"Oh, wait!" said papa. "Yone or Lu?"
"Now how absurd, papa!" I exclaimed. "Such things for Lu!"
"Why not?" asked Lu,rather faintly now, for she knew I always carried my point.
"The idea of you in amber, Lu! It's too foreign; no sympathy between you!"
"Stop, stop!" said papa. "You shan't crowd little Lu out of them. What do you want them for, Lu?"
"To wear," quavered Lu,"like the balls the Roman ladies carried for coolness."
"Well, then, you ought to have them. What do you want them for, Yone?"
"Oh, if Lu's going to have them, I don't want them."
"But give a reason, child."
"Why, to wear, too,to look at,to have and to hold for better, for worse,to say my prayers on," for a bright idea struck me, "to say my prayers on, like the Florence rosary." I knew that would finish the thing.
"Like the Florence rosary?" said papa, in a sleepy voice. "Why, this is the Florence rosary."
Of course, when we knew that, we were both more crazy to obtain it.
"Oh, Sir," just fluttered Lu, "where did you get it?"
"I got it; the question is, Who's to have it?"
"I must and will, potential and imperative," I exclaimed, quite on fire. "The nonsense of the thing! Girls with lucid eyes, like shadowy shallows in quick brooks, can wear crystallizations. As for me, I can wear only concretions and growths; emeralds and all their cousins would be shockingly inharmonious on me; but you know, Lu, how I use Indian spices, and scarlet and white berries and flowers, and little hearts and notions of beautiful copal that Rose carved for you,and I can wear sandal-wood and ebony and pearls, and now this amber. But you, Lu, you can wear every kind of precious stone, and you may have Aunt Willoughby's rubies that she promised me; they are all in tone with you; but I must have this."
"I don't think you're right," said Louise, rather soberly. "You strip yourself of great advantages. But about the rubies, I don't want anything so flaming, so you may keep them; and I don't care at all about this. I think, Sir, on the whole, they belong to Yone for her name."
"So they do," said papa. "But not to be bought off! That's my little
Lu!"
And somehow Lu, who had been holding the rosary, was sitting on papa's knee, as he half knelt on the floor, and the rosary was in my hand. And then he produced a little kid box, and there lay inside a star with a thread of gold for the forehead, circlets for wrist and throat, two drops, and a ring. Oh, such beauties! You've never seen them.
"The other one shall have these. Aren't you sorry, Yone?" he said.
"Oh, no, indeed! I'd much rather have mine, though these are splendid.
What are they?"
"Aqua-marina," sighed Lu, in an agony of admiration.
"Dear, dear! how did you know?"
Lu blushed, I saw,but I was too much absorbed with the jewels to remark it.
"Oh, they are just like that ring on your hand! You don't want two rings alike," I said. "Where did you get that ring, Lu?"
But Lu had no senses for anything beyond the casket.
If you know aqua-marina, you know something that's before every other stone in the world. Why, it is as clear as light, white, limpid, dawn light; sparkles slightly and seldom; looks like pure drops of water, sea-water, scooped up and falling down again; just a thought of its parent beryl green hovers round the edges; and it grows more lucent and sweet to the centre, and there you lose yourself in some dream of vast seas, a glory of unimagined oceans; and you say that it was crystallized to any slow flute-like tune, each speck of it floating into file with a musical grace, and carrying its sound with it. There! it's very fanciful, but I'm always feeling the tune in aqua-marina, and trying to find it,but I shouldn't know it was a tune, if I did, I suppose. How magnificent it would be, if every atom of creation sprang up and said its one word of abracadabra, the secret of its existence, and fell silent again. Oh, dear! you'd die, you know; but what a pow-wow! Then, too, in aqua-marina proper, the setting is kept out of sight, and you have the unalloyed stone with its sea-rims and its clearness and steady sweetness. It wasn't the stone for Louise to wear; it belongs rather to highly-nervous, excitable persons; and Lu is as calm as I, only so different! There is something more pure and simple about it than about anything else; others may flash and twinkle, but this just glows with an unvarying power, is planetary and strong. It wears the moods of the sea, too: once in a while a warm amethystine mist suffuses it like a blush; sometimes a white morning fog breathes over it: you long to get into the heart of it. That's the charm of gems, after all! You feel that they are fashioned through dissimilar processes from yourself,that there's a mystery about them, mastering which would be like mastering a new life, like having the freedom of other stars. I give them more personality than I would a great white spirit. I like amber that way, because I know how it was made, drinking the primeval weather, resinously beading each grain of its rare wood, and dripping with a plash to filter through and around the fallen cones below. In some former state I must have been a fly embalmed in amber.
"Oh, Lu!" I said, "this amber's just the thing for me, such a great noon creature! And as for you, you shall wear mamma's Mechlin and that aqua-marina; and you'll look like a mer-queen just issuing from the wine-dark deeps and glittering with shining water-spheres."
I never let Lu wear the point at all; she'd be ridiculous in it,so flimsy and open and unreserved; that's for me;Mechlin, with its whiter, closer, chaste web, suits her to a T.
I must tell you, first, how this rosary came about, any way. You know we've a million of ancestors, and one of them, my great-grandfather, was a sea-captain, and actually did bring home cargoes of slaves; but once he fetched to his wife a little islander, an Asian imp, six years old, and wilder than the wind. She spoke no word of English, and was full of short shouts and screeches, like a thing of the woods. My great-grandmother couldn't do a bit with her; she turned the house topsy-turvy, cut the noses out of the old portraits, and chewed the jewels out of the settings, killed the little home animals, spoiled the dinners, pranced in the garden with Madam Willoughby's farthingale and royal stiff brocades rustling yards behind,this atom of a shrimp,or balanced herself with her heels in the air over the curb of the well, scraped up the dead leaves under one corner of the house and fired them,a favorite occupation,and if you left her stirring a mess in the kitchen, you met her, perhaps, perched in the china-closet and mumbling all manner of demoniacal prayers, twisting and writhing and screaming over a string of amber gods that she had brought with her and always wore. When winter came and the first snow, she was furious, perfectly mad. One might as well have had a ball of fire in the house, or chain-lightning; every nice old custom had been invaded, the ancient quiet broken into a Bedlam of outlandish sounds, and as Captain Willoughby was returning, his wife packed the sprite off with him,to cut, rip, and tear in New Holland, if she liked, but not in New England,and rejoiced herself that she would find that little brown skin cuddled up in her best down beds and among her lavendered sheets no more. She had learned but two words all that time,Willoughby, and the name of the town.
You may conjecture what heavenly peace came in when the Asian went out, but there is no one to tell what havoc was wrought on board ship; in fact, if there could have been such a thing as a witch, I should believe that imp sunk them, for a stray Levantine brig picked herstill agile as a monkeyfrom a wreck off the Cape de Verdes and carried her into Leghorn, where she tookwill you mind, if I say?leg-bail, and escaped from durance. What happened on her wanderings I'm sure is of no consequence, till one night she turned up outside a Fiesolan villa, scorched with malaria fevers and shaken to pieces with tertian and quartan and all the rest of the agues. So, after having shaken almost to death, she decided upon getting well; all the effervescence was gone; she chose to remain with her beads in that family, a mysterious tame servant, faithful, jealous, indefatigable. But she never grew; at ninety she was of the height of a yard-stick,and nothing could have been finer than to have a dwarf in those old palaces, you know.