That evening, as Miss Muller sat alone with Hero in her room (just as the neuralgia was beginning), the door opened and Miss Vogdes entered. The girl turned a harassed, worn countenance toward Maria, and stumbled awkwardly over her words. It was not, certainly, because she was conscious that she had used William Muller cruelly. She had forgotten that William Muller lived.
She had been thinking of Maria all day. She was the woman whom Doctor McCall loved. By the time night came Kitty had a maddening desire to see again this woman that he loved—to touch her, hear her speak. She had been used to regard her as a disagreeable bore, but now she looked on her as a woman set apart from all the world. She had made a poor excuse to come up to the Water-cure: now that she was there she half forgot it. Maria's delicate face, her quick grace of motion, her clear, well-bred voice, were so many stabs to Kitty, each of which touched the quick. Maria's hair hung loosely over her shoulders: it was very soft and thick. She wondered if Doctor McCall had ever touched it. "Though what right have I to know?" For some reason this last was the pang that tugged hardest at Kitty's heart.
"I brought a message for Doctor McCall," she said, fumbling in her pocket—"that is, for you to deliver to him, Maria."
Miss Muller turned her shoulder to her: "Doctor McCall is gone—I don't know where."
She started forward: "Gone? To come again, you mean?"
"No—never to come back!" vehemently.
Kitty stood by her silent a moment: "William told me that you sent for him, that he loved you, Maria—that you would be married some of these days."
Miss Muller hesitated: there was no use in revealing her humiliation to this girl: "There was an obstacle in the way. Doctor McCall is peculiarly hedged in by circumstances."
"And you could not find the way of escape?"
"No." She did not see the flash of triumph on the girl's face, or notice when she went out.
Kitty was human. "At least," she muttered going down the hill, "I shall not have to see her his wife." When she had reached the Book-shop she took from her pocket a coarse yellow envelope containing a telegram directed to Hugh Guinness in his father's care. She turned it over. This was a bond between them which even Maria did not share: she alone knew that he was Hugh Guinness.
"What am I to do with this?"
Doctor McCall was gone, never to come back. It was like touching his hand far off to read this message to him. Besides, Kitty was curious. She opened the envelope.
"Come to me at once. You will soon be free," without any signature but an initial. The melodramatic mystery of it would have cautioned knowing women, but Kitty was not knowing.
"If he had received this an hour ago, the 'way of escape' would have been found. He would have been free to marry Maria." So much she understood. She sat down and was quiet for half an hour. It was the first wretched half hour of her life—so wretched that she forgot to cry.
"It would make him very happy to marry Maria," she said, getting up and speaking aloud. Then she opened the door and went up to her chamber, her thoughts keeping time with her swift motions. It seemed to her that she still spoke aloud. "If I were a man I could go to this house in Philadelphia and receive this message, which will set him free" (beginning to fold the dresses in her closet). "It will never reach him otherwise. I could find and bring him to Maria. But I never was five miles from Berrytown in my life, I never could go" (dragging out a great trunk and packing the dresses into it). "It would be a friendly thing for some man to do for him. Maria could not do so much" (cramming in undergarments enough for a year's wear). "If I were a man! He'd not snub me then as he does now, when I am only Kitty. If this could be done it would bring happiness for life to him." (The trunk was packed as she had seen her mother's. She was on her knees, trying to force down the lid, but her wrists were too weak.) "He would come back at once. How lovely Maria looked in that black lace mantilla! He would kiss her mouth and smooth her hair." (Kitty, still kneeling, was staring at the wall with pale cheeks and distended eyes. The lock snapped as it shut. She rose and began putting on her gray hat and veil.) "No woman could go to the city through that dark; and there is a storm coming. If I did it, what would he care for me? I am only Kitty. I would sit in the window here alone year after year, growing into a neglected old maid, and watch him go by with his happy wife and children. I need not interfere. I can throw the telegram into the fire and let them both go their ways. What are they to me?" She had buttoned her sacque and gloves, and now went up to the glass. It was a childish face that she looked at, but one now exceptionally grave and reserved.
She walked quickly down and tapped at the kitchen door: "When the porter comes for my trunk, Jane, give it to him. Tell my mother when she comes it was necessary for me to leave home to help a friend. I shall be back in a few days—if I am alive."
"De Lord be good to us, honey!" Jane stood aghast. Kitty came suddenly up to the old woman and kissed her. She felt quite alone in the world in beginning this desperate undertaking. The next moment she passed the window and was gone.
Miss Muller, with a satchel and shawl-strap, would have started coolly at an hour's notice alone for the Yosemite or Japan. But Kitty, with the enormous trunk, which was her sole idea of travel, set out through the night and storm, feeling death clutching at her on every side.
An hour after nightfall that evening the Eastern express-train reached the station beyond Berrytown, bringing home Peter and his wife, triumphant. Her money had covered a larger extent of muslins and laces than she hoped for—enough to convert the raw school-girl Kitty, when she was married, into a leader of church-going fashion.
Mrs. Guinness leaned back in the plush car-seat, planning the wedding-breakfast. That was now her only care. Out in the world of shops and milliners her superstitious dread of a man long since dead had seemed to her absurd.
"I have had some unreasonable fears about Kitty," she said to Peter, who was beginning to nod opposite to her. "But all will be well when she is Muller's wife."
Another train passed at the moment they reached the station. Her eye ran curiously over the long line of faces in the car-windows to find some neighbor or friend.
She touched Peter's arm: "How like that is to Kitty!" nodding toward a woman's head brought just opposite to them. The train began to move, and the woman turned her face toward them: "Merciful Heaven, it is Kitty!"
The engine sent out its shrill foreboding whistle and rushed on, carrying the girl into the darkness. Behind her in the car as it passed her mother saw the face of Hugh Guinness.
Doctor McCall had been five minutes too late for the first train, and so had been delayed for the express in which Kitty started on her adventure. Commonplace accidents determine commonplace lives, was a favorite maxim of the Berrytown Illuminati. The Supreme Intelligence whom they complimented with respect could not be expected to hold such petty trifles or petty lives in His controlling hand.
Doctor McCall had seen Catharine when she first entered the station. Her very manner had the air of flight and secresy. Puzzled and annoyed, he sat down in the rear of the car, himself unseen. When they reached Philadelphia it was not yet dawn. The passengers rushed out of the cars: Kitty sat quiet. She had never slept outside of the Book-house before. She looked out at the dim-lighted dépôt, at the slouching dark figures that stole through it from time to time, the engines, with their hot red eyes, sweeping back and forward in the distance, breaking the night with portentous shrieks. Where should she go? She had never been in a hotel in her life: she had no money. If she ventured into the night she would be arrested, no doubt, as a vagrant. She had a gallant heart to take care of Hugh Guinness's life, but her poor little woman's body was quaking in deadly fear for herself. In a moment a decent mulatto woman, whom McCall had sent, came from the waiting-room into the deserted car.
"There is a room for ladies, where you can be comfortable until daybreak, madam," she said respectfully.
"I am much obliged to you," said Catharine.
When she saw how young she was, the mulatto, a motherly body, took her into a little inner snuggery used to store packages: "You can turn the key, and sleep if you will until morning."
"I'll not close my eyes until my errand is done," thought Kitty, and sat down in a rocking-chair, placing her satchel beside her. In five minutes she was fast asleep. McCall, pacing up and down the platform, could see her through the open window. He forgot to wonder why she had come. There was a certain neatness and freshness about her which he thought he had never observed in other women. After her night's travel her dress fell soft and gray as though just taken from the fold, her petticoat, crisp and white, peeped in one place to sight. How dainty and well-fitting were the little boots and gloves! Where the hair was drawn back, too, from her forehead he could see the blue veins and pink below the skin, like a baby's. He did not know before what keen eyes he had. But this was as though a breath of the old home when he had been a child, one of the dewy Bourbon roses in his father's garden, had followed him to the stifling town. It made the station different—even the morning. Fresh damp winds blew pleasantly from the reddening sky. The white marble steps and lintels of the street shone clean and bright; the porters going by to the freight dépôt gave him good-day cheerfully. In the window the old mulatto had some thriving pots of ivy and fragrant geraniums. Even a dog that came frisking up the sidewalk rubbed itself in a friendly fashion against his legs.
McCall suddenly remembered a journey he had made long ago, and a companion whose breath was foul with opium as her head at night rested on his shoulder.
But there was no need that one woman's breath should sicken him even now with the whole world; and again he stopped in his walk to look at Kitty.
The fresh wind blowing on her wakened her presently. The mulatto was anxious to serve her: it was always the case with people of her class after Kitty had once spoken to them.
"I should like fresh water and towels," she said coolly, as though toilet appurtenances were to be found at every street corner. The woman paused, and then with a queer smile brought them. In a a few moments McCall saw her come out fresher than before.
"Where is this house?" showing a name and number to the mulatto, who read it once or twice, and then looked steadily at Kitty.
"Are you going alone to that place?"
"Certainly."
The woman gave her the directions without further parley, adding that it was about six miles distant, and turned away. Catharine followed her to thank her, and put a dollar note in her hand. It was all the money she had.
She walked on down the rapidly filling streets—for miles, as she thought. The hurry and rush of the day had begun. The sense of nothingness in the midst of this great multitude came upon Kitty. The fear, the excitement began to tell on her: yesterday she had eaten but little in her pity for Muller. "Which was very foolish of me," she said to herself. "Now I've no money to buy anything to eat. I have acted in this matter without common sense." The sun lighted up the yellow leaves of the maples along the sidewalk. The wind blew strongly up from the rivers. She passed a stand with some withered apples and stale cakes, and put her hand in her pocket, then with a wistful look went on.
It was late in the morning before she reached her journey's end. Showing her paper now and then, she had noticed the curious inquiring look which both men and women gave her on reading it. She found herself at last under a long gray stone wall pierced by an iron-knobbed gate. By the side of it a man was setting out on an eating-stand a half-eaten ham, chaffy rolls and pies yellow with age. The man was an old, cleanly shaven fellow, whose aquiline nose reminded her with a twinge of conscience of Mr. Muller.
"Am I near to this house?" showing her paper.
"Here," nodding back at the stone wall, cutting his pies.
"This! What is this place, sir?"
"Moyamensing Prison." He finished cutting the pies carefully, and then, wiping the knife, looked up at her, and suddenly came from behind the stand:
"You're not well?" pushing a seat toward her. "Here's some water. Or coffee?"
She sat down: "Oh, it's nothing. Only I've traveled a long way, and I did not know it was a prison I was coming to."
"Won't you have some coffee? You don't look rugged."
"No, thank you."
"Well, it's not what you've been used to, of course. But hot." He put the water within her reach and drew aside, looking at her now and then. He was used to the pale faces and tears of women at that gate. "Though she's different from them as has friends here," he thought, silencing one or two noisy customers by a look. Presently he came up to her: "You're afeard to go in there alone, young lady?"
"Yes, I am. What shall I do?"
"I thought as much. Yonder comes the chaplain. I'll speak to him," going to meet two gentlemen who crossed the street.
"You wished to see a prisoner?" one of them said, coming up to her.
Kitty was herself again. She stood up and bowed with her old-fashioned, grave politeness: "I do not know. It was this that brought me here," handing him the telegram.
"Ah? I remember," glancing at it. "Number 243 sent it, you recollect?" to his companion. "But this is addressed to Hugh Guinness?" turning inquiringly to Kitty.
"I am a—a member of his family. He was not at home, and I came to receive the message for him."
"Will you go in with us, doctor?" The chaplain turned to his companion.
"Presently. There is a man coming up the street I want to see."
The chaplain motioned her to follow him, casting a curious glance back at her. They passed up into the long stone corridors, tier over tier, with the lines of square iron doors, each with its slate dangling outside, with a name scrawled on it. He stopped at one, opened it and drew back, motioning her to enter.
Kitty caught sight of the damp wall of a cell, and stopped.
"Shall I go in with you?" seeing her shiver.
"No: Mr. Guinness might wish the message kept as private as possible."
"It is very probable. The prisoner is very ill, or you could not have a private interview."
She went in, and the door closed behind her. It was a moment before she could distinguish any object in the dimly lighted cell. Then she saw the square window, the cobwebbed walls, and close at hand a narrow pallet, on which lay a woman in a coarse and soiled night-dress. She was tall and gaunt: one arm was thrown over her head, framing a heavy-jawed, livid face, with dull black eyes fixed on Catharine.
"Who are you?" she said.
Kitty went straight up to her. The foul smell made her head reel. But this was only a woman, after all; and one in great bodily need—dying, she thought. Kitty was a born nurse. She involuntarily straightened the wretched pillows and touched the hot forehead before she spoke: "I came instead of Hugh Guinness. You had a message for him."
"I don't know. It doesn't matter for that," her eyes wandering. The soft touch and the kind face bending over her were more to her just now than all that had gone before in her life. "It is here the pain is," moving Kitty's hand to her side. The pain filled the dull eyes with tears. "This is a poor place to die in," trying to smile.
"Oh, you are not going to die," cheerfully. "Let me lift you up higher on the pillows. Put your arm about me—so. You're not too heavy for me to lift."
The woman, when she was arranged, took Kitty's fingers and feebly held them to her side. "It is so long since anybody took care of me. I sha'n't live till to-morrow. Don't leave me—don't go away."
"I'll not go away," said Kitty.
The man whom the prison physician had waited to meet was Doctor McCall. He had followed Kitty so far, unwilling to interfere by speaking to her. But when he saw her enter Moyamensing he thought that she needed a protector. "Ha, Pollard, is this you?" stopping to shake hands. They were old acquaintances, and managed, in spite of their profession, to see something of each other every year. McCall ran up to town once or twice through the winter, and stayed at Pollard's house, and Pollard managed to spend a week or two with him in peach season.
"I thought I knew your swing, McCall, two squares off. Looking for me?"
"No: I followed a lady, a friend of mine, who has just gone in at the gate."
"You know her, eh?" eagerly. "A most attractive little girl, I thought: She went in with the chaplain to see one of the prisoners."
McCall paused, his hand on the gate. A horrible doubt stopped his heart-beating for an instant. But how utterly absurd it was! Only because this black shadow pursued him always could such a fancy have come to him. "The prisoner is a woman?" with forced carelessness.
"Yes. A poor wretch brought here last spring for shoplifting. Her term's out next week. She has had a sharp attack of pneumonia, and has not much strength to bear it: she is a miserable wreck from opium-eating."
"Opium-eating? Can I go in?" said McCall.
"Certainly."
When the woman heard their steps on the corridor she said to Catharine, "I hear my husband coming now."
"That will be pleasant for you," kindly, wondering to herself what sort of a ruffian had chosen this creature for a mate and had the burden of her to carry.
"Yes, I know his step," turning dully to the door. It opened, and Hugh Guinness stood on the threshold.
He halted one brief moment. It seemed to Catharine that he was an older man than she had known him.
"It is you, then, Louise?" he said calmly, going up to the bed and looking down on her, his hands clasped, as usual, behind him.
"Yes, it is I. I thought you would like to see me and talk things over before I died, Hugh." She held out her hand, but he did not touch it. Looking at her a moment from head to foot as she lay in her unclean garments, he turned to where the other woman stood, a ray of light from the window shining on her fair hair and innocent face: "Do you know that I am Hugh Guinness, Kitty?"
"I knew that long ago."
"This," nodding down at the pallet, "is my wife. Now do you know why I could not go home to my father or to you?"
"God help us!" ejaculated Pollard. The next moment, remembering himself, he put his hand on McCall's shoulder: "I understand. When you were a boy, eh? Never mind: every man has his own trouble to carry."
"I've been a very real trouble to you, Hugh," whined Louise. "But I always loved you: I always meant to come back to you."
"When her later husbands had abandoned her." McCall laughed savagely, turning away.
She started up on the pallet, clenching her bony, dirty hands: "There were faults on both sides. I never would have been the woman I am if you had loved me. What will you do with me now?"
There was a dead silence in the cell, broken only by the heavy breathing of the woman. McCall stood dumb, looking first at Catharine and then at his wife.
"This is what he will do," said Kitty's clear, quiet tones. "You shall be washed and dressed, and taken home as his wife, to live or die as suits God's will."
"Never," muttered McCall.
"How soon can she leave this—this place?" she said, turning as if he had not spoken to Pollard.
"As soon as she is able to be moved. But," hesitating, with a doubtful look at McCall, "is that plan best?"
"Why, she's his wife!" with her innocent eyes wide. "He has no right to desert her. She will die if she is not properly cared for," turning to McCall.
"Do you stay with me: don't leave me," holding Kitty's sleeve. "If you would nurse me, I should get well."
"It is impossible that the lady should nurse you," said Pollard.
Kitty sat down: she began to tremble and turn white. "She has nobody but me. I'll stay," she said quietly.
McCall beckoned his fellow-physician out into the corridor.
"My dear fellow—" Pollard began.
"No: I know you sympathize with me. But we will not talk of this matter. Is that woman dying?"
"I'm afraid—that is, I think not. She is decidedly better to-day than she was last night. With care she may recover."
Kitty came out and stood with them in the corridor. McCall looked at her with amazement. The shy, silly school-girl, afraid to find her way about Berrytown, bore herself in this desperate juncture like the sagest of matrons.
"Is there no hospital to which she can be taken?" she said to Pollard.
"Yes, of course, of course."
"I'll go with her there, then. You know," laying her hand on McCall's arm, "you did marry her. You ought to try to help her poor body and soul as long as she lives."
"Would you have me take her as my wife again?"
"Not for an hour!" cried Kitty vehemently. She went into the cell, but came back in a moment: "Will you bring me some breakfast? I shall not be of much use here until it comes."
"She has more of the angel in her than any woman I ever knew," muttered McCall.
"She has a good deal of common sense, apparently," rejoined Pollard.
Kitty went with McCall's wife to the hospital, and helped to nurse her for a week. Pains and chills and nausea she could help, but for the deeper disease of soul, for the cure of which Kitty prayed on her knees, often with tears, there was little hope in her simple remedies, unless the cure and its evidence lay deep enough for only God's eye to see.
The woman's nature, of a low type at birth, had grown more brutal with every year of drunkenness and vice. She died at last, alone with Kitty.
"She said, the last thing, 'God be merciful to me a sinner!'" Kitty told the chaplain. "But I am afraid she hardly understood the meaning."
"He understood, my dear child. We can leave her with Him, You must go home now: you have done all you could. Doctor McCall will go with you?"
"No, I shall go alone: I came alone."
"He will follow you home to Berrytown, then?" for the chaplain was but a man, and his curiosity was roused to know the exact relation between McCall and this old-fashioned, lovable girl.
Kitty hesitated: "I think he will come to Berrytown again. There is some business there which his wife's death will leave him free now to attend to."
She went to a sofa and sat down: "I shall be glad to be at home," beginning to cry. "I want to see father."
"Broke down utterly," the chaplain told his wife, "as soon as her terrible work was done."
As for Kitty, it seemed to her that her work in life and death was over for ever.
"You must come back," she said when McCall put her in the cars, looking like a ghost of herself. "Your father will be wanting to see you. And—and Maria."
"Maria? What the deuce is Maria to me?"
It was no ghost of Kitty that came home that evening. The shy, lively color came and went unceasingly, and her eyes sparkled.
"Poor Maria!" she whispered to her pillow as she went to bed—"poor Maria!"
It was a long time before he came. Months afterward, one evening when the express-train rushed into the dépôt, Catharine went down through the walnut trees into the garden. She stopped in the shadow as a man's figure crossed the fields. The air was cool—it was early spring. The clouds in the west threw the Book-house into shadow. Hugh Guinness, coming home, could see the narrow-paned windows twinkling behind the walnut boughs. It was just as he had left it when he was a boy. There was the cow thrusting her head through a break in the fence he had made himself; the yellow-billed ducks quacked about the pond he had dug in the barnyard; the row of lilacs by the orchard fence were just in blossom: they were always the latest on the farm, he remembered. He saw Kitty, like the heart of his old home, waiting for him. Her white dress and the hair pushed back from her face gave her an appearance of curious gentleness and delicacy.
When he came to her he took both her hands in his.
"You will come to your father now?" she said, frightened and pale.
They walked side by side down the thick rows of young saplings. There was a cool bank overgrown with trumpet-creeper. Inside, he caught sight of a little recess or cave, and a gray old bench on which was just room for two.
"Will you stop here and sit down one moment?" she said.
It was nothing to him but a deserted spring-house. It was the one enchanted spot of Kitty's life.
Half an hour afterward they found old Peter playing on his violin at the doorstep. Kitty had often planned an effective bringing back of Hugh to him, but she forgot it all, and creeping up put her hands about his neck. "Father! look there, father!" she whispered.
The Book-house still stands among its walnuts in Berrytown. But a shrewd young fellow from New York has charge of it now, who deals principally in school-books and publications relative to Reforms and raspberries. Old Peter Guinness still holds an interest in it, although his chief business is that of special agent for libraries in buying rare books and pamphlets. He comes down for two or three weeks in winter to look into matters. But since his wife died he makes his home in Delaware with his son, who married, as all Berrytown knows, Kitty Vogdes after she behaved so shamefully to Mr. Muller.
Mrs. Guinness died in high good-humor with her son-in-law. "Doctor McCall," she assured her neighbors, "was exactly the man she should have chosen for Catharine. She had known him from a boy, and knew that his high social position and wealth were only his deserts. A member—vestryman indeed—of St. Luke's Church, the largest in Sussex county."
The farm-people in the sleepy, sunny Delaware neighborhood have elected Kitty a chief favorite. "A gentle, good-natured little woman, with no opinions of her own. A bit too fond of dress perhaps, and a silly, doting mother, but the most neighborly, lovable creature alive, after all."
Miss Muller was down in St. George's lecturing last fall, and made her mark, as she always does. But the Guinness men were now hopelessly conservative. She made her home with Kitty.
"A fine woman," old Peter said the morning after she was gone.
"Never knew a woman with a finer mind," said Hugh. "Nor many men."
"She nurses that dog as if it were a baby," said Kitty sharply. "It's silly! It's disgusting!"
Peter twanged his bow on the porch, looking down over the great farm-slopes stretching away in the morning light.
"We have everything to make life good to us, Hugh," he said after Kitty had gone. "And the best thing, to my notion, is an old-fashioned woman in the house, with no notion of ruling, like that Muller girl and her set."
Hugh was romping with his boy: "Do you know your first business in this world, sir? To take care of your mother," glancing at the garden, where Kitty, in her pretty white dress, was clipping chrysanthemums.
She rules him and the house and their lives absolutely, with but little regard for justice. But he has never suspected it. She hardly knows herself that she does it.
The wrecker on the Florida reefs, who steps from the Peninsula into the marine world, will tell you there is nothing so like the land as the water. The crystal atmosphere of this land of meridional spring, the masses of tawny green in forests of the pine, and the deeper foliage of the live-oak and wild-orange, even that fire of flower in phaenogamous plants peculiar to the Peninsula, have their fellowship and counterparts in the lustrous scenery of the submarine world. Even the beauty of moon-like lakes and river springs is realized in the salt envelope of the under-world. Washing the keel of the submerged vessel, or bursting with a sudden chill through the tepid waters of the Gulf, with a sensible difference to feeling and to sight, the diver recognizes a river in the strata, a wayside spring in the mid-sea fountain.
As the huge volume of many Florida springs, and their peculiar characteristic of sudden sinking, give them a distinguishable quality, so the like may be recognized in the fresh-water outbursts of the neighboring seas. Silver Spring in Marion county tosses out three hundred million gallons per day; Manatee Spring discharges a less volume, but is noted for the presence of the sea-cow (Trichecus muriatus); Santa Fé, Econfinna, Chipola and Oscilla are rivers which, like classic Acheron, descend and disappear with a full head—lost rivers, as they are aptly named. Pass to the marine world, and south-west of Bataban, in the Gulf of Xagua (Cuba), a river-fountain throws up a broad white disk like a flower of water on a liquid stem, visible on the violet phosphorescence of the Caribbean Sea. Its impetuous force makes it dangerous to unwary crafts; and, to add to its recognizable characteristics, in its pure waters is to be found the sea-cow—found there and in Manatee Bay and Spring alone. To the geologist such rivers are not mysteries. The lower strata of the limestone formation are hollowed out into vast cavernous channels and chambers, through which rolls for ever the hoarse murmur of multitudinous waters. It would require the conception of a Milton or the stern Florentine who pictured Malebolge to depict those hollow passages and lofty galleries, wrought into fantastic shapes by carbon chisels, and all pure snow-white, yet unrecognizable in the sublime horror of great darkness.
It is to the animal and vegetable coral the sea owes its arborescent and floriform scenery, the counterpart of the forest and phaenogamous beauty that adorns the land. The home of these wonderful creatures must be visited to realize the beauty of their dwellings and the wonderful structures they produce. A diver who explored the serene sea about the Hayti banks gives a beautiful description of the splendors of the under-world. The white, chalky bottom is visible from the surface at a depth of one hundred feet. Over that brilliant floor the filtered sunshine spreads a cloth of gold continually flecked with sailing shadows and fluctuating tints. The singular clearness of the medium removes that lovely violet drapery which surrounds like a pavilion the submarine palace, and allows a wider scope of vision. But the scene here is not the play of sunbeams or the magic glory of the prismal waters. Form adds its grace to the loveliness of color and the play of light and shadow. The structures, the work of astraea, madrepores, andreas and meandrinas, bear a singular resemblance to fabrications of the architect. One massive dome or archway, a hundred feet in diameter, rises to the surface. Its front is carved in elaborate tracery and crusted with serpulae, looking like the fret-and flower-work that covers Saracenic architecture. Looking through this into the violet ambuscade, the eye falls upon colonnades, light slender shafts a foot in diameter, that seem to support the paly-golden, lustrous roof. It is curiously like a vast temple, spreading every way in vault and colonnade, on which religious enthusiasm or barbaric royalty has worked with a reckless waste of art and labor. Nor is it the cold and shapely beauty of the stone: it seems to be a temple built of many-colored glass. To understand the magnificence of the wonderful structure, the reader must have in mind the laws affecting light in transmission through water—the frangibility of the rays, the frequent alternations in dispersion, reflection, interference and accidental and complementary color. He must recollect that every indentation, every twist of stony serpulae or fluting of the zoophyte catches the light and divides and splinters it into radiance, burning with a fringe of silver fire or flashing steel. When the mind has conceived of that, there is to add the vivid beauty of the living coral, its hue of molten colored glass spreading a radiant mucus over the stony skeleton.
But he has not yet entered into an entire conception of its loveliness. The arborescent and phaenogamous forms of the coral are to be noticed. Here is a plant: it has a pale, gray-blue stalk, and all over it are delicate green leaves, fronds or tentacles, as you please to call them. There is a fan-shaped shrub whose starry fronds recall the Chaemerops serrulata of the adjacent shore. The ament, so to speak, of the Parasmilia centralis, the catkin of the sea, recalls its terrene counterpart. There are other flowers in fascicles and corymbs. The rose is not lacking, but glows with the radiant beauty of its petaliferous sister; the columnar trunks of stony trees, covered with green, flossy mosses, are scattered about; and fresh fountains gush from the rocks, the white water as clearly distinguishable from the ultramarine as in the upper atmosphere.1
But some varieties of beauty in the coral belong to calmer seas: among others, the Red Sea is noticed for the exquisite loveliness of its coralline formations. An American explorer, well known in submarine diving, once visited that gulf sacred in history, and for a purpose certainly as singular as anything he found there. It was, to use his own words, "to fish for Pharaoh's golden chariot-wheels," lost in that famous pursuit. Is it possible, in the nature of things, for such an expedition to be made by any but an American? It takes a strong Bible faith, allied to a simple but strong self-confidence, to start a man on such an adventure. The curious transforming magic of the sea had its effect on the Arab dragoman he had engaged to assist him. Having settled on the exact spot, the swart Arabian descended, but signaled to return almost immediately, and was brought to the surface in open-eyed wonder. With all the hyperbole of Oriental imagination he swore positively to the finding of the chariot-wheels, and added the jewelry of Pharaoh's household. He was so earnest and so exact in the matter of the golden wheel, set with precious stones, that, though the captain dryly asked if he did not meet King Pharaoh himself, taking a moist throne and keeping court with the fishes, he none the less had the line attached and drew up—the rude wheel of a Tartar wagon, transformed under water, but plain and ugly enough above.
"The djin did it," explained the Arab. "It is a palace of the djins, howadji."
Though the adventurous explorer failed in his design on the defunct Egyptian, he was rewarded by some compensating views and discoveries. He saw there the Xenia elongata, a shrub-like coral distinguished for the beauty of its colors, having stellar tentacles, rose-colored, blue and lilac, an inch in diameter, and looking like flowers of living jewelry; another with a long cue, like a tress of hair, and others of allied beauty.
The coral-stone is seen and admired on centre-tables and in jewelry, but this is really the least pleasing beauty in the organism. The animal, subjected to exposure, is a brown mucus that dissipates in the sun and air, but clothed in its native element this glutinous substance is instinct with radiant life, the bodies being rose-color and the arms a pure white. Sometimes they grow in clusters and corymbs, gleaming with a pure, translucent color that fluctuates and changes in the light
Like colors of a shell,
That keep the hue and polish of the wave.
Our searcher found one unexpected verification of the story in Exodus. The passage in the Bible does not leave altogether in mystery the natural means by which the transit was effected. We are told of the strong east wind and the wall of waters. At the point near Suez a shoal extends quite across the sea. For several days this wind had borne back the shallow waters, descending as it did from the rugged mountain-slopes, and opening or sweeping back the deep as it were. Then the tide came, thrust forward in accumulated volume, until it made a real wall of waters that stood up in a huge crested, angry foam. It was sufficiently like to cause the explorer to apprehend the possibility of finding Pharaoh by traveling the same watery road. Another question that has puzzled scholars found a solution in the American's observation. Smith's Bible Dictionary discusses learnedly the name of this curious gulf, written [Greek: ae eruthra thalassa] in the Septuagint. The Dictionary surmises that the name was derived from the red western mountains, red coral zoophytes, etc., and appears to give little weight to the real and natural reason which came under our American's notice. On one occasion the diver observed, while under sea, that the curious wavering shadows, which cross the lustrous golden floor like Frauenhofer's lines on the spectrum, began to change and lose themselves. A purple glory of intermingled colors darkened the violet curtains of the sea-chambers, reddening all glints and tinges with an angry fire. Instead of that lustrous, golden firmament, the thallassphere darkened to crimson and opal. The walls grew purple, the floor as red as blood: the deep itself was purpled with the venous hue of deoxidized life-currents.
The view on the surface was even more magnificent. The sea at first assumed the light tawny or yellowish red of sherry wine. Anon this wine-color grew instinct with richer radiance: as far as eye could see, and flashing in the crystalline splendor of the Arabian sun, was a glorious sea of rose. The dusky red sandstone hills, with a border of white sand and green and flowered foliage, like an elaborately wrought cup of Bohemian glass enameled with brilliant flowers, held the sparkling liquid petals of that rosy sea. The surface, on examination, proved to be covered with a thin brickdust layer of infusoriae slightly tinged with orange. Placed in a white glass bottle, this changed to a deep violet, but the wide surface of the external sea was of that magnificent and brilliant rose-color. It was a new and pleasing example of the lustrous, ever-varying beauty of the ocean world. It was caused by diatomaceae, minute algae, which under the microscope revealed delicate threads gathered in tiny bundles, and containing rings, like blood-disks, of that curious coloring-matter in tiny tubes.
This miracle of beauty is not without its analogies in other seas. The medusae of the Arctic seas, an allied existence, people the ultramarine blue of the cold, pure sea with vivid patches of living green thirty miles in diameter. These minute organisms are doubly curious from their power of astonishing reproduction and the strange electric fire they display. Minute as these microscopic creatures are, every motion and flash is the result of volition, and not a mere chemic or mechanic phosphorescence. The Photocaris lights a flashing cirrus, on being irritated, in brilliant kindling sparks, increasing in intensity until the whole organism is illuminated. The living fire washes over its back, and pencils in greenish-yellow light its microscopic outline. Nor do these little creatures lack a beauty of their own. Their minute shields of pure translucent silex are elaborately wrought in microscopic symbols of mimic heraldry. They are the chivalry of the deep, the tiny knights with lance and cuirass, and oval bossy shield carved in quaint conceits and ornamental fashion. Nor must we despise them when we reflect upon their power of accretion. The Gallionellae, invisible to the naked eye, can, of their heraldic shields and flinty armor, make two cubic feet of Bilin polishing slate in four days. By straining sea-water, a web of greenish cloth of gold, illuminated by their play of self-generated electric light, has been collected. Humboldt and Ehrenberg speak of their voracity, their power of discharging electricity at will, and their sporting about, exhibiting an intelligent enjoyment of the life God has given to them. Man and his works perish, but the monuments of the infusoriae are the flinty ribs of the sea, the giant bones of huge continents, heaped into mountain-ranges over which the granite and porphyry have set their stony seal for ever. Man thrives in his little zone: the populous infusoriae crowd every nook of earth from the remote poles to the burning equatorial belt.
As the coral, in its soft, milky chalk, gives a name to tropical seas, so also it is a question to my simplicity if the Yellow Sea, Black Sea and White Sea do not owe their color and name, in part at least, to microscopic infusoriae. One of these, the Yellow Sea, is very similar in many characteristics to our beautiful southern gulf, and there is connected with it an incident or two illustrative of submarine adventure which is the partial purpose of this desultory sketch.
About the time our American was investing in Pharaoh's golden chariot-wheels an East Indiaman was trading its way from the English docks, eighteen weary weeks' sail by seamen's law, and more tedious by delays. They exchanged for bullion on the Gold Coast; for bullion and bad Cape brandy at Good Hope to sell to the Mohammedans, who are forbidden to drink it. At Bombay and Calcutta they exchanged bullion and brandy for opium to sell to the Chinese, who are forbidden to buy or use it. Whether the coolie trade was included in its iniquities or not, I cannot say. Very possibly that was the return cargo. From Ceylon they proceed to Siam, and thence to Hong-Kong, where they drop anchor in the offing, and by a special custom the cargo is sold and paid for in sycee silver before disfreighting, and the bullion is in the safe of the huge smuggler, although the opium has not yet been removed. The Chinese restrictive laws are very severe; but when we note that ninety thousand gallons of confiscated whisky were seized in godly Massachusetts in one year, we can infer the difficulties in the Maine law of the Celestials. The custom is for a hong, a smuggler in a Chinese junk, to draw up beside the English contrabandist and transfer the cargo in the outer harbor.
It is afternoon, and the great slumbering ocean breathes, but not with the quick, palpitating tide of the Atlantic. The smuggler sits on the oleaginous sea, tinged to ochreous yellow, waiting for evening and the confederate junk. The tropic twilight comes on swift red-golden wings that fan the vivid stars to brightness, and the rising tide breaks the surface into wrinkles of phosphorescent fire. High over head is the wide, unbroken canopy of the Pacific sky, and the gush of a larger moon than ours fills all the sphere with splendor as the huge ship stirs lazily in its Narcissus poise over its own reflection. There is a reddish glow in the western horizon over Hong-Kong, a fainter glimmer west by south over Macao, and farther west and north the reflected glories of the sacred city of Canton. The three make a semicircular crescent, like a great floating moon, on the horizon. A coral islet juts out between the cities under which the huge smuggler affects to play "I spy"—only affects, for she does not care for the authorities she bribes nor the laws she despises.
But the wind draws up the curtain of cloud by strands of rainy cordage, and men aloft are loosing the reefed topsail, bracing the after-yards and setting them for a run in on the larboard tack. They handle gaskets, bunt-lines, leech-lines, fix her best bib and spencer, like a country girl for a run up to town. Men are swarming about the yards and rigging. That is not all: Lascars, stevedores, supercargoes, the hong merchants, agents, are all busy breaking bulk. The India opium is covered with petals of the plant and stowed in chests lined with hides and covered with gunny; and these cases are locked in by stays, spars and bulkheads to prevent jamming. Helter-skelter and confusion alow and aloft, on the yards, rigging, deck, between decks and under hatches. The captain and purser are gloating over the sycee silver, for the Chinese government is as jealous of its exportation as of the importation of opium; and the sky and the sea are dark and angry. In a slovenly way the sails are trimmed, and she edges clumsily around the point with the bullion and opium, the full freight and gains of a year's voyaging and trading. Half an hour or an hour hence she will be free, and the junk dropping down to sea with the drugs in her. All at once a shriek or yell of "Hard aport!" and a great iron outward-bound steamer from Hong-Kong bursts into the unwieldy Chinaman, goes crunching through her like ripping pasteboard; tears her open; snarls through steamy nostrils and cindery fiery mouth, and growls over her wreck. And the sodden, stupefied merchantman, as if drunk with opium, goes yelling and staggering with her sleepy drugs to the bottom, and stays there, sycee silver and all.
From pricking his way across the Tartar plains, and probing in the Dead Sea and eating its fruits, just to know that living crustaceae could be found in one and pulpy flesh in the other, our Launfal, looking for the Sangreal in chariot-wheels, wound his devious way to the Flowery Kingdom, having tried a stroke or two at pearl-diving, and given some valuable hints, that were wasted, in Red Sea fishing and the Suez Canal. The sleepy Celestial seasons had gone flowering their way to paradise, and the opium-smuggler and her sycee silver lay safe and swallowed in ribs and jowl of quicksand. Our American proposed to have it up by the locks. Two things said Nay—the coral insect, which was using it in its architectural designs, and the hungry quicksand. Worst of all, the American could not find it. They hid the bulky vessel in hills of sand, and after two months' labor in submarine armor the speculator was beaten. "Get a coolie," said a resident China merchant, and he did.
Every seaport city of China is a twin. It is two cities—one inland, narrow-streeted, paved with rubble stones; the other at sea, floating on bamboo reeds. The amphibious inmates of the marine town never go ashore, but are a species of otter or seal. Besides, they are first-class thieves, as well as cowardly, cruel pirates and wreckers. They will steal the sheathing from a copper-bottomed vessel in broad daylight, and at night a guard-boat is necessary for protection. They will defy a sentry on shipboard—steal his ship from under him while he is wondering what he is set to guard. They are all expert divers, as familiar with the sea-bottom as with their own ugly little hovels. Such a native was found, and for a dollar spotted the submerged vessel in her matrix of sand and coral.
"Now set a guard-boat," said the Englishman, "or he will steal the line, to get another dollar for finding the smuggler again."
But the want of experts defeated the plan, after all. It was necessary to use a petard to lay bare the treasure, and no one had the necessary skill. When the American consented to lost time and defeat the cyclone threw another spoil in his way. The East like the West Indies is the brooding-place of storms, which in gyratory coils, like a lasso thrown wide and large, go twisting north by west. It caught a French frigate in the loop, and flung her poor bones on the coral reefs, and the hungry sand absorbed her. It is a peculiarity of those seas. But she was found, and the petard, like a huge axe wielded by a giant's arms, cut into her treasure-house and rescued it. The American's expenses for a journey round the world were paid.