Constance Fenimore Woolson

“ I said. “Do you remember it?
‘When the tide goes out,
The shore looks dark and sad with doubt’—
and that final question,
‘Ah, darling, shall we ever learn
Love’s tidal hours and days?’ ”
“You believe, then, that love has its high and low tides?” said John, lighting a fresh cigar.
“Low tide,” said Sara, half to herself—“low tide always.” She was looking at the bare shore with a sadness that had real roots down somewhere.
“Very low, I suppose,” commented John; “every thing is always very high or very low with you ladies. You are like the man who had a steamer to sell. ”

“ Mokes came out of his shell entirely, and graciously offered his arm to Aunt Diana for the long descent.
But Aunt Di could—“excuse me, Mr. Mokes”—really hold on “better by the railing;” but “perhaps Iris—”
Yes, Iris could, and did.
John looked after the three as they wound down the long spiral with a smile of quiet amusement.
“All alike,” he said to me, with the “old-comrade” freedom that had grown up between us. “La richesse est toujours des femmes le grand amour, Miss Martha.” ”

“ Poor Florida! she is full of deserted plantations.”
“But does any one know the story of the place?” repeated Iris, who preferred any diversion to Mokes’s solo.
“Why insist upon digging it up?” said Sara. “Let it rest in the purple haze of the past. The place has not been occupied for a hundred years. We see this beautiful orange walk; yonder is a solitary tomb. Can we not fill out these shadowy borders without the aid of prosaic detail?” ”

“ TOMB ON FISH ISLAND.
“ ‘Et in Arcadia ego,’ ” said John, who stood behind me. “Do you remember that picture of the gay flower-decked Arcadians coming through a forest with song and laughter, and finding there a solitary tomb with that inscription? This is Arcadia, and we too have found the tomb.”
Strolling on down the island, we came to a long arched walk of orange-trees trained into a continuous arbor.
“What a lovely wild old place!” said Iris. “What is its history? Does any body know?”
“It has not been occupied for nearly a century, I am told,” said Aunt Diana. ”

“ And taking off his straw hat the poet wiped his white forehead, and looked at us with a quizzical expression in his brilliant eyes.
“It is warm,” confessed Aunt Diana, who, weary and worried, was toiling along almost in silence. Mokes was nearly out of sight with the “other young lady;” Iris and the Captain were absorbed in that murmured conversation so hopeless to outsiders; and Spartan matron though she was, she had not the courage to climb around after the Professor in cloth boots that drew like a magnet the vicious cacti of the thicket. Miss Sharp had leather boots, and climbed valiantly. ”

“ And bursting into a peal of laughter, the mother tossed up the baby again until he too joined in the merriment over the “wimpsyness,” whatever that was, of the tourists from the North.
“Do you know, I feel as though Calhoun himself was laughing at me from his grave,” I said, as we walked away. “Your Arcadians, Sara, have made me more conscious of my bodily defects than a whole regiment of fine city people. What a shape that woman had! what eyes! what teeth! But what did she mean by wimpsy?”
“Very likely she meant Mokes. He is certainly limpsy; then why not wimpsy? There he is, by-the-way.” ”

“ Sara flushed, and turned away.
“Do you do it on purpose, I wonder?” I thought, with some indignation, as I glanced at John’s imperturbable face. I was very tender always with Sara’s sudden little sadnesses. I think there is no one who comprehends a girl passing through the shadow-land of doubt and vague questioning that lies beyond youth so well as the old maid who has made the journey herself, and knows of a surety that there is sunshine beyond. Obeying a sudden impulse, I asked the question aloud. Sara was in front of us, out of hearing.
“Do I do what on purpose, Miss Martha? ”

“ We moderns have discovered at San Marco a subterranean dungeon and bones: then why not an under-ground passage?”
“And bones?” asked Sara.
“No; Spanish jewels, plate, and all kinds of mediæval treasures. I consider the possibility far more promising than Captain Kidd’s chest. I have half a mind to begin digging.”
“You would be obliged to take the shovel yourself, then, Miss Martha,” said John. “Do you suppose you could hire the St. Augustiners to dig, really dig, day after day, Northern fashion? Why, they would laugh in your face at the mere idea. ”

“ Passing the morass on planks, we walked down a path bordered with Spanish-bayonets,{17} crossed the creek on a small boat lying there, and entered the enchanted domain. It seemed to be a large plantation run to waste; symmetrical fields surrounded by high hedges of the sour orange, loaded with its fruit; old furrows still visible in the never-freezing ground; every where traces of careful labor and cultivation, which had made the sandy island blossom as the rose. In the centre of a broad lawn were the ruins of a mansion, the white chimney alone standing, like a monument to the past. ”

“ Every one wears the jasmine. When it first appears every one says, “Have you seen it? It has come!” And out they go to gather it, and bring it home in triumph.
Passing through the odd little wicket, which, with the old-fashioned turnstile, is used in Florida instead of a latched gate, we found ourselves in a green lane bordered at the far end with cedars. Here, down on the North River, was the Rose Garden, now standing with its silent house fast asleep in the moonlight.
“I do not see Iris,” said Aunt Diana, anxiously.
“There is somebody over on the other side of the hedge,” said Sara. ”

“ John,” said Aunt Diana, coming to the rescue, “you mistake. This is Tolomato.”
“It makes no difference. I am now convinced that they are all Huguenot burying-grounds,” replied Sara, calmly.
The little cemetery was crowded with graves, mounds of sand over which the grass would not grow, and heavy coquina tombs whose inscriptions had crumbled away. The names on the low crosses, nearly all Spanish, Minorcan, Corsican, and Greek, bore witness to the foreign ancestry of the majority of the population. ”

“ I defy any one to be graceful, or even dainty, with an orange; it is a great, rich, generous, pulpy fruit, and you have got to eat it in a great, rich, generous, pulpy way. How we did enjoy those oranges under the glossy green and fragrant blossoms of the trees themselves! We gave it up then and there, and said openly that no bought Northern oranges could compare with them.
“I don’t feel politically so much disturbed now about the cost of that sea-wall,” said Sara, “if it keeps this orange grove from washing away. ”

“ I am not in the mood.”
“But, Sara, my dear—”
“Yes, and Sara, my dear! Religion is for two classes—the happy and the resigned. I belong to neither. I am lost out of the first, and I haven’t yet found the second. I took this journey to please you, Martha. I don’t blame you; it was all chance; but—You think you know all my life. You know nothing about it. Martha, I was once engaged to John Hoffman.” ”

“ Aunt Diana felt herself a little comforted; evidently the undoubted Knickerbocker antecedents were not frightened off by this midnight escapade, and Iris certainly looked enchantingly lovely in the moonlight, with her white dress and the rose in her hair. If Mokes were only here, and reconciled too. Happy thought! why should Mokes know? Aunt Diana was a skillful general: Mokes never knew.
“How large and still the house looks!” I said, as we turned toward the wicket; “who lives there?”
“Only the Rose Gardener,” answered John; “an old bachelor who loves his flowers and hates womankind. ”

“ Passing through the old gateway, we came out upon the Shell Road, the grand boulevard of the future, as yet but a few yards in length.
“They make about ten feet a year,” said John; “and when they are at work, all I can say unto you is, ‘Beware!’ You suppose it is a load of empty shells they are throwing down; but no. Have they time, forsooth, to take out the oysters, these hard-pressed workmen of St. Augustine? By no means; and so down they go, oysters and all, and the road makes known its extension on the evening breezes.” ”

“ A sail-boat took us first down to Fish Island, which is really a part of Anastasia, separated from it only by a small creek. The inlet, which is named Matanzas River south of the harbor, and the North River above it, was dotted with porpoises heaving up their unwieldy bulk; the shores were bristling with oysters; armies of fiddler-crabs darted to and fro on the sands; heavy old pelicans, sickle-bill curlews, ospreys, herons, and even bald-headed eagles flew around and about us. ”

“ Aunt Di never made open warfare; she believed in strategy; through the whole she never once said, “Iris, you must not,” or wavered for one moment in her charming manner toward the Captain. But the pits she dug for that young man, the barriers she erected, the obstructions she cast in his way, would have astonished even Osceola himself. ”

“ I said, as a new vista of symmetrical fields opened out on one side.
“There you make the common mistake of all Northerners, Miss Martha,” said John Hoffman. “Because the country is desolate and thinly settled, you suppose it to be also wild and new, like the Western States and Territories. You forget how long this far peninsula has been known to the white man. These shores were settled more than a century before Plymouth or Jamestown, and you can scarcely go out in any direction around St. Augustine without coming upon old groves of orange and fig trees, a ruined stone wall, or fallen chimney. ”

“ But the sea-wall by moonlight was reserved for Antinous. Thus we dallied with the pleasant weather until Aunt Diana, like a Spartan matron, roused herself to action. “This will never do,” she said; “this very afternoon we will all go over to the island and see the tombs.”
Aunt Di’s temper had been sorely tried. Going out with Mokes the preceding evening to find Iris, who was ostensibly “strolling up and down the wall” in the moonlight with the Captain, she had found no trace of her niece from one end of the wall to the other—from the glacis of San Marco to the flag-staff at the Barracks. ”

“ The Indians sat down on the floor of the little chapel, the father put on his robes and began. No doubt he hoped to soften their hearts by the holy service, but in vain; the last word spoken, they fell upon him and—”
“Massacred him,” concluded Sara. “You need not go on, Sir. I know all about it. I was there.”
“You were there, Miss St. John!”
“Certainly,” replied Sara, calmly. “I am now convinced that in some anterior state of existence I have assisted, as the French say, at all the Florida massacres. Indian, Spanish, or Huguenot, it makes no difference to me. I was there!” ”

“ City people, on the contrary, walk their miles daily as a matter of course. You can almost tell whether a young lady is city or country bred from the mere fact of her walking or not walking.”
“Climate here has something to do with it,” said John, “and also the old Spanish ideas that ladies should wear satin slippers and take as few steps as possible. The Minorcans keep up some of the old ideas still. Courtship is carried on through a window, the maiden within, a rose in her hair, and the favorite Spanish work in her hand, and the lover outside leaning on the casement. ”

“ The saw-palmetto grew in patches, and rustled its stiff leaves as we passed.
“I can’t think of any thing but Spanish ladies looking out between the sticks of their fans,” remarked Eugenio.
“That’s just like it,” said Iris, and plucking one of the fan-shaped leaves, she gave the idea a lovely coquettish reality. The Captain murmured something (he had a way of murmuring) . What it was we could not hear, but then Iris heard, and blushed very prettily. Mokes took the “other young lady,” the sliced one, and walked on loftily. She went. The truth is, they generally go with three millions. ”

“ I said, as we strolled back from the little dépôt.
“I doubt it,” answered Sara. “He is the kind that goes in ankle deep, and then hesitates over the final plunge. But probably all the rest of his life he will cherish the delusion that he had only to speak, and he will intimate as much to his cronies over a temperate and confidential glass of whisky on winter nights.”
“After all, Miss Sharp is worth twenty Professors. How silently and even smilingly she bore her fate! Iris, now, pouted openly over the Captain’s desertion.” ”

“ Augustine, and lingered there far beyond their appointed time. Crowds of old ladies and gentlemen sunned themselves on the south piazzas, and troops of young people sailed and walked every where, waking up the sleeping woods and the dreaming water with song and laughter. The enterprising tourists came and went with their accustomed energy; they bought palmetto hats and twined gray moss around them; they carried orange-wood canes and cigar boxes containing young alligators. ”

“ Their bones lie beneath this water, or under the shifting sands of the beach, but the river perpetuates the deed in its name, Matanzas, or slaughter.”
“Is there any place about here where there were no massacres?” asked Sara. “Wherever I go, they arise from the past and glare at me. Between Spanish, Huguenot, and Indian slaughter, I am becoming quite gory.” ”

“ The Captain was with us, likewise Mokes; but Aunt Diana had sliced in another young lady to keep the balance even; and away we went through the town, across the Maria Sanchez Creek, under the tree arches, and out on to the broad causeway beyond.
“What! walk to Ponce de Leon Spring!” exclaimed the languid St. Augustine ladies as we passed.
“They evidently look upon Northerners as a species of walking madmen,” I said, laughing.
“It is a singular fact,” commented Sara, “that country people never walk if they can help it; they go about their little town and that is all. ”

“ Beyond the house opened out the long orange-tree aisles—beautiful walks arched in glossy green foliage—half a mile of dense leafy shade.
“This is the sour orange,” said our guide, “a tree extensively cultivated in the old days for its hardy growth and pleasant shade. It is supposed to be an exotic run wild, for the orange is not indigenous here. When Florida was ceded to England in exchange for Cuba, most of the Spanish residents left, and their gardens were then found well stocked with oranges and lemons, figs, guavas, and pomegranates.”
“Poor Florida! nobody wanted her,” said John. ”

“ But Aunt Di was true to her colors, and never saw or heard any thing detrimental to her cause.
It was a lovely February morning; the telegraph reported zero weather in New York, but here the thermometer stood at seventy, with a fresh sea-breeze. We stepped up on to the sea-wall at the Basin, where the sail-boats were starting out with pleasure parties for the North Beach. Iris had her Captain; Aunt Diana followed closely arm in arm with Mokes; Miss Sharp, jubilant, had captured the Professor; Sara and I were together as usual, leaving John Hoffman to bring up the rear with his morning cigar. ”