The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866

Nor see the Angel at the helm
Who steers the Ship of Death!

DOCTOR JOHNS

LXIII

Reuben had heard latterly very little of domestic affairs at Ashfield. He knew scarce more of the family relations of Adèle than was covered by that confidential announcement of the parson's which had so set on fire his generous zeal. The spinster, indeed, in one of her later letters had hinted, in a roundabout manner, that Adèle's family misfortunes were not looking so badly as they once did,—that the poor girl (she believed) felt tenderly still toward her old playmate,—and that Mr. Maverick was, beyond all question, a gentleman of very easy fortune. But Reuben was not in a mood to be caught by any chaff administered by his most respectable aunt. If, indeed, he had known all,—if that hearty burst of Adèle's gratitude had come to him,—if he could once have met her with the old freedom of manner,—ah! then—then—

But no; he thinks of her now as one under social blight, which he would have lifted or borne with her had not her religious squeamishness forbidden. He tries to forget what was most charming in her, and has succeeded passably well.

"I suppose she is still modelling her heroes on the Catechism," he thought, "and Phil will very likely pass muster."

The name of Madam Maverick as attaching to their fellow-passenger—which came to his ear for the first time on the second day out from port—considerably startled him. Madam Maverick is, he learns, on her way to join her husband and child in America. But he is by no means disposed to entertain a very exalted respect for any claimant of such name and title. He finds, indeed, the prejudices of his education (so he calls them) asserting themselves with a fiery heat; and most of all he is astounded by the artfully arranged religious drapery with which this poor woman—as it appears to him—seeks to cover her short-comings. He had brought away from the atmosphere of the old cathedrals a certain quickened religious sentiment, by the aid of which he had grown into a respect, not only for the Romish faith, but for Christian faith of whatever degree. And now he encountered what seemed to him its gross prostitution. The old Doctor then was right: this Popish form of heathenism was but a device of Satan,—a scarlet covering of iniquity. Yet, in losing respect for one form of faith, he found himself losing respect for all. It was easy for him to match the present hypocrisy with hypocrisies that he had seen of old.

Meantime, the good ship Meteor was skirting the shores of Spain, and had made a good hundred leagues of her voyage before Reuben had ventured to make himself known as the old schoolmate and friend of the child whom Madam Maverick was on her way to greet after so many years of separation. The truth was, that Reuben, his first disgust being overcome, could not shake off the influence of something attractive and winning in the manner of Madam Maverick. In her step and in her lithe figure he saw the step and figure of Adèle. All her orisons and aves, which she failed not to murmur each morning and evening, were reminders of the earnest faith of her poor child. It is impossible to treat her with disrespect. Nay, it is impossible,—as Reuben begins to associate more intimately the figure and the voice of this quiet lady with his memories of another and a younger one,—quite impossible, that he should not feel his whole chivalrous nature stirred in him, and become prodigal of attentions. If there were hypocrisy, it somehow cheated him into reverence.

The lady is, of course, astounded at Reuben's disclosure to her. "Mon Dieu! you, then, are the son of that good priest of whom I have heard so much! And you are Puritan? I would not have thought that. They love the vanities of the world then,"—and her eye flashed over the well-appointed dress of Reuben, who felt half an inclination to hide, if it had been possible, the cluster of gairish charms which hung at his watch-chain. "You have shown great kindness to my child, Monsieur. I thank you with my whole heart."

"She is very charming, Madam," said Reuben, in an easy, dégagé manner, which, to tell truth, he put on to cover a little embarrassing revival of his old sentiment.

Madam Maverick looked at him keenly. "Describe her to me, if you will be so good, Monsieur."

Whereupon Reuben ran on,—jauntily, at first, as if it had been a ballet-girl of San Carlo whose picture he was making out; but his old hearty warmth declared itself by degrees; and his admiration and his tenderness gave such warm color to his language as it might have shown if her little gloved hand had been shivering even then in his own passionate clasp. And as he closed, with a great glow upon his face, Madam Maverick burst forth,—

"Mon Dieu, how I love her! Yet is it not a thing astonishing that I should ask you, a stranger, Monsieur, how my own child is looking? Culpa mea! culpa mea!" and she clutched at her rosary, and mumbled an ave, with her eyes lifted and streaming tears.

Reuben looked upon her in wonder, amazed at the depth of her emotion. Could this be all hypocrisy?

"Tenez!" said she, recovering herself, and reading, as it were, his doubts. "You count these" (lifting her rosary) "bawbles yonder, and our prayers pagan prayers; my husband has told me, and that she, Adèle, is taught thus, and that the Bon Dieu has forsaken our Holy Church,—that He comes near now only to your—what shall I call them?—meeting-houses? Tell me, Monsieur, does Adèle think this?"

"I think," said Reuben, "that your daughter would have charity for any religious faith which was earnest."

"Charity! Mon Dieu! Charity for sins, charity for failings,—yes, I ask it; but for my faith! No, Monsieur, no—no—a thousand times, no!"

"This is real," thought Reuben.

"Tell me, Monsieur," continued she, with a heat of language that excited his admiration, "what is it you believe there? What is the horror against which your New England teachers would warn my poor Adèle? May the Blessed Virgin be near her!"

Whereupon, Reuben undertook to lay down the grounds of distrust in which he had been educated; not, surely, with the fervor or the logical sequence which the old Doctor would have given to the same, but yet inveighing in good set terms against the vain ceremonials, the idolatries, the mummeries, the confessional, the empty absolution; and summing up all with the formula (may be he had heard the Doctor use the same language) that the piety of the Romanist was not so much a deep religious conviction of the truth, as a sentiment.

"Sentiment!" exclaims Madam Maverick. "What else? What but love of the good God?"

But not so much by her talk as by the every-day sight of her serene, unfaltering devotion is Reuben won into a deep respect for her faith.

Those are rare days and rare nights for him, as the good ship Meteor slips down past the shores of Spain to the Straits,—days all sunny, nights moon-lit. To the right,—not discernible, but he knows they are there,—the swelling hills of Catalonia and of Andalusia, the marvellous Moorish ruins, the murmurs of the Guadalquivir; to the left, a broad sweep of burnished sea, on which, late into the night, the moon pours a stream of molten silver, that comes rocking and widening toward him, and vanishes in the shadow of the ship. The cruise has been a splendid venture for him,—twenty-five thousand at the least. And as he paces the decks,—in the view only of the silent man at the wheel and of the silent stars,—he forecasts the palaces he will build. The feeble Doctor shall have ease and every luxury; he will be gracious in his charities; he will astonish the old people by his affluence; he will live—

Just here, he spies a female figure stealing from the companion-way, and gliding beyond the shelter of the wheelhouse. Half concealed as he chances to be in the shadow of the rigging, he sees her fall upon her knees, and, with head uplifted, cross her hands upon her bosom. 'T is a short prayer, and the instant after she glides below.

"Good God! what trust!"—it is an ejaculatory prayer of Reuben's, rather than an oath. And with it, swift as the wind, comes a dreary sense of unrest. The palaces he had built vanish. The stars blink upon him kindly, and from their wondrous depths challenge his thought. The sea swashes idly against the floating ship. He too afloat,—afloat. Whither bound? Yearning still for a belief on which he may repose. And he bethinks himself,—does it lie somewhere under the harsh and dogmatic utterances of the Ashfield pulpit? At the thought, he recalls the weary iteration of cumbersome formulas, that passed through his brain like leaden plummets, and the swift lashings of rebuke, if he but reached over for a single worldly floweret, blooming beside the narrow path; and yet,—and yet, from the leaden atmosphere of that past, saintly faces beam upon him,—a mother's, Adèle's,—nay, the kindly fixed gray eyes of the old Doctor glow upon him with a fire that must have been kindled with truth.

Does it lie in the melodious aves, and under the robes of Rome? The sordid friars, with their shaven pates, grin at him; some Rabelais head of a priest in the confessional-stall leers at him with mockery: and yet the golden letters of the great dome gleam again with the blazing legend, Ædificabo meam Ecclesiam!—and the figure of the Magdalen yonder has just now murmured, in tones that must surely have reached a gracious ear,—

"Tibi Christe, redemptori,
Nostro vero salvatori!"

Is the truth between? Is it in both? Is it real? And if real, why may not the same lips declare it under the cathedral or the meeting-house roof? Why not—in God's name—charity?

LXIV

The Meteor is a snug ship, well found, well manned, and, as the times go, well officered. The captain, indeed, is not over-alert or fitted for high emergencies; but what emergencies can belong to so placid a voyage? For a week after the headlands of Tarifa and Spartel have sunk under the eastern horizon, the vessel is kept every day upon her course,—her top-gallant and studding sails all distent with the wind blowing freely from over Biscay. After this come light, baffling, westerly breezes, with sometimes a clear sky, and then all is overclouded by the drifting trade-mists. Zigzagging on, quietly as ever, save the bustle and whiz and flapping canvas of the ship "in stays," the good Meteor pushes gradually westward.

Meantime a singular and almost tender intimacy grew up between Reuben and the lady voyager. It is always agreeable to a young man to find a listening ear in a lady whose age puts her out of the range of any flurry of sentiment, and whose sympathy gives kindly welcome to his confidence. All that early life of his he detailed to her with a particularity and a warmth (himself unconscious of the warmth) which brought the childish associations of her daughter fresh to the mind of poor Madam Maverick. No wonder that she gave a willing ear! no wonder that the glow of his language kindled her sympathy! Nor with such a listener does he stop with the boyish life of Ashfield. He unfolds his city career, and the bright promises that are before him,—promises of business success, which (he would make it appear) are all that fill his heart now. In the pride of his twenty-five years he loves to represent himself as blasé in sentiment.

Madam Maverick has been taught, in these latter years, a large amount of self-control; so she can listen with a grave, nay, even a kindly face, to Reuben's sweeping declarations. And if, at a hint from her,—which he shrewdly counts Jesuitical,—his thought is turned in the direction of his religious experiences, he has his axioms, his common-sense formulas, his irreproachable coolness, and, at times, a noisy show of distrust, under which it is easy to see an eager groping after the ends of that great tangled skein of thought within, which is a weariness.

"If you could only have a talk with Father Ambrose!" says Madam Maverick with half a sigh.

"I should like that of all things," says Reuben, with a touch of merriment. "I suppose he 's a jolly old fellow, with rosy cheeks and full of humor. By Jove! there go the beads again!" (He says this latter to himself, however, as he sees the nervous fingers of the poor lady plying her rosary, and her lips murmuring some catch of a prayer.)

Yet he cannot but respect her devotion profoundly, wondering how it can have grown up under the heathenisms of her life; wondering perhaps, too, how his own heathenism could have grown up under the roof of a parsonage. It will be an odd encounter, he thinks, for this woman, with the people of Ashfield, with the Doctor, with Adèle.

There are gales, but the good ship rides them out jauntily, with but a single reef in her topsails. Within five weeks from the date of her leaving Marseilles she is within a few days' sail of New York. A few days' sail! It may mean overmuch; for there are mists, and hazy weather, which forbid any observation. The last was taken a hundred miles to the eastward of George's Shoal. Under an easy offshore wind the ship is beating westward. But the clouds hang low, and there is no opportunity for determining position. At last, one evening, there is a little lift, and, for a moment only, a bright light blazes over the starboard bow. The captain counts it a light upon one of the headlands of the Jersey shore; and he orders the helmsman (she is sailing in the eye of an easy westerly breeze) to give her a couple of points more "northing"; and the yards and sheets are trimmed accordingly. The ship pushes on more steadily as she opens to the wind, and the mists and coming night conceal all around them.

"What do you make of the light, Mr. Yardley?" says the captain, addressing the mate.

"Can't say, sir, with such a bit of a look. If it should be Fire Island, we 're in a bad course, sir."

"That's true enough," said the captain thoughtfully. "Put a man in the chains, Mr. Yardley, and give us the water."

"I hope we shall be in the bay by morning, Captain," said Reuben, who stood smoking leisurely near the wheel. But the captain was preoccupied, and answered nothing.

A little after, a voice from the chains came chanting full and loud, "By the mark—nine!"

"This 'll never do, Mr. Yardley," said the captain, "Jersey shore or any other. Let all hands keep by to put the ship about."

A voice forward was heard to say something of a roar that sounded like the beat of surf; at which the mate stepped to the side of the ship and listened anxiously.

"It 's true, sir," said he coming aft. "Captain, there 's something very like the beat of surf, here away to the no'th'ard."

A flutter in the canvas caught the captain's attention. "It 's the wind slacking; there's a bare capful," said the mate, "and I 'm afeard there's mischief brewing yonder." He pointed as he spoke a little to the south of east, where the darkness seemed to be giving way to a luminous gray cloud of mist.

"And a half—six!" shouts again the man in the chains.

The captain meets it with a swelling oath, which betrays clearly enough his anxiety. "There 's not a moment to lose, Yardley; see all ready there! Keep her a good full, my boy!" (to the man at the wheel).

The darkness was profound. Reuben, not a little startled by the new aspect of affairs, still kept his place upon the quarter-deck. He saw objects flitting across the waist of the ship, and heard distinctly the coils flung down with a clang upon the wet decks. There was something weird and ghostly in those half-seen figures, in the indistinct maze of cordage and canvas above, and the phosphorescent streaks of spray streaming away from either bow.

"Are you ready there?" says the captain.