Queechy Volume I Part 28

"What?" said Mr. Carleton, inexpressibly curious to get at the workings of the child's mind, which was not easy, for Fleda was never very forward to talk of herself; ? "what were you thinking? I want to know how you could get such a thing into your head."

"It wasn't very strange," said Fleda. "The stars made me think of heaven, and grandpa's being there, and then I thought how he was ready to go there, and that made him ready to die ?"

"I wouldn't think of such things, Elfie," said Mr. Carleton, after a few minutes.

"Why not, Sir?" said Fleda, quickly.

"I don't think they are good for you."

"But, Mr. Carleton," said Fleda, gently, ? "if I don't think about it, how shall I ever be ready to die?"

"It is not fit for you," said he, evading the question, ? "it is not necessary now, ? there's time enough. You are a little body, and should have none but gay thoughts."

"But, Mr. Carleton," said Fleda, with timid earnestness, ?

"don't you think one could have gay thoughts better if one knew one was ready to die?"

"What makes a person ready to die, Elfie?" said her friend, disliking to ask the question, but yet more unable to answer hers, and curious to hear what she would say.

"Oh, to be a Christian," said Fleda.

"But I have seen Christians," said Mr. Carleton, "who were no more ready to die than other people."

"Then they were make-believe Christians," said Fleda, decidedly.

"What makes you think so?" said her friend, carefully guarding his countenance from anything like a smile.

"Because," said Fleda, "grandpa was ready, and my father was ready, and my mother, too; and I know it was because they were Christians."

"Perhaps your kind of Christians are different from my kind,"

said Mr. Carleton, carrying on the conversation half in spite of himself. "What do you mean by a Christian, Elfie?"

"Why, what the Bible means," said Fleda, looking at him with innocent earnestness.

Mr. Carleton was ashamed to tell her he did not know what that was, or he was unwilling to say what he felt would trouble the happy confidence she had in him. He was silent; but as they rode on, a bitter wish crossed his mind that he could have the simple purity of the little child in his arms; and he thought he would give his broad acres, supposing it possible that religion could be true, ? in exchange for that free happy spirit that looks up to all its possessions in heaven.

CHAPTER XI.

Starres are poore books, and oftentimes do misse; This book of starres lights to eternall blisse.

GEORGE HERBERT.

The voyage across the Atlantic was not, in itself, at all notable. The first half of the pa.s.sage was extremely unquiet, and most of the pa.s.sengers uncomfortable to match. Then the weather cleared; and the rest of the way, though lengthened out a good deal by the tricks of the wind, was very fair and pleasant.

Fifteen days of tossing and sea-sickness had brought little Fleda to look like the ghost of herself. So soon as the weather changed, and sky and sea were looking gentle again, Mr. Carleton had a mattress and cus.h.i.+ons laid in a sheltered corner of the deck for her, and carried her up. She had hardly any more strength than a baby.

"What are you looking at me so for, Mr. Carleton?" said she, a little while after he had carried her up, with a sweet serious smile that seemed to know the answer to her question.

He stooped down and clasped her little thin hand, as reverentially as if she really had not belonged to the earth.

"You are more like a sprite than I like to see you just now,"

said he, unconsciously fastening the child's heart to himself with the magnetism of those deep eyes. ? "I must get some of the sailors' salt beef and sea-biscuit for you ? they say that is the best thing to make people well."

"Oh, I feel better already," said Fleda; and settling her little face upon the cus.h.i.+on and closing her eyes, she added, "thank you, Mr. Carleton!"

The fresh air began to restore her immediately; she was no more sick; her appet.i.te came back; and from that time, without the help of beef and sea-biscuit, she mended rapidly. Mr.

Carleton proved himself as good a nurse on the sea as on land.

She seemed to be never far from his thoughts. He was constantly finding out something that would do her good or please her; and Fleda could not discover that he took any trouble about it; she could not feel that she was a burden to him; the things seemed to come as a matter of course. Mrs.

Carleton was not wanting in any show of kindness or care, and yet, when Fleda looked back upon the day, it somehow was Guy that had done everything for her; she thought little of thanking anybody but him.

There were other pa.s.sengers that petted her a great deal, or would have done so, if Fleda's very timid, retiring nature had not stood in the way. She was never bashful, nor awkward; but yet it was only a very peculiar sympathetic style of address that could get within the wall of reserve which, in general, hid her from other people. Hid what it could: for through that reserve a singular modesty, sweetness, and gracefulness of spirit would show themselves. But there was much more behind.

There were no eyes, however, on board, that did not look kindly on little Fleda, excepting only two pair. The Captain showed her a great deal of flattering attention, and said she was a pattern of a pa.s.senger; even the sailors noticed and spoke of her, and let slip no occasion of showing the respect and interest she had raised. But there were two pair of eyes, and one of them Fleda thought most remarkably ugly, that were an exception to the rest; these belonged to her cousin Rossitur and Lieutenant Thorn. Rossitur had never forgiven her remarks upon his character as a gentleman, and declared preference of Mr. Carleton in that capacity; and Thorn was mortified at the invincible childish reserve which she opposed to all his advances; and both, absurd as it seems, were jealous of the young Englishman's advantage over them. Both not the less, because their sole reason for making her a person of consequence was that he had thought fit to do so.

Fleda would permit neither of them to do anything for her that she could help.

They took their revenge in raillery, which was not always good-natured. Mr. Carleton never answered it in any other way than by his look of cold disdain, ? not always by that; little Fleda could not be quite so unmoved. Many a time her nice sense of delicacy confessed itself hurt, by the deep and abiding colour her cheeks would wear after one of their ill- mannered flings at her. She bore them with a grave dignity peculiar to herself, but the same nice delicacy forbade her to mention the subject to any one; and the young gentlemen contrived to give the little child in the course of the voyage a good deal of pain. She shunned them at last as she would the plague. As to the rest, Fleda liked her life on board s.h.i.+p amazingly. In her quiet way she took al the good that offered and seemed not to recognise the ill.

Mr. Carleton had bought for her a copy of The Rape of the Lock, and Bryant's poems. With these, sitting or lying among her cus.h.i.+ons, Fleda amused herself a great deal; and it was an especial pleasure when he would sit down by her and read and talk about them. Still a greater was to watch the sea, in its changes of colour and varieties of agitation, and to get from Mr. Carleton, bit by bit, all the pieces of knowledge concerning it that he had ever made his own. Even when Fleda feared it she was fascinated; and while the fear went off the fascination grew deeper. Daintily nestling among her cus.h.i.+ons, she watched with charmed eyes the long rollers that came up in detachments of three to attack the good s.h.i.+p, that like a slandered character rode patiently over them; or the crested green billows, or sometimes the little rippling waves that showed old Ocean's placidest face; while with ears as charmed as if he had been delivering a fairy tale, she listened to all Mr. Carleton could tell her of the green water where the whales feed, or the blue water where Neptune sits in his own solitude, the furthest from land, and the pavement under his feet outdoes the very canopy overhead in its deep colouring; of the transparent seas where the curious mysterious marine plants and animals may be clearly seen many feet down, and in the North where hundreds of feet of depth do not hide the bottom; of the icebergs; and whirling great fields of ice, between which, if a s.h.i.+p get, she had as good be an almond in a pair of strong nut-crackers. How the water grows colder and murkier as it is nearer the sh.o.r.e; how the mountain waves are piled together; and how old Ocean, like a wise man,. however roughened and tumbled outwardly by the currents of life, is always calm at heart. Of the signs of the weather; the out- riders of the winds, and the use the seaman makes of the tidings they bring, and before Mr. Carleton knew where he was, he found himself deep in the science of navigation, and making a star-gazer of little Fleda. Sometimes kneeling beside him as he sat on her mattress, with her hand leaning on his shoulder, Fleda asked, listened, and looked; as engaged, as rapt, as interested, as another child would be in Robinson Crusoe, gravely drinking in knowledge with a fresh healthy taste for it that never had enough. Mr. Carleton was about as amused and as interested as she. There is a second taste of knowledge that some minds get in imparting it, almost as sweet as the first relish. At any rate, Fleda never felt that she had any reason to fear tiring him; and his mother, complaining of his want of sociableness, said she believed Guy did not like to talk to any-body but that little pet of his, and one or two of the old sailors. If left to her own resources, Fleda was never at a loss; she amused herself with her books, or watching the sailors, or watching the sea, or with some fanciful manufacture she had learned from one of the ladies on board, or with what the company about her were saying and doing.

One evening she had been some time alone, looking out upon the restless little waves that were tossing and tumbling in every direction. She had been afraid of them at first, and they were still rather fearful to her imagination. This evening, as heir musing eye watched them rise and fall, her childish fancy likened them to the up-springing chances of life, ? uncertain, unstable, alike too much for her skill and her strength to manage. She was not more helpless before the attacks of the one than of the other. But then ? that calm blue heaven that hung over the sea. It was like the heaven of power and love above her destinies; only this was far higher, and more pure and abiding. "He knoweth them that trust in him." "There shall not a hair of your head perish."

Not these words, perhaps, but something like the sense of them, was in little Fleda's head. Mr. Carleton coming up, saw her gazing out upon the water, with an eye that seemed to see nothing.

"Elfie! ? Are you looking into futurity!"

"No, ? yes ? not exactly!" said Fleda, smiling.

"No, yes, and not exactly!" said he, throwing himself down beside her. "What does all that mean?"

"I wasn't exactly looking into futurity," said Fleda.

"What then? ? Don't tell me you were 'thinking;' I know that already. What?"

Fleda was always rather shy of opening her cabinet of thoughts. She glanced at him, and hesitated, and then yielded to a fascination of eye and smile that rarely failed of its end. Looking off to the sea again as if she had left her thoughts there, she said,

"I was only thinking of that beautiful hymn of Mr. Newton's."

"What hymn?"

"That long one, 'The Lord will provide.' "

"Do you know it? Tell it to me, Elfie; let us see whether I shall think it beautiful."

Fleda knew the whole, and repeated it.

"Though troubles a.s.sail, And dangers affright, Though friends should all fail, And foes all unite; Yet one thing secures us Whatever betide, The Scripture a.s.sures us 'The Lord will provide.'