. The Martinswand is within a mile of the little burg of Zirl, where the people, in the time of their kaiser's peril, came out with torches and bells, and the Host lifted up by their priest, and all prayed on their knees underneath the gaunt pile of limestone, which is the same to-day as it was then, whilst Kaiser Max is dust. The Martinswand soars up very steep and very majestic, bare stone at its base and all along its summit crowned with pine woods; and on the other side of the road that runs onward to Zirl are a little stone church, quaint and low, and gray with age, and a stone farm-house and cattle-sheds and timber-sheds of wood that is darkly brown from time; and beyond these are some of the most beautiful meadows in the world, full of tall grass and countless flowers, with pools and little estuaries made by the brimming Inn River that flows by them, and beyond the river the glaciers of the Sonnstein and the Selrain and the wild Arlberg region, and the golden glow of sunset in the west, most often seen from here through a veil of falling rain.
At this farm-house, with Martinswand towering above it and Zirl a mile beyond, there lived, and lives still, a little boy who bears the old historical name of Findelkind. His father, Otto Korner, was the last of a sturdy race of yeomen who had fought with Hofer and Haspinger, and had been free men always.
Findelkind came in the middle of seven other children, and was a pretty boy of nine years old, with slenderer limbs and paler cheeks than his rosy brethren, and tender, dreamy, dark-blue eyes that had the look, his mother told him, of seeking stars in midday—de chercher midi à quatorze heures, as the French have it. He was a good little lad, and seldom gave any trouble from disobedience, though he often gave it from forgetfulness. His father angrily complained that he was always in the clouds—that is, he was always dreaming—and so very often would spill the milk out of the pails, chop his own fingers instead of the wood, and stay watching the swallows when he was sent to draw water. His brothers and sisters were always making fun of him: they were sturdier, ruddier and merrier children than he was, loved romping and climbing and nutting, thrashing the walnut trees and sliding down snow-drifts, and got into mischief of a more common and childish sort than Findelkind's freaks of fancy. For indeed he was a very fanciful little boy: everything around had tongues for him, and he would sit for hours among the long rushes on the river's edge, trying to imagine what the wild green-gray water had found in its wanderings, and asking the water-rats and the ducks to tell him about it; but both rats and ducks were too busy to attend to an idle little boy, and never spoke, which vexed him.
Findelkind, however, was very fond of his books: he would study day and night in his little ignorant, primitive fashion. He loved his missal and his primer, and could spell them both out very fairly, and was learning to write of a good priest in Zirl, where he trotted three times a week with his two little brothers. When not at school he was chiefly set to guard the sheep and the cows, which occupation left him very much to himself, so that he had many hours in the summer-time to stare up to the skies and wonder, wonder, wonder about all sorts of things; while in the winter—the long, white, silent winter, when the post-wagons ceased to run, and the road into Switzerland was blocked, and the whole world seemed asleep except for the roaring of the winds—Findelkind, who still trotted over the snow to school in Zirl, would dream still, sitting on the wooden settle by the fire when he came home again under Martinswand. For the worst—or the best—of it all was that he was Findelkind also.
This was what was always haunting him. He was Findelkind, and to bear this name seemed to him to mark him out from all other children and dedicate him to Heaven. One day three years before, when he had been only six years old, the priest in Zirl, who was a very kindly and cheerful man, and amused the children as much as he taught them, had not allowed Findelkind to leave the school to go home because the storm of snow and wind was so violent, but had kept him until the worst should pass, with one or two other little lads who lived some way off, and had let the boys roast apples and chestnuts by the stove in his little room, and while the wind howled and the blinding snow fell without had told the children the story of another Findelkind, an earlier Findelkind, who had lived in the flesh as far back as 1381, and had been a little shepherd-lad—"just like you," said the good man, looking at the little boys munching their roast crabs—"over there, above Stuben, where Danube and Rhine meet and part." The pass of Arlberg is even still so bleak and bitter that few care to climb there: the mountains around are drear and barren, and snow lies till midsummer, and even longer sometimes. "But in the early ages," said the priest—and this is quite a true tale, which the children heard with open eyes, and mouths only not open because they were full of crabs and chestnuts,—"in the early ages," said the priest to them, "the Arlberg was far more dreary than it is now. There was only a mule-track over it, and no refuge for man or beast; so that wanderers and peddlers, and those whose need for work or desire for battle brought them over that frightful pass, perished in great numbers and were eaten by the bears and the wolves. The little shepherd-boy, Findelkind—who was a little boy five hundred years ago, remember," added the priest—"was sorely disturbed and distressed to see those poor dead souls in the snow winter after winter, and to see the blanched bones lie on the bare earth unburied when summer melted the snow. It made him unhappy, very unhappy; and what could he do, he a little boy keeping sheep? He had as his wage two florins a year—that was all—but his heart rose high and he had faith in God. Little as he was, he said to himself he would try and do something, so that year after year those poor lost travellers and beasts should not perish so. He said nothing to anybody, but he took the few florins he had saved up, bade his master farewell and went on his way begging—a little fourteenth-century boy, with long, straight hair and a girdled tunic, as you see them," continued the priest, "in the miniatures in the black-letter missal that lies upon my desk. No doubt Heaven favored him very strongly, and the saints watched over him; still, without the boldness of his own courage and the faith in his own heart they would not have done so. I suppose, too, that when knights in their armor and soldiers in their camps saw such a little fellow all alone they helped him, and perhaps struck some blows for him, and so sped him on his way and protected him from robbers and from wild beasts. Still, be sure that the real shield and the real reward that served Findelkind of Arlberg was the pure and noble purpose that armed him night and day. Now, history does not tell us where Findelkind went, nor how he fared, nor how long he was about it, but history does tell us that the little barefooted, long-haired boy, knocking so boldly at castle-gates and city-walls in the name of Christ and Christ's poor brethren, did so well succeed in his quest that before long he had returned to his mountain-home with means to have a church and a rude dwelling built, where he lived with six other brave and charitable souls, dedicating themselves to St. Christopher, and going out night and day, to the sound of the Angelus, seeking the lost and weary. This is really what Findelkind of Arlberg did five centuries ago, and did so well that his fraternity of St. Christopher twenty years after numbered amongst its members archdukes, prelates and knights without number, and lasted as a great order down to the days of Joseph II. This is what Findelkind in the fourteenth century did, I tell you. Bear like faith in your hearts, my children, and, though your generation is a harder one than his, because it is without faith, yet you shall move mountains, because Christ and St. Christopher will be with you."
Then the good man, having said that, blessed them and left them alone to their chestnuts and crabs and went into his own oratory to prayer. The other boys laughed and chattered, but Findelkind sat very quietly thinking of his namesake all the day after, and for many days and weeks and months this story haunted him. A little boy had done all that, and this little boy had been called Findelkind—Findelkind, just like himself.
It was a beautiful story, and yet it tortured him. If the good man had known how the history would root itself in the child's mind perhaps he would never have told it, for night and day it vexed Findelkind, and yet seemed beckoning to him and crying, "Go, thou, and do likewise!"
But what could he do?
There was the snow, indeed, and there were the mountains, as in the fourteenth century, but there were no travellers lost. The diligence did not go into Switzerland after autumn, and the country-people who went by on their mules and in their sledges to Innspruck knew their way very well, and were never likely to be adrift on a winter's night or eaten by a wolf or a bear.
When spring came Findelkind sat by the edge of the bright pure water amongst the flowering grasses and felt his head heavy. Findelkind of Arlberg, who was in heaven now, must look down, he fancied, and think him so stupid and so selfish sitting there. The first Findelkind a few centuries before had trotted down on his bare feet from his mountain-pass, and taken his little crook and gone out boldly over all the land on his pilgrimage, and knocked at castle-gates and city-walls in Christ's name and for love of the poor. That was to do something indeed!
This poor little living Findelkind would look at the miniatures in the priest's missal, in one of which there was the fourteenth-century boy with long hanging hair and a wallet and bare feet, and he never doubted that it was the portrait of the blessed Findelkind who was in heaven; and he wondered if he looked like a little boy there or if he were changed to the likeness of an angel.
"He was a boy just like me," thought the poor little fellow; and he felt so ashamed of himself, so much ashamed; and the priest had told him to try and do the same. He brooded over it so much, and it made him so anxious and so vexed, that his brothers ate his porridge and he did not notice it, his sisters pulled his curls and he did not feel it, his father brought a stick down on his back and he only started and stared, and his mother cried because he was losing his mind and would grow daft, and even his mother's tears he scarcely saw. He was always thinking of Findelkind in heaven.
When he went for water he spilt one half; when he did his lessons, he forgot the chief part; when he drove out the cow, he let her munch the cabbages; and when he was set to watch the oven, he let the loaves burn, like great Alfred. He was always busied thinking, "Little Findelkind that is in heaven did so great a thing: why may not I? I ought! I ought!" What was the use of being named after Findelkind that was in heaven unless one did something great too?
Next to the church there is a little stone sort of shed with two arched openings, and from it you look into the tiny church with its crucifixes and relics, or out to great, bold, sombre Martinswand, as you like best; and in this spot Findelkind would sit hour after hour while his brothers and sisters were playing, and look up at the mountains or on to the altar, and wish and pray and vex his little soul most woefully; and his ewes and his lambs would crop the grass about the entrance, and bleat to make him notice them and lead them farther afield, but all in vain. Even the dear sheep he hardly heeded, and his pet ewes Katte and Greta and the big ram Zips rubbed their soft noses in his hand unnoticed. So the summer passed away—the summer that is so short in the mountains, and yet so green and so radiant, with the torrents tumbling through the flowers, and the hay tossing in the meadows, and the lads and lasses climbing to cut the rich sweet grass of the alps. The short summer passed as fast as a dragon-fly flashes by, all green and gold, in the sun; and it was near autumn once more, and still Findelkind was always dreaming and wondering what he could do for the good of St. Christopher; and the longing to do it all came more and more into his little heart, and he puzzled his brain till his head ached.
One autumn morning, whilst yet it was dark, Findelkind made up his mind, and rose before his brothers and stole down stairs and out into the air, as it was easy to do, because the house-door never was bolted. He had nothing with him, he was barefooted, and his school-satchel was slung behind him, as Findelkind of Arlberg's wallet had been five centuries before. He took a little staff from the piles of wood lying about, and went out on to the highroad, on his way to do Heaven's will. He was not very sure—but that was because he was only nine years old and not very wise—but Findelkind that was in heaven had begged for the poor: so would he.
His parents were very poor, but he did not think of them as in want at any time, because he always had his bowlful of porridge and as much bread as he wanted to eat. This morning he had had nothing to eat: he wished to be away before any one could question him.
It was still dusk in the fresh autumn morning; the sun had not risen behind the glaciers of the Stubaythal, and the road was scarcely seen; but he knew it very well, and he set out bravely, saying his prayers to Christ and to St. Christopher and to Findelkind that was in heaven. He was not in any way clear as to what he would do, but he thought he would find some great thing to do somewhere lying like a jewel in the dust; and he went on his way in faith, as Findelkind of Arlberg had done. His heart beat high, and his head lost its aching pains, and his feet felt light—as light as if there were wings to his ankles. He would not go to Zirl, because Zirl he knew so well, and there could be nothing very wonderful waiting there; and he ran fast the other way. When he was fairly out from under the shadow of Martinswand he slackened his pace, and saw the sun come up on his path and begin to redden the gray-green water; and the early Eilwagen from Landeck, that had been lumbering along all the night, overtook him. He would have run after it and called out to the travellers for alms, but he felt ashamed: his father had never let him beg, and he did not know how to begin. The Eilwagen rolled on through the autumn mud, and that was one chance lost. He was sure that the first Findelkind had not felt ashamed when he had knocked at the first castle-gate.
By and by, when he could not see Martinswand by turning his head back ever so, he came to an inn that used to be a post-house in the old days when men travelled only by road. A woman was feeding chickens in the bright clear red of the cold daybreak. Findelkind timidly held out his hand. "For the poor," he murmured, and doffed his cap.
The old woman looked at him sharply: "Oh, is it you, little Findelkind? Have you run off from school? Be off with you home! I have mouths enough to feed here."
Findelkind went away, and began to learn that it is not easy to be a prophet or a hero in one's own country. He trotted a mile farther and met nothing. At last he came to some cows by the wayside, and a man tending them. "Would you give me something to help make a monastery?" he said timidly, and once more took off his cap.
The man gave a great laugh: "A fine monk you! And who wants more of those lazy drones? Not I."
Findelkind never answered: he remembered the priest had said that the years he lived in were very hard ones, and men in them had no faith. Ere long he came to a big walled house, with turrets and grated casements—very big it looked to him—like one of the first Findelkind's own castles. His heart beat loud against his side, but he plucked up his courage and knocked as loud as his heart was beating. He knocked and knocked, but no answer came. The house was empty. But he did not know that: he thought it was that the people within were cruel, and he went sadly onward with the road winding before him, and on his right the beautiful, impetuous gray river, and on his left the green Mittelgebirge and the mountains that rose behind it. By this time the sun was high: its rays were glowing on the red of the cranberry-shrubs and the blue of the bilberry-boughs; he was hungry and thirsty and tired. But he did not give in for that: he held on steadily. He knew that there was near, somewhere near, a great city that the people called Sprugg, and thither he had resolved to go. By noontide he had walked eight miles, and come to a green place where men were shooting at targets, the tall thick grass all around them; and a little way farther off was a train of people chanting and bearing crosses and dressed in long flowing robes.
The place was the Höttinger Au, and the day was Saturday, and the village was making ready to perform a miracle-play on the morrow. Findelkind ran to the robed singing-folk, quite sure that he saw the people of God. "Oh, take me! take me!" he cried to them—"do take me with you to do Heaven's work!"
But they pushed him aside for a crazy little boy that spoilt their rehearsing.
"It was only for Hötting-folk," said a lad older than himself. "Get out of the way with you, liebchen;" and the man who carried the cross knocked him with force on the head by mere accident, but Findelkind thought he had meant it.
Were people so much kinder five centuries before? he wondered, and felt sad as the many-colored robes swept on through the grass and the crack of the rifles sounded sharply through the music of the chanting voices. He went on footsore and sorrowful, thinking of the castle-doors that had opened and the city-gates that had unclosed at the summons of the little long-haired boy painted on the missal.
He had come now to where the houses were much more numerous, though under the shade of great trees—lovely old gray houses, some of wood, some of stone, some with frescoes on them and gold and color and mottoes, some with deep-barred casements and carved portals and sculptured figures—houses of the poorer people now, but still memorials of a grand and gracious time. For he had wandered into the quarter of St. Nicholas of this fair mountain-city, which he, like his country-folks, called Sprugg, though the government and the world called it Innspruck.
He got out upon a long gray wooden bridge, and looked up and down the reaches of the river, and thought to himself maybe this was not Sprugg but Jerusalem, so beautiful it looked with its domes shining golden in the sun, and the snow of the Patscher Kofl and the Brandjoch behind them. For little Findelkind had never come so far before.
As he stood on the bridge so dreaming a hand clutched him and a voice said, "A whole kreutzer, or you do not pass."
Findelkind started and trembled. A kreutzer? He had never owned such a treasure in all his life. "I have no money," he murmured timidly: "I came to see if I could get money for the poor."
The keeper of the bridge laughed: "You are a little beggar, you mean? Oh, very well: then over my bridge you do not go."
"But it is the city on the other side."
"To be sure it is the city, but over nobody goes without a kreutzer."
"I never have such a thing of my own—never, never," said Findelkind, ready to cry.
"Then you were a little fool to come away from your home, wherever that may be," said the man at the bridge-head. "Well, I will let you go, for you look a baby. But do not beg: that is bad."
"Findelkind did it."
"Then Findelkind was a rogue and a vagabond," said the taker of tolls.
"Oh, no, no, no!"
"Oh, yes, yes, yes, little saucebox! and take that," said the man, giving him a box on the ear, being angry at contradiction.
Findelkind's head drooped, and he went slowly over the bridge, forgetting that he ought to have thanked the toll-taker for a free passage. The world seemed to him very difficult. How had Findelkind done when he had come to bridges? and oh, how had Findelkind done when he had been hungry? For this poor little Findelkind was getting very hungry, and his stomach was as empty as was his wallet.
A few steps brought him to the Goldenes Dachl. He forgot his hunger and his pain, seeing the sun shine on all that gold and the curious painted galleries under it. He thought it was real, solid gold. Real gold laid out on a house-roof, and the people all so poor! Findelkind began to muse, and wonder why everybody did not climb up there and take a tile off and be rich. But perhaps it would be wicked. Perhaps God put the roof there with all that gold to prove people. Findelkind got bewildered. If God did such a thing, was it kind?
His head seemed to swim, and the sunshine went round and round with him. There went by him just then a very venerable-looking old man with silver hair: he was wrapped in a long cloak.
Findelkind pulled at the cloak gently, and the old man looked down. "What is it, my boy?" he asked.
Findelkind answered, "I came out to get gold: may I take it off that roof?"
"It is not gold, child: it is gilding."
"What is gilding?"
"It is a thing made to look like gold: that is all."
"It is a lie, then!"
The old man smiled: "Well, nobody thinks so. If you like to put it so, perhaps it is. What do you want gold for, you wee thing?"
"To build a monastery and house the poor."
The old man's face scowled and grew dark, for he was a Lutheran pastor from Bavaria. "Who taught you such trash?" he said crossly.
"It is not trash: it is faith."
And Findelkind's face began to burn and his blue eyes to darken and moisten. There was a little crowd beginning to gather, and the crowd was beginning to laugh. There were some soldiers and rifle-shooters in the throng, and they jeered and joked, and made fun of the old man in the long cloak, who grew angry then with the child. "You are a little idolater and a little impudent sinner," he said wrathfully, and shook the boy by the shoulder and went away; and the throng that had gathered round had only poor Findelkind left to tease.
He was a very poor little boy indeed to look at, with his sheepskin tunic and his bare feet and legs, and his wallet that never was to get filled.
"Where do you come from, and what do you want?" they asked.
And he answered with a sob in his voice, "I want to do like Findelkind of Arlberg."
And then the crowd laughed, not knowing at all what he meant, but laughing just because they did not know, as crowds always will do.
And only the big dogs, that are so very big in this country, and are all loose and free and good-natured citizens, came up to him kindly and rubbed against him and made friends; and at that tears came into his eyes and his courage rose, and he lifted his head.
"You are cruel people to laugh," he said indignantly: "the dogs are kinder. People did not laugh at Findelkind. He was a little boy just like me, no better and no bigger, and as poor, and yet he had so much faith, and the world then was so good, that he left his sheep and got money enough to build a church and a hospice to Christ and St. Christopher. And I want to do the same for the poor. Not for myself—no, for the poor. I am Findelkind too, and Findelkind that is in heaven speaks to me." Then he stopped, and a sob rose again in his throat.
"He is crazy," said the people, laughing, yet a little scared; for the priest at Zirl had said rightly, This is not an age of faith. At that moment there sounded, coming from the barracks, that used to be the Schloss in the old days of Kaiser Max and Mary of Burgundy, the sound of drums and trumpets and the tramp of marching feet. It was one of the corps of jägers of Tyrol going down from the avenue to the Rudolf Platz, with their band before them and their pennons streaming. It was a familiar sight, but it drew the street-throngs to it like magic: the age is not fond of dreamers, but it is very fond of drums. In almost a moment the old dark arcades and the river-side and the passages near were all empty, except for the old women sitting at their stalls of fruit or cakes or toys. They are wonderful arched arcades, like the cloisters of a cathedral more than anything else, and the shops under them are all homely and simple—shops of leather, of furs, of clothes, of wooden playthings, of sweet, wholesome bread. They are very quaint, and kept by poor folks for poor folks, but to the dazed eyes of Findelkind they looked like a forbidden Paradise, for he was so hungry and so heartbroken, and he had never seen any bigger place than little Zirl.
He stood and looked wistfully, but no one offered him anything. Close by was a stall of splendid purple grapes, but the old woman that kept it was busy knitting. She only called to him to stand out of her light.
"You look a poor brat: have you a home?" said another woman, who sold bridles and whips and horses' bells and the like.
"Oh yes, I have a home—by Martinswand," said Findelkind with a sigh.
The woman looked at him sharply: "Your parents have sent you on an errand here?"
"No, I have run away."
"Run away? Oh, you bad boy! Unless, indeed—are they cruel to you?"
"No—very good."
"Are you a little rogue then, or a thief?"
"You are a bad woman to think such things," said Findelkind hotly, knowing himself on how innocent and sacred a quest he was.
"Bad? I? Oh ho," said the old dame, cracking one of her new whips in the air, "I should like to make you jump about with this, you thankless little vagabond! Be off!"
Findelkind sighed again, his momentary anger passing, for he had been born with a gentle temper, and thought himself to blame much more readily than he thought other people were—as, indeed, every wise child does, only there are so few children—or men—that are wise.
He turned his head away from the temptation of the bread- and fruit-stalls, for in truth hunger gnawed him terribly, and wandered a little to the left. From where he stood he could see the long beautiful street of Theresa with its oriels and arches, painted windows and gilded signs, and the steep, gray, dark mountains closing it in at the distance; but the street frightened him, it looked so grand, and he knew it would tempt him; so he went where he saw the green tops of some high elms and beeches. The trees, like the dogs, seemed like friends: it was the human creatures that were cruel.
At that moment there came out of the barrack-gates, with great noise of trumpets and trampling of horses, a group of riders in gorgeous uniforms, with sabres and chains glancing and plumes tossing. It looked to Findelkind like a group of knights—those knights who had helped and defended his namesake with their steel and their gold in the old days of the Arlberg quest. His heart gave a leap, and he jumped on the dust for joy, and he ran forward and fell on his knees and waved his cap like a little mad thing, and cried out, "Oh, dear knights! oh, great soldiers! help me, fight for me, for the love of the saints! I have come all the way from Martinswand, and I am Findelkind, and I am trying to serve St. Christopher like Findelkind of Arlberg."
But his little swaying body and pleading hands and shouting voice and blowing curls frightened the horses: one of them swerved, and very nearly settled the woes of Findelkind for ever and aye by a kick. The soldier who rode the horse reined him in with difficulty: he was at the head of the little staff, being indeed no less or more than the general commanding the garrison, which in this city is some fifteen thousand strong. An orderly sprang from his saddle and seized the child, and shook him and swore at him. Findelkind was frightened, but he shut his eyes and set his teeth, and said to himself that the martyrs must have had very much worse than these things to suffer in their pilgrimage. He had fancied these riders were knights—such knights as the priest had shown him the likeness of in old picture-books—whose mission it had been to ride through the world succoring the weak and weary and always defending the right.
"What are your swords for if you are not knights?" he cried, desperately struggling in his captor's grip, and seeing through his half-closed lids the sunshine shining on steel scabbards.
"What does he want?" asked the officer in command of the garrison, whose staff all this bright and martial array was. He was riding out from the barracks to an inspection on the Rudolf Platz. He was a young man, and had little children himself, and was half amused, half touched, to see the tiny figure of the dusty little boy.
"I want to build a monastery like Findelkind of Arlberg, and to help the poor," said our Findelkind valorously, though his heart was beating like that of a little mouse caught in a trap, for the horses were trampling up the dust around him and the orderly's grip was hard.
The officers laughed aloud; and indeed he looked a poor little scrap of a figure, very ill able to help even himself.
"Why do you laugh?" cried Findelkind, losing his terror in his indignation, and inspired with the courage which a great earnestness always gives. "You should not laugh. If you were true knights you would not laugh: you would fight for me. I am little, I know. I am very little, but he was no bigger than I, and see what great things he did. But the soldiers were good in those days: they did not laugh and use bad words." And Findelkind, on whose shoulder the orderly's hold was still fast, faced the horses which looked to him as huge as Martinswand, and the swords which he little doubted were to be sheathed in his heart.
The officers stared, laughed again, then whispered together, and Findelkind heard them mutter the word "toll." Findelkind, whose quick little ears were both strained like a mountain-leveret's, understood that the great men were saying amongst themselves that it was not safe for him to be about alone, and that it would be kinder to him to catch and cage him—the general view with which the world regards enthusiasts.
He heard, he understood: he knew that they did not mean to help him, these men with the steel weapons and the huge steeds, but that they meant to shut him up in a prison—him, little free-born, forest-fed Findelkind. He wrenched himself out of the soldier's grip as the rabbit wrenches itself out of the jaws of the trap, even at the cost of leaving a limb behind, shot between the horses' legs, doubled like a hunted thing, and spied a refuge. Opposite the avenue of gigantic poplars and pleasant stretches of grass shaded by other bigger trees there stands a very famous church—famous alike in the annals of history and of art—the church of the Franciscans that holds the tomb of Kaiser Max, though, alas! it holds not his ashes, as his dying desire was that it should. The church stands here, a noble sombre place, with the Silver Chapel of Philippina Wessler adjoining it, and in front the fresh cool avenues that lead to the river and the broad water-meadows, and the grand road bordered with the painted stations of the Cross.
There were some peasants coming in from the country driving cows; some burghers in their carts with fat, slow horses; some little children were at play under the poplars and the elms; great dogs were lying about on the grass: everything was happy and at peace except the poor throbbing heart of little Findelkind, who thought the soldiers were coming after him to lock him up as mad, and ran and ran as fast as his trembling legs would carry him, making for sanctuary, as in the old bygone days that he loved many a soul less innocent than his had done. The wide doors of the Hof Kirche stood open, and on the steps lay a black and tan hound, watching no doubt for its master and mistress, who had gone within to pray. Findelkind in his terror vaulted over the dog, and into the church tumbled headlong.
It seemed quite dark, after the brilliant sunshine on the river and the grass: his forehead touched the stone floor as he fell, and as he raised himself and stumbled forward, reverent and bareheaded, looking for the altar to cling to when the soldiers should enter to seize him, his uplifted eyes fell on the great tomb.
The tomb seems entirely to fill the church as, with its twenty-four guardian figures round it, it towers up in the twilight that reigns here even at midday. There is a stern majesty and grandeur in it which dwarfs every other monument and mausoleum. It is grim, it is rude, it is savage, with the spirit of the rough ages that created it; but it is great with their greatness, it is heroic with their heroism, it is simple with their simplicity.
As the awestricken eyes of the terrified child fell on the mass of stone and bronze the sight smote him breathless. The mailed warriors standing around it, so motionless, so solemn, filled him with a frozen, nameless fear. He had never a doubt but that they were the dead arisen. The foremost that met his eyes were Theodoric and Arthur—the next, grim Rodolf, father of a dynasty of emperors. There, leaning on their swords, the three gazed down on him, armored, armed, majestic, serious, guarding the empty grave, which to the child, who knew nothing of its history, seemed a bier; and at the feet of Theodoric, who alone of them all looked young and merciful, poor little desperate Findelkind fell with a piteous sob, and cried, "I am not mad! Indeed, indeed, I am not mad!"
He did not know that these six figures were but statues of bronze. He was quite sure they were the dead arisen, and meeting there around that tomb on which the solitary kneeling knight watched and prayed, encircled, as by a wall of steel, by these his comrades. He was not frightened; he was rather comforted and stilled, as with a sudden sense of some deep calm and certain help.
Findelkind, without knowing that he was like so many dissatisfied poets and artists much bigger than himself, dimly felt in his little tired mind how beautiful and how gorgeous and how grand the world must have been when heroes and knights like these had gone by in its daily sunshine and its twilight storms. No wonder Findelkind in heaven had found his pilgrimage so fair when, if he had needed any help, he had only had to kneel and clasp these firm mailed limbs, these strong cross-hilted swords, in the name of Christ and of the poor!
Theodoric seemed to look down on him with benignant eyes from under the raised visor, and Findelkind, weeping, threw his small arms closer and closer round the bronzed knees of the heroic figure and sobbed aloud, "Help me! help me! Oh, turn the hearts of the people to me, and help me to do good!"
But Theodoric answered nothing.
There was no sound in the dark, hushed church; the gloom grew darker over Findelkind's eyes; the mighty forms of monarchs and of heroes grew dim before his sight. He lost consciousness and fell prone upon the stones at Theodoric's feet, for he had fainted from hunger and emotion.
When he awoke it was quite evening: there was a lantern held over his head; voices were muttering curiously and angrily; bending over him were two priests, a sacristan of the church and his own father. His little wallet lay by him on the stones, always empty.
"Liebchen, were you mad?" cried his father, half in rage, half in tenderness. "The chase you have led me! and your mother thinking you were drowned! and all the working day lost, running after old women's tales of where they had seen you! Oh, little fool! little fool! what was amiss with Martinswand that you must leave it?"
Findelkind slowly and feebly rose and sat up on the pavement, and looked up, not at his father, but at the knight Theodoric. "I thought they would help me to keep the poor," he muttered feebly as he glanced at his own wallet. "And it is empty, empty!"
"Are we not poor enough?" cried his father with paternal impatience, ready to tear his hair with vexation at having such a little idiot for son. "Must you rove afield to find poverty to help, when it sits cold enough, the Lord knows, at our own hearth? Oh, little ass! little dolt! little maniac! fit only for a madhouse! talking to iron figures and taking them for real men!—What have I done, O Heaven, that I should be afflicted thus?"
And the poor man wept, being a good, affectionate soul, but not very wise, and believing that his boy was mad. Then, seized with sudden rage once more at thought of his day all wasted and its hours harassed and miserable through searching for the lost child, he plucked up the light, slight figure of Findelkind in his own arms, and with muttered thanks and excuses to the sacristan of the church, bore the boy out with him into the evening air, and lifted him into a cart which stood there with a horse harnessed to one side of the pole, as the country-people love to do, to the risk of their own lives and their neighbors'. Findelkind said never a word: he was as dumb as Theodoric had been to him; he felt stupid, heavy, half blind; his father pushed him some bread, and he ate it by sheer instinct, as a lost animal will do. The cart jogged on, the stars shone, the great church vanished in the gloom of night.
As they went through the city toward the river-side and the homeward way not a single word did his father, who was a silent man at all times, address to him. Only once as they passed the bridge, "Son," he asked, "did you run away truly thinking to please God and help the poor?"
"Truly I did," answered Findelkind with a sob in his throat.
"Then thou wert an ass," said his father. "Didst never think of thy mother's love and of my toil? Look at home."
Findelkind was mute. The drive was very long, backward by the same way, with the river shining in the moonlight and the mountains half covered with the clouds.
It was ten by the bells of Zirl when they came once more under the solemn shadow of grave Martinswand. There were lights moving about the house, his brothers and sisters were still up, his mother ran out into the road, weeping and laughing with fear and joy.
Findelkind himself said nothing. He hung his head. They were too fond of him to scold him or to jeer at him: they made him go quickly to his bed, and his mother made him a warm milk-posset and kissed him. "We will punish thee to-morrow, naughty and cruel one," said his parent. "But thou art punished enough already, for in thy place little Stefan had the sheep, and he has lost Katte's lambs, the beautiful twin lambs! I dare not tell thy father to-night. Dost hear the poor thing mourn? Do not go afield for thy duty again."
A pang went through the heart of Findelkind, as if a knife had pierced it. He loved Katte better than almost any other living thing, and she was bleating under his window motherless and alone. They were such beautiful lambs too!—lambs that his father had promised should never be killed, but be reared to swell the flock.
Findelkind cowered down in his bed and felt wretched beyond all wretchedness. He had been brought back, his wallet was empty, and Katte's lambs were lost. He could not sleep. His pulses were beating like so many steam-hammers: he felt as if his body were all one great throbbing heart. His brothers, who lay in the same chamber with him, were sound asleep: very soon his father and mother also, on the other side of the wall. Findelkind was alone, wide awake, watching the big white moon sail past his little casement and hearing Katte bleat. Where were her poor twin lambs? The night was bitterly cold, for it was already far on in autumn; the river had swollen and flooded many fields; the snow for the last week had fallen quite low down on the mountain-sides. Even if still living the little lambs would die, out on such a night without the mother or food and shelter of any sort. Findelkind, whose vivid brain always saw everything that he imagined as if it were being acted before his eyes, in fancy saw his two dear lambs floating dead down the swollen tide, entangled in rushes on the flooded shore, or fallen with broken limbs upon a crest of rocks. He saw them so plainly that scarcely could he hold back his breath from screaming aloud in the still night and arousing the mourning wail of the desolate mother.
At last he could bear it no longer: his head burned, and his brain seemed whirling round. At a bound he leaped out of bed quite noiselessly, slid into his sheepskins, and stole out as he had done the night before, hardly knowing what he did. Poor Katte was mourning in the wooden shed with the other sheep, and the wail of her sorrow sounded sadly across the loud roar of the rushing river. The moon was still high. Above, against the sky, black and awful with clouds floating over its summit, was the great Martinswand.
Findelkind this time called the big dog Waldmar to him, and with the dog beside him went once more out into the cold and the gloom, whilst his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, were sleeping, and poor childless Katte alone was awake. He looked up at the mountain, and then across the water-swept meadows to the river. He was in doubt which way to take. Then he thought that in all likelihood the lambs would have been seen if they had wandered the river-way, and even little Stefan would have had too much sense to let them go there. So he crossed the road and began to climb Martinswand. With the instinct of the born mountaineer he had brought out his crampons with him, and had now fastened them on his feet: he knew every part and ridge of the mountains, and had more than once climbed over to that very spot where Kaiser Max had hung in peril of his life.
On second thoughts he bade Waldmar go back to the house. The dog was a clever mountaineer too, but Findelkind did not wish to lead him into danger. "I have done the wrong, and I will bear the brunt," he said to himself; for he felt as if he had killed Katte's children, and the weight of the sin was like lead on his heart, and he would not kill good Waldmar too.
His little lantern did not show much light, and as he went higher upward he lost sight of the moon. The cold was nothing to him, because the clear still air was one in which he had been reared; and the darkness he did not mind, because he was used to that also; but the weight of sorrow upon him he scarcely knew how to bear, and how to find two tiny lambs in this vast waste of silence and shadow would have puzzled and wearied older minds than his. Garibaldi and all his household, old soldiers tried and true, sought all night once upon Caprera on such a quest in vain. If he could only have awakened his brother Stefan to ask him which way they had gone! But then, to be sure, he remembered, Stefan must have told that to all those who had been looking for the lambs from sunset to nightfall. All alone he began the ascent.
Time and again, in the glad spring-time and the fresh summer weather, he had driven his flock upward to eat the grass that grew in the clefts of the rocks and on the broad green alps. The sheep could not climb to the highest points, but the goats did, and he with them. Time and again he had lain on his back in these uppermost heights, with the lower clouds behind him and the black wings of the birds and the crows almost touching his forehead, as he lay gazing up into the blue depth of the sky and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming.
He would never dream any more now, he thought to himself. His dreams had cost Katte her lambs, and the world of the dead Findelkind was gone for ever: gone all the heroes and knights; gone all the faith and the force; gone every one who cared for the dear Christ and the poor in pain.
The bells of Zirl were ringing midnight. Findelkind heard, and wondered that only two hours had gone by since his mother had kissed him in his bed. It seemed to him as if long, long nights had rolled away and he had lived a hundred years. He did not feel any fear of the dark calm night, lit now and then by silvery gleams of moon and stars. The mountain was his old familiar friend, and the ways of it had no more terror for him than these hills here used to have for the bold heart of Kaiser Max. Indeed, all he thought of was Katte—Katte and the lambs. He knew the way that the sheep-tracks ran—the sheep could not climb so high as the goats—and he knew too that little Stefan could not climb so high as he. So he began his search low down upon Martinswand.
After midnight the cold increased: there were snow-clouds hanging near, and they opened over his head, and the soft snow came flying along. For himself he did not mind it, but alas for the lambs! If it covered them, how would he find them? And if they slept in it they were dead.
It was bleak and bare on the mountain-side, though there were still patches of grass, such as the flocks liked, that had grown since the hay was cut. The frost of the night made the stone slippery, and even the irons gripped it with difficulty, and there was a strong wind rising like a giant's breath, and blowing his small horn lantern to and fro. Now and then he quaked a little with fear—not fear of the night or the mountains, but of strange spirits and dwarfs and goblins of ill repute, said to haunt Martinswand after nightfall. Old women had told him of such things, though the priest always said that they were only foolish tales, there being nothing on God's earth wicked save men and women who had not clean hearts and hands. Findelkind believed the priest; still, all alone on the side of the mountain, with the snowflakes flying round him, he felt a nervous thrill that made him tremble and almost turn backward. Almost, but not quite, for he thought of Katte and the poor little lambs lost—and perhaps dead—through his fault.
The path went zigzag and was very steep; the Siberian pines swayed their boughs in his face; stones that lay in his path, unseen in the gloom, made him stumble. Now and then a large bird of the night flew by with a rushing sound: the air grew so cold that all Martinswand might have been turning to one huge glacier. All at once he heard through the stillness—for there is nothing so still as a mountain-side in snow—a little pitiful bleat. All his terrors vanished, all his memories of ghost-tales passed away; his heart gave a leap of joy; he was sure it was the cry of the lambs. He stopped to listen more surely. He was now many score of feet above the level of his home and of Zirl: he was, as nearly as he could judge, halfway as high as where the cross in the cavern marks the spot of the kaiser's peril. The little bleat sounded above him, and it was very feeble and faint.
Findelkind set his lantern down, braced himself up by drawing tighter his old leathern girdle, set his sheepskin cap firm on his forehead, and went toward the sound as far as he could judge that it might be. He was out of the woods now: there were only a few straggling pines rooted here and there in a mass of loose-lying rock and slate. So much he could tell by the light of the lantern, and the lambs, by the bleating, seemed still above him.
It does not perhaps seem very hard labor to hunt about by a dusky light upon a desolate mountain-side, but when the snow is falling fast, when the light is only a small circle, wavering yellowish on the white, when around is a wilderness of loose stones and yawning clefts, when the air is ice and the hour is past midnight, the task is not a light one for a man; and Findelkind was a child, like that Findelkind that was in heaven.
Long, very long, was his search: he grew hot and forgot all fear, except a spasm of terror lest his light should burn low and die out. The bleating had quite ceased now, and there was not even a sigh to guide him; but he knew that near him the lambs must be, and he did not waver nor despair.
He did not pray—praying in the morning had been no use—but he trusted in God, and he labored hard, toiling to and fro, seeking in every nook and behind each stone, and straining every muscle and nerve, till the sweat rolled in a briny dew off his forehead and his curls dripped with wet. At last, with a scream of joy, he touched some soft, close wool that gleamed white as the white snow. He knelt down on the ground and peered behind the stone by the full light of his lantern: there lay the little lambs—two little brothers, twin brothers, huddled close together, asleep. Asleep? He was sure they were asleep, for they were so silent and still.
He bowed over them and kissed them, and laughed and cried, and kissed them again. Then a sudden horror smote him: they were so very still. There they lay, cuddled close, one on another, one little white head on each little white body, drawn closer than ever together to try and get warm. He called to them; he touched them; then he caught them up in his arms, and kissed them again and again and again. Alas! they were frozen and dead. Never again would they leap in the long green grass, and frisk with one another, and lie happy by Katte's side: they had died calling for their mother, and in the long, cold, cruel night only Death had answered.
Findelkind did not weep nor scream nor tremble: his heart seemed frozen, like the dead lambs. It was he who had killed them. He rose up and gathered them in his arms, and cuddled them in the skirts of his sheepskin tunic, and cast his staff away that he might carry them; and so, thus burdened with their weight, set his face to the snow and the wind once more and began his downward way. Once a great sob shook him: that was all. Now he had no fear. The night might have been noonday, the snowstorm might have been summer, for aught that he knew or cared.
Long and weary was the way, and often he stumbled and had to rest; often the terrible sleep of the snow lay heavy on his eyelids, and he longed to lie down and be at rest, as the little brothers were; often it seemed to him that he would never reach home again. But he shook the lethargy off him and resisted the longing, and held on his way: he knew that his mother would mourn for him as Katte mourned for the lambs. At length, through all difficulty and danger, when his light had spent itself, and his strength had wellnigh spent itself too, his feet touched the old highroad. There were flickering torches and many people and loud cries around the church, as there had been four hundred years before, when the last sacrament had been said in the valley for the hunter-king doomed to perish above. His mother, being sleepless and anxious, had risen long before it was dawn, and had gone to the children's chamber, and had found the bed of Findelkind empty once more.
He came into the midst of the people with the two little lambs in his arms, and he heeded neither the outcries of neighbors nor the frenzied joy of his mother: his eyes looked straight before him and his face was white like the snow. "I killed them," he said; and then two great tears rolled down his cheeks and fell on the little cold bodies of the two little dead twin brothers.
Findelkind was very ill for many nights and many days after that. Whenever he spoke in his fever he always said, "I killed them." Never anything else. So the dreary winter months went by, while the deep snow filled up valleys and meadows and covered the great mountains from summit to base, and all around Martinswand was quite still, save that now and then the post went by to Zirl, and on the holy days the bells tolled: that was all. His mother sat between the stove and his bed with a sore heart; and his father, as he went to and fro between the walls of beaten snow from the wood-shed to the cattle-byre, was sorrowful, thinking to himself the child would die and join that earlier Findelkind whose home was with the saints.
But the child did not die. He lay weak and wasted and almost motionless a long time, but slowly, as the spring-time drew near, and the snows on the lower hills loosened, and the abounding waters coursed green and crystal-clear down all the sides of the hills, Findelkind revived as the earth did, and by the time the new grass was springing and the first blue of the gentian gleamed on the Alps he was well.
But to this day he seldom plays, and scarcely ever laughs. His face is sad and his eyes have a look of trouble. Sometimes the priest of Zirl says of him to others, "He will be a great poet or a great hero some day." Who knows?
Meanwhile, in the heart of the child there remains always a weary pain that lies on his childish life as a stone may lie on a flower. "I killed them," he says often to himself, thinking of the two little white brothers frozen to death on Martinswand that cruel night; and he does the things that are told him, and is obedient, and tries to be content with the humble daily duties that are his lot, and when he says his prayers at bedtime always ends them so: "Dear God, do let the little lambs play with Findelkind that is in heaven."
Ouida.