Flood Tide
by Sara Ware Bassett · English · Gutenberg #18902 · 410,403 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Flood Tide
Author: Sara Ware Bassett
Release date: July 23, 2006 [eBook #18902]
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Language: English
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FLOOD TIDE
by
SARA WARE BASSETT
Author of
"The Harbor Road," "The Wall Between," "Taming of Zenas Henry,"
etc.
With Frontispiece by M. L. Greer
[Frontispiece: "Delight's kinder bowled over by surprise, Tiny," Willie
explained gently.]
A. L. Burt Company
Publishers -------- New York
Published by arrangement with Little, Brown and Company
Copyright, 1921,
By Sara Ware Bassett.
All rights reserved
Published March, 1921
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE WEAVER AND HIS FANCIES
II. WILLIE HAS AN IDEE
III. A NEW ARRIVAL
IV. THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER ENTERS
V. AN APPARITION
VI. MARRYING AND GIVING IN MARRIAGE
VII. A SECOND SPIRIT APPEARS
VIII. SHADOWS
IX. A WIDENING OF THE BREACH
X. A CONSPIRACY
XI. THE GALBRAITH HOUSEHOLD
XII. ROBERT MORTON MAKES A RESOLVE
XIII. A NEWCOMER ENTERS
XIV. THE SPENCES ENTER SOCIETY
XV. A REVELATION
XVI. ANOTHER BLOW DESCENDS
XVII. A GRIM HAND INTERVENES
XVIII. THE PROGRESS OF ANOTHER ROMANCE
XIX. WILLIE AS PILOT
XX. ONE MORE OF WILLIE'S SHIPS REACHES PORT
XXI. SURPRISES
XXII. DELIGHT MAKES HER DECISION
XXIII. FAME COMES TO THE DREAMER OF DREAMS
FLOOD TIDE
CHAPTER I
THE WEAVER AND HIS FANCIES
Willie Spence was a trial. Not that his personality rasped society at
large. On the contrary his neighbors cherished toward the little old
man, with his short-sighted blue eyes and his appealing smile, an
affection peculiarly tender; and if they sometimes were wont to observe
that although Willie possessed some common sense he was blessed with
uncommon little of it, the observation was facetiously uttered and was
offered with no malicious intent.
In fact had one scoured Wilton from end to end it would have been
difficult to unearth a single individual who bore enmity toward the
owner of the silver-gray cottage on the Harbor Road. It was impossible
to talk ten seconds with Willie Spence and not be won by his
kindliness, his optimism, his sympathy, and his honesty. Willie
probably could not have dissembled had he tried, and fortunately his
life was of so simple and transparent a trend that little lay hidden
beneath its crystalline exterior. What he was he was. When baffled by
phenomena he would scratch his thin locks and with a smile of endearing
candor frankly admit, "I dunno." When, on the other hand, he knew
himself to be master of a debated fact, no power under heaven could
shake the tenacity with which he clung to his beliefs. There was never
any compromise with truth on Willie's part. A thing was so or it was
not.
This reputation for veracity, linked as it was with an ingenuous good
will toward all mankind, had earned for Willie Spence such universal
esteem and tenderness that whenever the stooping figure with its ruddy
cheeks, soft white hair, and gentle smile made its appearance on the
sandy roads of the hamlet, it was hailed on all sides with the loving
and indulgent greetings of the inhabitants of the village.
Even Celestina Morton, who kept house for him and who might well have
lost patience at his defiance of domestic routine, worshipped the very
soil his foot touched. There was, of course, no denying that Willie's
disregard for the meal hour had become what she termed "chronical" and
severely taxed her forbearance; or that since she was a creature of
human limitations she did at times protest when the chowder stood
forgotten in the tureen until it was of Arctic temperature; nor had she
ever acquired the grace of spirit to amiably view freshly baked
popovers shrivel neglected into nothingness. Try as she would to curb
her tongue, under such circumstances, she occasionally would burst out:
"I do wish, Willie Spence, you'd quit your dreamin' an' come to dinner."
For answer Willie would rise hastily and stand arrested, a bit of
string in one hand and the hammer in the other, and peering
reproachfully over the top of his steel-bowed spectacles would reply:
"Law, Tiny! You wouldn't begretch me my dreams, would you? They're
about all I've got. If it warn't fur the things I dream I wouldn't
have nothin'."
The wistfulness in the sensitive face would instantly transform
Celestina's irritation into sympathy and cause her to respond:
"Nonsense, Willie! What are you talkin' about? Ain't you got more
friends than anybody in this town? Nobody's poor so long as he has
good friends."
"Oh, 'taint bein' poor I mind," laughed Willie, now quite himself
again. "It's knowin' nothin' an' bein' nothin' that discourages me.
If I'd only had the chance to learn somethin' when I was a youngster I
wouldn't have to be goin' it blind now like I do. There's times,
Celestina," added the man solemnly, "when I really believe I've got
stuff inside me that's worth while if only I knew what to do with it."
"Pshaw! Ain't you usin' what's inside you all the time to help the
folks of this town out of their troubles? I'd like to know how they'd
get along if it warn't fur you. Ain't you doctorin' an' fixin' up
things for the whole of Cape Cod from one end to the other, day in and
day out? I call that amountin' to somethin' in the world if you don't."
Willie paused thoughtfully.
"I do do quite a batch of tinkerin', that's true," admitted he,
brightening, "an' I'm right down glad to do it, too. Don't think I
ain't. Still, I can't help knowin' there's better ways to go at it
than blunderin' along as I have to, an' sometimes I can't help wishin'
I knew what the right way is. There must be folks that know how to do
in half the time what I do by makeshift an' fussin'. Sometimes it
seems a pity there never was anybody to steer me into findin' out the
kind of things I've always wanted to know."
Celestina began to rock nervously.
Being of New England fiber, and classing as morbid all forms of
introspection, she always so dreaded to have the conversation drift
into a reflective channel that whenever she found Willie indulging in
reveries she was wont to rout him out of them, tartly reproaching
herself for having even indirectly been the cause of stirrin' him up.
"Next time I'll set the chowder back on the stove an' say nothin'," she
would vow inwardly. "I'd much better have waited 'til his dream was
over an' done with. S'pose I am put out a bit--'twon't hurt me. If I
don't care enough for Willie to do somethin' for him once in a while,
good as he's always been to me, I'd oughter be ashamed of myself."
Hence it is easily seen that neither to Wilton in general nor to
Celestina in particular was Willie Spence a trial.
No, it was to himself that Willie was the torment. "I plague myself
'most to death, Tiny," he would not infrequently confess when the two
sat together at dusk in the little room that looked out on the reach of
blue sea. "It's gettin' all these idees that drives me distracted.
'Tain't that I go huntin' 'em; they come to me, hittin' me broadside
like as if they'd been shot out of a gun. There's times," ambled on
the quiet voice, "when they'll wake me out of a sound sleep an' give me
no peace 'til I've got up and 'tended to 'em. That notion of hitchin'
a string to the slide in the stove door so'st you could open the
draught without stirrin' out of your chair--that took me in the night.
There warn't no waitin' 'til mornin'! Long ago I learned that. Once
the idee has a-holt of me there's nothin' to do but haul myself out of
bed, even if it's midnight an' colder'n the devil, an' try out that
notion."
"The plan was a good one; it's saved lots of steps," put in Celestina.
"It had to be done, Tiny," Willie answered simply. "That's all there
was to it. Good or bad, I had to carry it to a finish if I didn't
sleep another wink that night."
The assertion was true; Celestina could vouch for that. After ten
years of residence in the gray cottage she had become too completely
inured to hearing the muffled sound of saw and hammer during the wee
small hours of the night to question the verity of the statement.
Therefore she was quite ready to agree that there was no peace for
Willie, or herself either, until the particular burst of genius that
assailed him had been transformed from a mirage of the imagination to
the more tangible form of tacks and strings.
For strings played a very vital part in Willie Spence's inspirational
world. Indeed, when Celestina had first come to the weathered cottage
on the bluff to keep house for the lonely little bachelor and had
discovered that cottage to be one gigantic spider's web, her initial
impression was that strings played far too important a part in the
household. What a labyrinthine entanglement the dwelling was! Had a
mammoth silkworm woven his airy filaments within its interior, the
effect could scarcely have been more grotesque.
Strings stretched from the back door, across the kitchen and through
the hallway, and disappeared up the stairs into Willie's bedroom, where
one pull of a cord lifted the iron latch to admit Oliver Goldsmith, the
Maltese cat, whenever he rattled for entrance. There was a string that
hoisted and lowered the coal hod from the cellar through a square hole
in the kitchen floor, thereby saving one the fatigue of tugging it up
the stairs.
"A coal hod is such an infernal tote to tote!" Willie would explain to
his listeners.
Then there was a string which in like manner swung the wood box into
place. Other strings opened and closed the kitchen windows, unfastened
the front gate, rang a bell in Celestina's room, and whisked Willie's
slippers forth from their hiding place beneath the stairs; not to
mention myriad red, blue, green, yellow, and purple strings that had
their goals in the ice chest, the pump, the letter box, and the storm
door, and in connection with which objects they silently performed
mystic benefactions.
Probably, however, the most significant string of all was that of stout
twine that reached from Willie's shop to the home of Janoah Eldridge,
two fields beyond, just at the junction of the Belleport and Harbor
roads. This string not only linked the two cottages but sustained upon
its taut line a small wooden box that could be pulled back and forth at
will and convey from one abode to the other not only written
communications but also such diminutive articles as pipes, tobacco,
spectacles, balls of string, boxes of tacks, and even tools of moderate
weight. By means of this primitive special delivery service Jan
Eldridge could be summoned posthaste whenever an especially luminous
inspiration flashed upon Willie's intellect and could assist in helping
to make the dream a reality.
For it was always through Willie's plastic imagination that these
creative visions flitted. In all his seventy years Jan had been beset
by only one outburst of genius and that had pertained to whisking an
extra blanket over himself when he was cold at night. How much
pleasanter to lie placidly between the sheets and have the blanket
miraculously appear without the chill and discomfort of arising to
fetch it, he argued! But alas! the magic spell had failed to work.
Instead the strings had wrenched the corners from the age-worn
covering, thereby arousing Mrs. Eldridge's ire. Moreover, although Jan
had not confessed it at the time, the blanket while in process of
locomotion had for some unfathomable reason dragged in its wake all the
other bedclothes, freeing them from their moorings and submerging his
head in a smothering weight of disorganized sheets and counterpanes
only to leave his poor shivering body a prey to the unfriendly
elements. An attack of lumbago that rendered him helpless from January
until March followed and had decided Jan that inventors were born, not
made. Thereafter he had been content to abandon the realm of research
to his comrade and allow Willie to furnish the inspiration for further
creative ventures. Nevertheless his retirement from the spheres of
discovery did not prevent him from zealously assisting in the
mechanical details that rendered Willie's schemes material. Jan not
only possessed a far more practical type of mind than did his friend
but he was also a more skilful workman and therefore in the carrying
out of any plan his aid was indispensable. He was, moreover, content
to be the lesser power, looking up to Willie's ability with admiration
and asserting with unfeigned sincerity to every one he met that Willie
Spence had not only been born with the _injun_ but he had the _newity_
to go with it.
"Why," Jan would often declare with spirit, "in my opinion Willie has
every whit as much call to write X, Y, Z, an' all them other letters
after his name as any of those fellers that graduate from colleges!
He's a wonder, Willie Spence is--a walkin' wonder! Some day he's goin'
to make his mark, too, an' cause the folks in this town to set up an'
take notice. See if he don't."
Willie's neighbors had long since tired of waiting for the glorious
moment of his fame to arrive; and although they had too genuine a
regard for the little old inventor to state publicly what they really
thought of the strings, the nails, the spools, the wires, and the
pulleys, in private they did not hesitate to denounce derisively the
scientist's contrivances and assert that some fine day the house on the
bluff would come to dire disaster.
"Somebody's goin' to get hung or strangled on one of them contraptions
Willie's rigged up," Captain Phineas Taylor prophesied impressively to
Zenas Henry as the two men sat smoking in the lee of the wood pile.
"You watch out an' see if they don't."
Indeed there was no denying that Celestina was continually catching
hairpins, hooks, and buttons in the strings; or that some such dilemma
as had been predicted had actually occurred, for one day while alone in
the house a pin fastening the back of her print gown had become
inextricably entangled in the maze amid which she moved, and fearing
Willie's wrath if she should sunder her fetters she had been forced to
stand captive and helplessly witness a newly made sponge cake burn to a
crisp in the oven. She had hoped the ignominious episode would not
reach the outside world; but as Wilton was possessed of a miraculous
power for finding out things the story filtered through the community,
affording the village a laugh and the opportunity to affirm with
ominous shakings of the head that it was only because the Lord looked
out for fools and little children that a worse evil had not long ago
befallen the Spence household.
Willie accepted the banter in good part. Born with a forgiving,
noncombative disposition he seldom took offence and although Janoah
Eldridge, who knew him better perhaps than anyone else on earth did,
acclaimed that this tranquil exterior concealed, as did Tim
Linkinwater's, unsuspected depths of ferocity, Wilton had yet to
encounter its lionlike fury. Instead the mild little inventor, with
his spools and his pulleys, his bits of wire and his measureless
reaches of string, pursued his peaceful though tortuous way, and if his
abode became transformed into a magnified cobweb only himself and
Celestina were inconvenienced thereby.
To Celestina inconvenience was second nature since from the moment of
her birth it had been her lot in life. Arriving in the world
prematurely she had found nothing prepared for her coming and had been
forced to put up with such makeshifts for comfort as could be hurriedly
scrambled together. From that day until the present instant the same
fate had shadowed her path; perhaps it was in her stars. Her parents
had been of dilatory habits and by the time a crib with the necessary
pillows and bedding had been secured, and she had drawn a few peaceful
breaths therein a new baby had arrived and she had been ousted from her
resting place and compelled to surrender it to the more recent comer.
Ever since she had been shunted from pillar to post, sleeping on cots,
on couches, in folding beds and in hammocks, and keeping her meager
possessions in paste-board boxes tucked away beneath tables and
bureaus. Poised on the ragged edge of domesticity she continued
throughout her girlhood to look forward with hope to an eventual state
of permanence. When she was eighteen, however, her mother died and in
the task of bringing up six brothers and sisters younger than herself
all considerations for her personal ease were forgotten. Ten years
passed and her father was no more; than gradually, one after another,
the family she had so patiently reared took wing, leaving Celestina a
lonely spinster of fifty, homeless and practically penniless.
This cruel lack of responsibility on the part of her relatives resulted
less from a want of affection than from a supreme misunderstanding of
their older sister. So completely had Celestina learned to efface her
personality and her inclinations that they reasoned she was utterly
without preferences; that she lacked the homing instinct; and was quite
as happy in one place as in another. Having thus washed their hands of
her they proceeded to sell the Morton homestead and each one pocket his
share of the proceeds. Very scanty this inheritance was, so scanty
that it compelled Celestina to begin a rotation around the village,
where in return for shelter she filled in domestic gaps of various
kinds. She helped here, she helped there; she took care of babies,
nursed the sick, comforted the aged. On she moved from house to house,
no enduring foundation ever remaining beneath her feet. No sooner
would she strike her roots down into a congenial soil than she would be
forced to pluck them up again and find new earth to which to cling.
She might have married a dozen times during her youth had not her
conscience deterred her from deserting her father and the children left
to her care. In fact one persistent swain who refused to take "No" for
an answer had begged Celestina to wait and pray over the matter.
"I never trouble the Lord with things I can settle myself," replied she
firmly. "I can't go marryin' an' that's all there is to it."
Other offers had been declined with the same characteristic firmness
until now the golden season of mating-time was past, and although she
was still a pretty little woman the stamp of spinsterhood was
unalterably fixed upon her.
Wilton, in the meantime, had long ago lost sight of the uncomplaining
self-sacrifice it had previously lauded and explained Celestina
Morton's unwedded state by declaring that she was too "easy goin'" to
make anybody a good wife. This criticism came, perhaps, more loudly
from the female faction of the town than from the male. However that
may be, the stigma, merited or unmerited, had become so firmly branded
upon Celestina that it could not be effaced. She may to some extent
have brought it upon herself, for certain it was that she never kicked
against the pricks or tried to shape her circumstances more in
accordance with her liking. Undoubtedly had she accepted her lot less
meekly she might have commanded a greater measure of attention and
sympathy; still, if she had not been of a more or less plastic nature
and surrendered herself patiently to her destiny it is a question
whether she would have survived at all.
It was this mutability, this power to detach herself from her
environment and view it with the stoical indifference of a spectator
that caused Wilton with its harsh New England standards, to
characterize Celestina as "easy goin'." In fact, this popularly termed
"flaw" in her make-up was what had acted as an open sesame to every
door at which she knocked and had kept a roof above her head. She had
been just sixty years of age when Willie Spence's sister had died and
left him alone in the wee cottage on the Harbor Road, and all Wilton
had begun to speculate as to what was to become of him. Willie was as
dependent as an infant; the village gossips who knew everything knew
that. From childhood he had been looked after,--first by his mother,
then by his aunt, and lastly by his sister; and when death had removed
in succession all three of these props, leaving the little old man at
last face to face with life, his startled blue eyes had grown large
with terror. What was to become of him now? Not only did Willie
himself helplessly raise the interrogation but so did all Wilton.
Of course he could go and board with the Eldridges but that would mean
renting or selling the silver-gray cottage where he had dwelt since
birth and would be a tragic severing of all ties with the past;
moreover, and a fact more potent than all the rest, it would mean
dismantling the house of the web that for years he had spun, the
symbols of dreams that had been his chief delight. Should he go to the
Eldridges there could be no more inventing, for Jan's wife was a hard,
practical woman who had scant sympathy with Willie's "idees."
Nevertheless one redeeming consideration must not be lost sight of--she
was a famous cook, a very famous cook; and poor Willie, although he
cared little what he ate, was incapable of concocting any food at all.
But the strings, the strings! No, to go to live with Jan and Mrs.
Eldridge was not to be thought of.
It was just at this psychological juncture, when Willie was choosing
'twixt flesh and spirit, that he saw Celestina Morton standing like a
vision in the sunshine that spangled his doorway. She said she knew
how lonely he must be and therefore she had come to make a friendly
call and tidy up the house or mend for him anything that needed
mending. With this simple introduction she had taken off her hat and
coat, donned an ample blue-and-white pinafore, and set to work.
Fascinated Willie watched her deft movements. Now and then she smiled
at him but she did not speak and neither did he; nor, he noticed, did
she disturb his strings or comment on their inconvenience. When
twilight came and the hour for her departure drew near Willie stationed
himself before the peg from which dangled her shabby wraps and
stubbornly refused to have her hat and cloak removed from the nail.
There, figuratively speaking, they had hung ever since, the inventor
reasoning that life without this paragon of capability was a wretched
and profitless adventure.
In justifying his sudden decision to Janoah Eldridge, Willie had merely
explained that he had hired Celestina because she was so comfortable to
have around, a recommendation at which Wilton would have jeered but
which, perhaps, in the eyes of the Lord was quite as praiseworthy as
that which her more hidebound but less accommodating sisters could have
boasted. For disorder and confusion never kept Celestina awake nights
or prevented her from partaking of three hearty meals a day as it would
have Abbie Brewster or Deborah Howland. So long as things were clean,
their being an inch or two, or even a foot, out of plumb did not worry
the new inmate of the gray house an iota. And when Willie was balked
in an "idee" that had "kitched him," and left half-a-dozen strings and
wires swinging in mid-air for weeks together, Celestina would patiently
duck her head as she passed beneath them and offer no protest more
emphatic than to remark:
"Them strings hangin' down over the sink snare me every time I wash a
dish. Ain't you calculatin' ever to take 'em down, Willie?"
The reply vouchsafed would be as mild as the suggestion:
"I reckon they ain't there for eternity, Tiny," the inventor would
respond. "Like as not both you an' me will live to see 'em out of the
way."
That was all the satisfaction Celestina would get from her feeble
complaints; it was all she ever got. Yet in spite of the exasperating
response she adored Willie who had been to her the soul of kindliness
and courtesy ever since she had come to the bluff to live. He might
forget to come to his meals,--forget, in fact, whether he had eaten
them or not; he might venture forth into the village with one gray sock
and one blue one; or when part way to the post-office become lost in
reverie and return home again without ever reaching his destination.
Such incidents had happened and were likely to happen again.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding his absentmindedness, he was never too
much absorbed to maintain toward Celestina an old-fashioned deference
very appealing to one accustomed to being ignored and slighted.
The impulse, it was quite obvious, was prompted less by conventionality
than by a knightliness of heart, and Celestina, who had never before
been the recipient of such courtesies, found herself inexpressibly
touched by the trifling attentions. Often she speculated as to whether
this mental attitude toward all womanhood was one Willie himself had
evolved or whether it was the result of standards instilled into his
sensitive consciousness by the women who had been his companions
through life,--his mother, his aunt, his sister. Whichever the case
there was no question that the old man's bearing toward her placed her
on a pinnacle where gossip was silenced, and transformed her humble
ministrations from those of a hireling into acts of graciousness and
beauty.
Moreover to live in the same house with such an optimist was no
ordinary experience. Well Celestina remembered the day when at dinner
the little old man had choked violently, turning purple in the face in
his fight for breath. She had rushed to his side, terror-stricken, but
between his spasms of coughing the inventor had gasped out:
"Why make so much fuss over what's gone down the wrong way, Tiny?
Think--of--the--things--I've--swallered--all--these--years--that
have--gone down--right!"
The observation was characteristic of Willie's creed of life. He never
emphasized the exceptions but always the big, fine, elemental good in
everything.
Even the name by which he went had been bestowed on him by the
community as a term of endearment. There were, to be sure, other men
in the hamlet whose names had passed into diminutives. There was, for
example, Seth Crocker, whose wife explained that she called him Sethie
"for short." But Sethie's name was never pronounced with the same
affectionate drawl that Willie's was.
No, Willie had his peculiar niche in Wilton and a very sacred niche it
was.
What marvel, therefore, that Celestina reverenced the very earth which
he trod and cheerfully put up with the strings, the wires, the spools,
the tacks, and the pulleys; that she shifted the meals about to suit
his convenience; and that when she was awakened at midnight by a
rhythmic hammering which portended that the inventor had once again
"got kitched with a new idee" she smiled indulgently in the darkness
and instead of cursing the echoes that disturbed her slumber whispered
to herself Jan Eldridge's oft-repeated prediction that the day would
come when Willie Spence would astonish the scoffers of Wilton and would
make his mark.
CHAPTER II
WILLIE HAS AN IDEE
On a day in June so clear that a sea gull loomed mammoth against the
sky; a day when a sail against the horizon was visible for miles; a day
when the whole world seemed swept and garnished as for a festival,
Zenas Henry Brewster drew rein before the Spence cottage, hitched the
Admiral to the picket fence that bordered the highway, and ascending
the bank which sloped abruptly to the road presented himself at the
kitchen door from which issued the aroma of baking bread.
"Mornin', Tiny," called the visitor, poking his head across the
threshold. "Willie anywheres about?"
Celestina, who was washing the breakfast dishes, glanced up at the lank
figure with a start.
"Law, Zenas Henry, what a turn you gave me!" she exclaimed. "I never
heard a footfall. Yes, Willie's outside somewheres. He and Jan
Eldridge have been tinkerin' with the pump since early mornin'.
They've had it apart a hundred times, I guess, an' like as not they're
round there now pullin' it to pieces for the hundred-an'-oneth."
Zenas Henry grinned.
"That's a queer to-do," he remarked. "What's got all the pumps?
Bewitched, I reckon. Ours ain't workin' fur a cent either, an' I drove
round thinkin' I'd fetch Willie home with me to have a look at it.
He's got a knack with such things an' I calculate he'd know what's the
matter with it. Darned if I do."
The man began to move away across the grass.
Celestina, however, who was in the mood for gossip, had no mind to let
him escape so easily.
"How's your folks?" questioned she, dropping her dishcloth into the pan
and following him to the door.
"Oh, we're all right," returned Zenas Henry with a backward glance.
"Captain Benjamin's shoulder pesters him some about layin', but I tell
him he can't expect rain an' fog not to bring rheumatism."
"That's so," agreed Celestina. "What a spell of weather we've had! I
guess it's about over now, though. I'm sorry Benjamin's shoulders
should hector him so. We're gettin' old, Zenas Henry, that's the plain
truth of it, an' must cheerfully take our share of aches an' pains, I
s'pose. Are Captain Phineas an' Captain Jonas well?"
"Oh, they're nimble as crabs."
"An' Abbie?"
"Fine as a clipper in a breeze!" responded the man with enthusiasm.
"Best wife that ever was! The sun rises an' sets in that woman,
Celestina. What she can't do ain't worth doin'! Turns off work like
as if it was of no account an' grows better lookin' every day a-doin'
it."
Celestina laughed.
"I reckon you didn't make no mistake gettin' married, Zenas Henry,"
mused she.
"Mistake!" repeated Zenas Henry.
"An' no mistake takin' in the child, either," went on Celestina,
unheeding the interruption.
She saw his face soften and a glow of tenderness overspread it.
"Delight was sent us out of heaven," he declared with solemnity.
"'Twas as much intended that ship should come ashore here an' the three
captains an' myself bring that little girl to land as that the sun
should rise in the mornin'. The child was meant fur us--fur us an' fur
nobody else on earth. Was she our own daughter we couldn't be fonder
of her than we are. It's ten years now since the wreck of the
_Michleen_. Think of it! How time flies! Ten years--an' the girl's
most twenty. I can't realize it. Why, it seems only yesterday she was
clingin' to my neck an' I was bringin' her home."
"She's grown to be a regular beauty," Celestina observed.
"I s'pose she has; folks seem to think so," replied Zenas Henry. "But
it wouldn't make an ounce of difference to me how she looked; I'd love
her just the same. I reckon she'll never seem to me anyhow like she
does to other people. Still I ain't so blind that I don't know she's
pretty. Her hair is wonderful, an' she's got them big brown eyes an'
pink cheeks. I'm proud as Tophet of her. If it warn't fur Abbie I
figger the three captains an' I would have the child clean spoilt. But
Abbie's always kept a firm hand on us an' prevented us from puttin'
nonsensical notions into Delight's head. Much of the way she's turned
out is due to Abbie's common sense. Well, the girl's a mighty nice
one," concluded Zenas Henry. "There's none to match her."
"You're right there!" Celestina assented cordially. "She's one in a
hundred, in a thousand. She has the sweetest way in the world with
her, too. A body couldn't see her an' not love her. I guess there's
many a young feller along the Cape thinks so too, or I'm much
mistaken," added she slyly. "She must have a score of beaux."
"Beaux!" snapped Zenas Henry, wheeling abruptly about. "Indeed she
hasn't. Why, she's nothin' but a child yet."
"She's most twenty. You said so yourself just now."
"Pooh! Twenty! What's twenty?" Zenas Henry cried derisively. "Why,
I'm three times that already an' more too, an' I ain't old. So are
you, Tiny. Twenty? Nonsense!"
"But Delight is twenty, Zenas Henry," persisted Celestina.
"What of it?"
"Well, you mustn't forget it, that's all," continued the woman softly.
"Many a girl her age is married an'----"
"Married!" burst out the man with indignation. "What under heaven are
you talkin' about, Celestina? Delight marry? Not she! She's too
young. Besides, she's well enough content with Abbie an' the three
captains an' me. Marry? Delight marry! Ridiculous!"
"But you don't mean to say you expect a creature as pretty as she is
not to marry," said Celestina aghast.
"Oh, why, yes," ruminated Zenas Henry. "Of course she's goin' to get
married sometime by an' by--mebbe in ten years or so. But not now."
"Ten years or so! My goodness! Why, she'll be thirty or thirty-five,
an' an old maid by that time."
"No, she won't. I was forty-five before I married, an' it didn't do me
no hurt or spoil my chances."
"You might have been livin' with Abbie all them years, though."
"I know it."
He paused thoughtfully.
"Yes," he reflected aloud, "I've often thought what a pity it was Abbie
an' I didn't have our first youth together. It took me half a lifetime
to find out how much I needed her."
"You wouldn't want Delight should do that," ventured Celestina.
"Delight? We ain't discussin' Delight," retorted Zenas Henry, promptly
on the defensive. "Delight's another matter altogether. She's nothin'
but a baby. There's no talk of her marryin' for a long spell yet."
Peevishly he kicked the turf with the toe of his boot.
Although he said no more, it was quite evident that he was much
irritated.
"Well," he presently observed in a calmer tone, "I reckon I'll go round
an' waylay Willie."
Celestina, leaning against the door frame, watched the gaunt,
loose-jointed figure stride out into the sunshine and disappear behind
the corner of the house.
What a day it was! From beneath the lattice that arched the entrance
to the cottage and supported a rambler rose bursting into bloom she
could see the bay, blue as a sapphire and scintillating with ripples of
gold. A weather-stained scow was making its way out of the channel,
and above it circled a screaming cloud of tern that had been routed
from their nesting place on the margin of white sand that bordered the
path to the open sea. Mingling with their cries and the rhythmic
pulsing of the surf, the clear voices of the men aboard the tug reached
her ear. It was flood tide, and the water that surged over the bar
stained its reach of pearl to jade green and feathered its edges with
snowy foam.
It was no weather to be cooped up indoors doing housework.
Idly Celestina loitered, drinking in the beauty of the scene. The
languor of summer breathed in the gentle, pine-scented air and rose
from the warm earth of the garden. Voluptuously she stretched her arms
and yawned; then straightening to her customary erectness she went into
the house, being probably the only woman in Wilton who that morning had
abandoned her domestic duties long enough to take into her soul the
benediction of the world about her.
It was such detours from the path of duty that had helped to win for
Celestina her pseudonym of "easy goin'." Perhaps this very vagrant
quality in her nature was what had aided her in so thoroughly
sympathizing with Willie in his sporadic outbursts of industry. For
Willie was not a methodical worker any more than was Celestina. There
were intervals, it is true, when he toiled steadily, feverishly, all
day long and far into the night, forgetting either to eat or sleep;
then would follow days together when he simply pottered about, or did
even worse and remained idle in the sunny shelter of the grape arbor.
Here on a rude bench constructed from a discarded four-poster he would
often sit for hours, smoking his corncob pipe and softly humming to
himself; but when genius went awry and his courage was at a low ebb,
strings, wires, and pulleys having failed to work, he would neither
smoke nor sing, but with eyes on the distance would sit immovable as if
carved from stone.
To-day, however, was not one of his "settin' days." He had been up
since dawn, had eaten no breakfast, and had even been too deeply
preoccupied to fill and light the blackened pipe that dangled limply
from his lips. Yet despite all his coaxings and cajolings, the iron
pump opposite the shed door still refused to do anything but emit from
its throat a few dry, profitless gurgles that seemed forced upward from
the very caverns of the earth. Both Willie and Jan Eldredge looked
tired and disheartened, and when Zenas Henry approached stood at bay,
surrounded by a litter of wrenches, hammers, and scattered fragments of
metal.
"What's the matter with your pump?" called Zenas Henry as he strolled
toward them.
Willie turned on the intruder, a smile half humorous, half
contemptuous, flitting across his face.
"If I could answer that question, Zenas Henry, I wouldn't be standin'
here gapin' at the darn thing," was his laconic response. "It's just
took a spell, that's all there is to it. It was right enough last
night."
"There's no accountin' fur machinery," Zenas Henry remarked.
The observation struck a note of pessimism that rasped Willie's
patience.
"There's got to be some accountin' fur this claptraption," retorted he,
a suggestion of crispness in his tone. "I shan't stir foot from this
spot 'til I find out what's set it to actin' up this way."
Zenas Henry laughed at the declaration of war echoing in the words.
"I've given up flyin' all to flinders over everything that gets out of
gear," he drawled. "If I was to be goin' up higher'n a kite every
time, fur instance, that the seaweed ketches round the propeller of my
motor-boat, I'd be in mid-air most of the time."
Willie raised his head with the alertness of a hunter on the scent.
"Seaweed?" he repeated vaguely.
Zenas Henry nodded.
"Ain't there no scheme fur doin' away with a nuisance like that?"
"I ain't discovered any," came dryly from Zenas Henry. "We've all had
a whack at the thing--Captain Jonas, Captain Phineas, Captain Benjamin,
an' me--an' we're back where we were at the beginnin'. Nothin' we've
tried has worked."
"U--m!" ruminated Willie, stroking his chin.
"I've about come to the conclusion we ain't much good as mechanics,
anyhow," went on Zenas Henry with a short laugh. "In fact, Abbie's of
the mind that we get things out of order faster'n we put 'em in."
Janoah Eldridge rubbed his grimy hands and chuckled, but Willie deigned
no reply.
"This propeller now," he presently began as if there had been no
digression from the topic, "I s'pose the kelp gets tangled around the
blades."
"That's it," assented Zenas Henry.
"An' that holds up your engine."
"Uh-huh," Zenas Henry agreed with the same bored inflection.
"An' that leaves you rockin' like a baby in a cradle 'til you can get
the wheel free."
"Uh-huh."
There was a moment of silence.
"It can't be much of a stunt tossin' round in a choppy sea like as if
you was a chip on the waves," commented Jan Eldridge with a
commiserating grin.
"'Tain't."
"What do you do when you find yourself in a fix like that?" he inquired
with interest.
"Do?" reiterated Zenas Henry. "What a question! What would any fool
do? There ain't no choice left you but to hang head downwards over the
stern of the boat an' claw the eel-grass off the wheel with a gaff."
Janoah burst into a derisive shout.
"Oh, my eye!" he exclaimed. "So that's the way you do it, eh? Don't
talk to me of motor-boats! A good old-fashioned skiff with a
leg-o'-mutton sail in her is good enough fur me. How 'bout you,
Willie?"
No reply was forthcoming.
"I say, Willie," repeated Jan in a louder tone, "that these new fangled
motor-boats, with their noise an' their smell, ain't no match fur a
good clean dory."
Willie came out of his trance just in time to catch the final clause of
the sentence.
"Who ever saw a clean dory in Wilton?"
Jan faltered, abashed.
"Well, anyhow," he persisted, "in my opinion, clean or not, a straight
wholesome smell of cod ain't to be mentioned in the same breath with a
mix-up of stale fish an' gasoline."
Zenas Henry bridled.
"You don't buy a motor-boat to smell of," he said tartly. "You seem to
forget it's to sail in."
"But if the eel-grass holds you hard an' fast in one spot most of the
time I don't see's you do much sailin'," taunted Jan. "'Pears to me
you're just adrift an' goin' nowheres a good part of the time."
"No, I ain't" snapped Zenas Henry with rising ire. "It's only
sometimes the thing gets spleeny. Most always--"
"Then it warn't you I saw pitchin' in the channel fur a couple of hours
yesterday afternoon," commented the tormentor.
"No. That is--let me think a minute," meditated Zenas Henry. "Yes, I
guess it was me, after all," he admitted with reluctant honesty. "The
tide brought in quite a batch of weeds, an' they washed up round the
boat before I could get out of their way; quicker'n a wink we were
neatly snarled up in 'em. Captain Jonas an' Captain Phineas tried to
get clear, but somehow they ain't got much knack fur freein' the wheel.
So we did linger in the channel a spell."
"Linger!" put in Willie. "I shouldn't call bobbin' up an' down in one
spot fur two mortal hours lingerin'. I'd call it nearer bein'
hypnotized."
Zenas Henry was now plainly out of temper. He was well aware that
Wilton had scant sympathy with his motor-boat, the first innovation of
the sort that had been perpetrated in the town.
"Hadn't you better turn your attention from motor-boats to pumps?" he
asked testily.
"I reckon I had, Zenas Henry," Willie answered, unruffled by the
thrust. "As you say, if you chose to wind yourself up in the eel-grass
it's none of my affair."
Turning his back on his visitor, he bent once more over the pump and
adjusted a leather washer between its rusty joints.
"Now let's give her a try, Jan," he said, as he tightened the screws.
"If that don't fetch her I'm beat."
By this time Jan's faith had lessened, and although he obediently
raised the iron handle and began to ply it up and down, it was obvious
that he did not anticipate success. But contrary to his expectations
there was a sudden subterranean groan, followed by a rumble of
gradually rising pitch; then from out the stubbed green spout a stream
of water gushed forth and trickled into the tub beneath.
"Hurray!" shouted Jan. "There she blows, Willie! Ain't you the
dabster, though!"
The inventor did not immediately acknowledge the plaudits heaped upon
him, but it was evident he was gratified by his success for, as he
wiped the beads of perspiration from his forehead he sighed deeply.
"If I hadn't been such a blame fool I'd 'a' known what the matter was
in the first place," he remarked. "Well, if we knew as much when we're
born as we do when we get ready to die, what would be the use of livin'
seventy odd years?"
In spite of his irritation Zenas Henry smiled.
"I don't s'pose you're feelin' like tacklin' another pump to-day," he
ventured with hesitation. "Ours up at the white cottage has gone on a
strike, too."
Instantly Willie was interested.
"What's got yours?" he asked.
"Blest if I know. We've took it all to pieces an' ain't found nothin'
out with it, an' now to save our souls we can't put it together again,"
Zenas Henry explained. "I drove round, thinkin' that mebbe you'd go
back with me an' have a look at it."
"Course I will, Zenas Henry," Willie said without hesitation. "I'd
admire to. A pump that won't work is like a fishline without a
hook--good for nothin'. Have you got room in your team for Jan, too?"
"Sure."
"Then let's start along," said the inventor, stooping to gather up his
tools.
But he had reckoned without his host, for as he swept them into a
jagged piece of sailcloth and prepared to tie up the bundle, Celestina
called to him from the window.
"Where you goin', Willie?" she demanded.
"Up to Zenas Henry's to mend the pump."
"But you can't go now," objected she. "It's ten o'clock, an' you ain't
had a mouthful of breakfast this mornin'."
The little man regarded her blankly.
"Ain't I et nothin'?" he inquired with surprise.
"No. Don't you remember you got up early to go fishin', an' then you
found the pump wasn't workin', an' you've been wrestlin' with it ever
since."
"So I have!"
A sunny smile of recollection overspread the old man's face.
"Ain't you hungry?"
"I dunno," considered he without interest. "Mebbe I am. Yes, now you
speak of it, I will own to feelin' a mite holler. Can't you hand me a
snack to eat as I go along?"
"You'd much better come in an' have your breakfast properly."
"Oh, I don't want nothin' much," the altruist protested. "Just fetch
me out a slice of bread or a doughnut. We've got to get at that pump
of Zenas Henry's. I'm itchin' to know what's the matter with it."
Celestina looked disappointed.
"I've been savin' your coffee fur you since seven o'clock," murmured
she reproachfully.
"That was very kind of you, Tiny," Willie responded with an
ingratiating glance into her eyes. "You just keep it hot a spell
longer, an' I'll be back. Likely I won't be long."
"You've been workin' five hours on your own pump!"
"Five hours? Pshaw! You don't say so," mused the tranquil voice.
"Think of that! An' it didn't seem no time. Well, it's a-pumpin' now,
Celestina."
The mild face beamed with satisfaction, and Celestina had not the heart
to cloud its brightness by annoying him further.
"That's capital!" she declared. "Here's your bread an' butter, Willie.
An' here's some apple turnovers fur you, an' Jan, an' Zenas Henry.
They'll be nice fur you goin' along in the wagon." Then turning to Jan
she whispered in a pleading undertone:
"Do watch, Jan, that Willie don't lay that bread down somewheres an'
forget it. Mebbe if he sees the rest of you eatin' he'll remember to
eat himself. If he don't, though, remind him, for he's just as liable
to bring it back home again in his hand. Keep your eye on him!"
Jan nodded understandingly, and climbing into the dusty wagon, the
three men rattled off over the sandy road. Willie dropped his tools
into the bottom of the carriage but the slice of bread remained
untouched in his fingers. Now that triumph had brought a respite in
his labors he seemed silent and thoughtful. It was not until the
Admiral turned in at the Brewster gate that he roused himself
sufficiently to observe with irrelevance:
"Speakin' about that propeller of yours, Zenas Henry--it must be no end
of a temper-rasper."
Zenas Henry slapped the reins over the horse's flank and waited
breathlessly, hoping some further comment would come from the little
inventor, but as Willie remained silent, he at length could restrain
his impatience no longer and ventured with diffidence:
"S'pose you ain't got any notion what we could do about it, have you,
Willie?"
The old man shrugged his shoulders.
"No, not the ghost," was his terse reply.
That night, however, Celestina was awakened from her dreams by the ring
of a hammer. She rose, and lighting her candle, tip-toed into the
hall. It was one o'clock, and she could see that Willie's bedroom door
was ajar and the bed untouched.
With a little sigh she blew out the flame in her hand and crept back
beneath the shelter of her calico comforter.
She knew the symptoms only too well.
Willie was once again "kitched by an idee!"
CHAPTER III
A NEW ARRIVAL
The new idea, whatever it was, was evidently not one to be hastily
perfected, for the next morning when Celestina went down stairs, she
found the jaded inventor seated moodily in a rocking-chair before the
kitchen stove, his head in his hands.
"Law, Willie, are you up already?" she asked, as if unconscious of his
nocturnal activities.
The reply was a wan smile.
"An' you've got the fire built, too," went on Celestina cheerily. "How
nice!"
"Eh?" repeated he, giving her a vague stare. "The fire?"
"Yes. I was sayin' how good it was of you to start it up." The man
gazed at her blankly.
"I ain't touched the fire," he answered. "I might have, though, as
well as not, Tiny, if I'd thought of it."
"That's all right," Celestina declared, making haste to repair her
blunder. "I've plenty of time to lay it myself. 'Twas only that when
I saw you settin' up before it I thought mebbe you'd built it 'cause
you were cold."
"I was cold," acquiesced Willie, his eyes misty with thought. "But I
warn't noticin' there was no heat in the stove when I drew up here."
Celestina bit her lip. How characteristic the confession was!
"Well, there'll be a fire now very soon," said she, bustling out and
returning with paper and kindlings. "The kitchen will be warm as toast
in no time. An' I'll make you some hot coffee straight away. That
will heat you up. This northerly wind blows the cobwebs out of the
sky, but it does make it chilly."
Although Willie's eyes automatically followed her brisk motions and
watched while she deftly started the blaze, it was easy to see that he
was too deep in his own meditations to sense what she was doing.
Perhaps had his mood not been such an abstract one he would have
realized that he was directly in the main thoroughfare and obstructing
the path between the pantry and the oven. As it was he failed to grasp
the circumstance, and not wishing to disturb him, Celestina patiently
circled before, behind and around him in her successive pilgrimages to
the stove. Such situations were exigencies to which she was quite
accustomed, her easy-going disposition quickly adapting itself to
emergencies of the sort. So skilful was she in effacing her presence
that Willie had no knowledge he was an obstacle until suddenly the iron
door swung back of its own volition and in passing brushed his knuckles
with its hot metal edge.
"Ouch!" cried he, starting up from his chair.
"What's the matter?" called Celestina from the pantry.
"Nothin'. The oven door sprung open, that's all."
"It didn't burn you?"
"N--o, but it made me jump," laughed Willie. "Why didn't you tell me,
Tiny, that I was in your way?"
"You warn't in my way."
"But I must 'a' been," the man persisted. "You should 'a' shoved me
aside in the beginnin'."
Stretching his arms upward with a comfortable yawn, he rose and
sauntered toward the door.
"Now you're not to pull out of here, Willie Spence," Celestina objected
in a peremptory tone, "until you've had your breakfast. You had none
yesterday, remember, thanks to that pump; an' you had no dinner either,
thanks to Zenas Henry's pump. You're goin' to start this day right.
You're to have three square meals if I have to tag you all over Wilton
with 'em. I don't know what it is you've got on your mind this time,
but the world's worried along without it up to now, an' I guess it can
manage a little longer."
Willie regarded his mentor good-humoredly.
"I figger it can, Celestina," he returned. "In fact, I reckon it will
have to content itself fur quite a spell without the notion I've run
a-foul of now."
Celestina offered no interrogation; instead she said, "Well, don't let
it harrow you up; that's all I ask. If it's goin' to be a
long-drawn-out piece of tinkerin', why there's all the more reason you
should eat your three good meals like other Christians. Next you know
you'll be gettin' run down, an' I'll be havin' to brew some dandelion
bitters for you." She came to an abrupt stop half-way between the oven
and the kitchen table, a bowl and spoon poised in her hand. "I ain't
sure but it's time to brew you somethin' anyway," she announced. "You
ain't had a tonic fur quite a spell an' mebbe 'twould do you good."
A helpless protest trembled on Willie's lips.
"I--I--don't think I need any bitters, Celestina," he at last observed
mildly.
"You don't know whether you do or not," Celestina replied with as near
an approach to sharpness as she was capable of. "However, there's no
call to discuss that now. The chief thing this minute is for you to
sit up to the table an' eat your victuals."
Docilely the man obeyed. He was hungry it proved, very hungry indeed.
With satisfaction Celestina watched every spoonful of food he put to
his lips, inwardly gloating as one muffin after another disappeared;
and when at last he could eat no more and took his blackened cob pipe
from his pocket, she drew a sigh of satisfaction.
"There now, if you want to go back to your inventin' you can," she
remarked, as she began to clear away the dishes. "You've took aboard
enough rations to do you quite a while."
Notwithstanding the permission Willie did not immediately avail himself
of it but instead lingered uneasily as if something troubled his
conscience.
"Say, Tiny," he blurted out at length, "if you happen around by the
front door and miss the screen don't be scared an' think it's stole. I
had to use it fur somethin' last night."
"The screen door?" gasped Celestina.
"Yes."
"But--but--Willie! The door was new this Spring; there wasn't a brack
in it."
"I know it," was the calm answer. "That's why I took it."
"But you could have got nettin' over at the store to-day."
"I couldn't wait."
Celestina did not reply at once; but when she did she had herself well
in hand, and every trace of irritation had vanished from her tone.
"Well, we don't often open that door, anyway," she reflected aloud, "so
I guess no harm's done. It's a full year since anybody's come to the
front door, an' like as not 'twill be another before--"
A jangling sound cut short the sentence.
"What's that?" exclaimed she aghast.
"It's a bell."
"I never heard a bell like that in this house."
"It's a bell I rigged up one day when you were gone to the Junction,"
exclaimed Willie hurriedly. "I thought I told you about it."
"You didn't."
"Well, no matter now," he went on soothingly.
"I meant to."
"Where is it?" demanded Celestina.
"It's in the hall. It's a new front-door bell, that's what it is,"
proclaimed the inventor, his voice lost in a second deafening peal.
"My soul! It's enough to wake the dead!" gasped Celestina, with hands
on her ears. "I should think it could be heard from here to Nantucket.
What set you gettin' a bell that size, Willie? 'Twould scare any
caller who dared to come this way out of a year's growth. I'll have to
go an' see who's there, if he ain't been struck dumb on the doorsill.
Who ever can it be--comin' to the front door?"
With perturbed expectancy she hurried through the passageway, Willie
tagging at her heels.
The infrequently patronized portal of the Spence mansion, it proved,
was so securely barred and bolted that to unfasten it necessitated no
little time and patience; even after locks and fastenings had been
withdrawn and the door was at liberty to move, not knowing what to do
with its unaccustomed freedom it refused to stir, stubbornly resisting
every attempt to wrench its hinges asunder. It was not until the man
and woman inside had combined their efforts and struggled with it for
quite an interval that it contrived to creak apart far enough to reveal
through a four-inch crack the figure of a young man who was standing
patiently outside.
One could not have asked for a franker, merrier face than that which
peered at Celestina through the narrow chink of sunshine. To judge at
random the visitor had come into his manhood recently, for the brown
eyes were alight with youthful humor and the shoulders unbowed by the
burdens of the world. He had a mass of wavy, dark hair; a thoughtful
brow; ruddy color; a pleasant mouth and fine teeth; and a tall, erect
figure which he bore with easy grace.
"Is Miss Morton at home?" he asked, smiling at Celestina through the
shaft of golden light.
Celestina hesitated. So seldom was she addressed by this formal
pseudonym that for the instant she was compelled to stop and consider
whether the individual designated was on the premises or not.
"Y--e--s," she at last admitted feebly.
"I wonder if I might speak with her," the stranger asked.
"Why don't you tell him you're Miss Morton," coached Willie, in a loud
whisper.
But the man on the steps had heard.
"You're not Miss Morton, are you?" he essayed, "Miss Celestina Morton?"
"I expect I am," owned Celestina nervously.
"I'm your brother Elnathan's boy, Bob."
Celestina crumpled weakly against the door frame.
"Nate's boy!" she repeated. "Bless my soul! Bless my soul an' body!"
The man outside laughed a delighted laugh so infectious that before
Celestina or Willie were conscious of it they had joined in its mellow
ripple. After that everything was easy.
"We can't open the door to let you in," explained Willie, peering out
through the rift, "'cause this blasted door ain't moved fur so long
that its hinges have growed together; but if you'll come round to the
back of the house you'll find a warmer welcome."
The guest nodded and disappeared.
"Land alive, Willie!" ejaculated Celestina while they struggled to
replace the dislocated bars and bolts. "To think of Nate's boy
appearin' here! I can't get over it! Nate's boy! Nate was my
favorite brother, you know--the littlest one, that I brought up from
babyhood. This lad is so completely the livin' image of him that when
I clapped eyes on him it took the gimp clear out of me. It was like
havin' Nate himself come back again."
With fluttering eagerness she sped through the hall.
Robert Morton was standing in the kitchen when she arrived, his head
towering into the tangle of strings that crossed and recrossed the
small interior. Whatever his impression of the extraordinary spectacle
he evinced no curiosity but remained as imperturbable amid the network
that ensnared him as if such astounding phenomena were everyday
happenings. Nevertheless, a close observer might have detected in his
hazel eyes a dancing gleam that defied control. Apparently it did not
occur either to Willie or to Celestina to explain the mystery which had
long since become to them so familiar a sight; therefore amid the
barrage of red, green, purple, pink, yellow and white strings they
greeted their guest, throwing into their welcome all the homely
cordiality they could command.
From the first moment of their meeting it was noticeable that Willie
was strongly attracted by Robert Morton's sensitive and intelligent
face; and had he not been, for Celestina's sake he would have made an
effort to like the newcomer. Fortunately, however, effort was
unnecessary, for Bob won his way quite as uncontestedly with the little
inventor as with Celestina. There was no question that his aunt was
delighted with him. One could read it in her affectionate touch on his
arm; in her soft, nervous laughter; in the tremulous inflection of her
many questions.
"Your father couldn't have done a kinder thing than to have sent you to
Wilton, Robert," she declared at last when quite out of breath with her
rejoicings. "My, if you're not the mortal image of him as he used to
be at your age! I can scarcely believe it isn't Nate. His forehead
was high like yours, an' the hair waved back from it the same way; he
had your eyes too--full of fun, an' yet earnest an' thoughtful. I
ain't sure but you're a mite taller than he was, though."
"I top Dad by six inches, Aunt Tiny," smiled the young man.
"I guessed likely you did," murmured Celestina, with her eyes still on
his face. "Now you must sit right down an' tell me all about yourself
an' your folks. I want to know everything--where you come from; when
you got here; how long you can stay, an' all."
"The last question is the only really important one," interrupted
Willie, approaching the guest and laying a friendly hand on his
shoulder. "The doin's of your family will keep; an' where you come
from ain't no great matter neither. What counts is how long you can
spare to visitin' Wilton an' your aunt. We ain't much on talk here on
the Cape, but I just want you should know that there's an empty room
upstairs with a good bed in it, that's yours long's you can make out to
use it. Your aunt is a prime cook, too, an' though there's no danger
of your mixin' up this place with Broadway or Palm Beach, I believe you
might manage to keep contented here."
"I'm sure I could," Bob Morton answered, "and you're certainly kind to
give me such a cordial invitation. I wasn't expecting to remain for
any length of time, however. I came down from Boston, where I happened
to be staying yesterday afternoon, and had planned to go back tonight.
I've been doing some post-graduate work in naval engineering at Tech
and have just finished my course there. So, you see, I'm really on my
way home to Indiana. But Dad wrote that before I returned he wanted me
to take a run down here and see Aunt Tiny and the old town where he was
born, so here I am."
Willie scanned the stranger's face meditatively.
"Then you're clear of work, an' startin' off on your summer vacation."
"That's about it," confessed Bob.
"Anything to take you West right away?"
"N--o--nothing, except that the family have not seen me for some time.
I've accepted a business position with a New York firm, but I don't
start in there until October."
"You're your own master for four months, eh?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, I ain't a-goin' to urge you to put in your time here; but I will
say again, in case you've forgotten it, that so long as you're content
to remain with us we'd admire to have you. 'Twould give your aunt no
end of pleasure, I'll be bound, an' I'd enjoy it as well as she would."
"You're certainly not considerin' goin' back to Boston today!" chimed
in Celestina.
"I was," laughed Bob.
"You may as well put that notion right out of your head," said Willie,
"for we shan't let you carry out no such crazy scheme."
"But to come launching down on you this way--" began the younger man.
"You ain't come launchin' down," objected his aunt with spirit. "We
ain't got nothin' to do but inventin', an' I reckon that can wait."
Glancing playfully at Willie she saw a sudden light of eagerness flash
into his countenance. But Bob, not understanding the allusion, looked
from one of them to the other in puzzled silence.
"All right, Aunt Tiny," he at last announced, "if you an' Mr. Spence
really want me to, I should be delighted to stay with you a few days.
The fact is," he added with boyish frankness, "my suit case is down
behind the rose bushes this minute. Having sent most of my luggage
home, and not knowing what I should do, I brought it along with me."
"You go straight out, young man, an' fetch it in," commanded Willie,
giving him a jocose slap on the back.
Nevertheless, in spite of the mandate, Robert Morton lingered.
"Do you know, Aunt Tiny, I'm almost ashamed to accept your
hospitality," he observed with winning sincerity. "We've all been so
rotten to you--never coming to see you or anything. Dad's terribly cut
up that he hasn't made a single trip East since leaving Wilton."
The honest confession instantly quenched the last smouldering embers of
Celestina's resentment toward her kin.
"Don't think no more of it!" she returned hurriedly. "Your father's
been busy likely, an' so have you; an' anyhow, men ain't much on
follerin' up their relations, or writin' to 'em. So don't say another
word about it. I'm sure I've hardly given it a thought."
That the final assertion was false Robert Morton read in the woman's
brave attempt to control the pitiful little quiver of her lips;
nevertheless he blessed her for her deception.
"You're a dear, Aunt Tiny," he exclaimed heartily, stooping to kiss her
cheek. "Had I dreamed half how nice you were, wild horses couldn't
have kept me away from Wilton."
Celestina blushed with pleasure.
Very pretty she looked standing there in the window, her shoulders
encircled by the arm of the big fellow who, towering above her, looked
down into her eyes so affectionately. Willie couldn't but think as he
saw her what a mother she would have made for some boy. Possibly
something of the same regret crossed Celestina's own mind, for a shadow
momentarily clouded her brow, and to banish it she repeated with
resolute gaiety:
"Do go straight out an' bring in that suit case, Bob, or some straggler
may steal it. An' put out of your mind any notion of goin' to Boston
for the present. I'll show you which room you're to have so'st you can
unpack your things, an' while you're washin' up I'll get you some
breakfast. You ain't had none, have you?"
"No; but really, Aunt Tiny, I'm not--"
"Yes, you are. Don't think it's any trouble for it ain't--not a mite."
Willie beamed with good will.
"You've landed just in time to set down with us," he remarked. "We
ain't had our breakfast, either."
Celestina wheeled about with astonishment. Willie's hospitality must
have burst all bounds if it had lured him, who never deviated from the
truth, into uttering a falsehood monstrous as this. One glance,
however, at his placid face, his unflinching eye, convinced her that
swept away by the interest of the moment the little old man had lost
all memory of whether he had breakfasted or not.
She did not enlighten him.
"Mebbe it ain't honest to let him go on thinkin' he's had nothin' to
eat," she whispered to herself, "but if all them muffins, an' oatmeal,
an' coffee don't do nothin' toward remindin' him he's et once, I ain't
goin' to do it. This second meal will make up fur the breakfast he
missed yesterday. I ain't deceivin' him; I'm simply squarin' things
up."
CHAPTER IV
THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER ENTERS
Before the morning had passed Bob Morton was as much at home in the
little cottage that faced the sea as if he had lived there all his
days. His property was spread out in the old mahogany bureau upstairs;
his hat dangled from a peg in the hall; and he had exchanged his "city
clothes" for the less conventional outing shirt and suit of blue serge,
both of which transformed him into a figure amazingly slender and
boyish. For two hours he and Celestina had rehearsed the family
history from beginning to end; and now he had left her to get dinner,
and he and Willie had betaken themselves to the workshop where they
were deep in confidential conversation.
"You see," the inventor was explaining to his guest, "it's like this:
it ain't so much that I want to bother with these notions as that I
have to. They get me by the throat, an' there's no shakin' 'em off.
Only yesterday, fur example, I got kitched with an idee about a boat--"
he broke off, regarding his listener with sudden suspicion.
Bob waited.
Evidently Willie's scrutiny of the frank countenance opposite satisfied
him, for dropping his voice he continued in an impressive whisper:
"About a motor-boat, this idee was."
Glancing around as if to assure himself that no one was within hearing,
he hitched the barrel on which he was seated nearer his visitor.
"There's a sight of plague with motor-boats among these shoals," he
went on eagerly. "What with the eel-grass that grows along the inlets
an' the kelp that's washed in by the tide after a storm, the propeller
of a motor-boat is snarled up a good bit of the time. Now my scheme,"
he announced, his last trace of reserve vanishing, "is to box that
propeller somehow--if so be as it can be done--an'--," the voice
trailed off into meditation.
Robert Morton, too, was silent.
"You would have to see that the wheel was kept free," he mused aloud
after an interval.
"I know it."
"And not check the speed of the boat."
"Right you are, mate!" exclaimed Willie with delight.
"And not hamper the swing of the rudder."
"You have it! You have it!" Willie shouted, rubbing his hands together
and smiling broadly. "It's all them things I'm up against."
"I believe the trick might be turned, though," replied young Morton,
rising from the nail keg on which he was sitting and striding about the
narrow room. "It's a pretty problem and one it would be rather good
fun to work out."
"I'd need to rig up a model to experiment with, I s'pose," reflected
Willie.
"Oh, we could fix that easily enough," Bob cried with rising enthusiasm.
"_We_?"
"Sure! I'll help you."
The announcement did not altogether reassure the inventor, and Bob
laughed at the dubious expression of his face.
"Of course I'm only a dry-land sailor," he went on to explain
good-humoredly, "and I do not begin to have had the experience with
boats that you have. I did, however, study about them some at Tech and
perhaps--"
"Study about 'em!" repeated Willie, unable wholly to conceal his
scepticism and scorn.
Again the younger man laughed.
"I realize that is not like getting knowledge first-hand," he continued
with modesty, "but it seemed the best I could do. As to this plan of
yours, two heads are sometimes better than one, and between us I
believe we can evolve an answer to the puzzle."
"That'll be prime!" Willie ejaculated, now quite comfortable in his
mind. "An' when we get the answer to the riddle, Jan Eldridge will
help us. You ain't met Jan yet, have you? He's the salt of the earth,
Janoah Eldridge is. Him an' me are the greatest chums you ever saw.
He mebbe has his peculiarities, like the rest of us. Who ain't?
You'll likely find him kinder sharp-tongued at first, but he don't mean
nothin' by it; and' he's quick, too--goes up like a rocket at a
minute's notice. Folks down in town insist in addition that he's
jealous as a girl, but I've yet to see signs of it. Fur all his little
crochets you'll like Jan Eldridge. You can't help it. We're none of
us angels--when it comes to that. Hush!" broke off Willie warningly.
"I believe that's him now. Didn't you see a head go past the winder?"
"I thought I did."
"Then that's Jan. Nobody else would be comin' across the dingle. Now
not a word of this motor-boat business to him," cautioned Willie,
dropping his voice. "I never tell Jan 'bout my idees 'till I get 'em
well worked out, for he's no great shakes at inventin'."
There was an instant of guilty silence, and then the two conspirators
beheld a freckled face, crowned by a mass of rampant sandy hair,
protrude itself through the doorway.
"Hi, Willie!" called the newcomer, unmindful of the presence of a
stranger. "Well, how do you find yourself to-day? Ready to tackle
another pump?"
With simulated indignation Willie bristled.
"Pump!" he repeated. "Don't you dare so much as to mention pumps in my
hearin' fur six months, Janoah Eldridge. I've had my fill of pumps fur
one spell."
The freckled face in the door expanded its smile into a grin that
displayed the few scattered teeth adorning its owner's jaws.
"No," went on the inventor, "I ain't attackin' no pumps to-day. I'm
sorter takin' a vacation. You see we've got company. Tiny's nephew,
Bob Morton from Indiana, has come to stay with us. This is him on the
nail keg."
Shuffling further into the room Jan peered inquisitively at the guest.
"So you're Tiny's nephew, eh?" he commented, examining the visitor's
countenance with curiosity. "Well, well! To think of some of Tiny's
relations turnin' up at last! Not that it ain't high time, I'll say
that. Now which of the Mortons do you belong to, young man?"
"Elnathan."
"I might 'a' known first glance, for you're like him as his tintype."
Bob laughed.
"Aunt Tiny thinks I am, too."
"She'd oughter know," was the dry comment. "She had the plague of
bringin' him up from the time he could toddle. I'm glad some of you
have finally got round to comin' to see her. You've been long enough
doin' it. I ain't so sure, though, but if I was in her place I'd--"
"There, there, Jan," interrupted Willie nervously, "why go diggin' up
the past? The lad is here now an'--"
"But they have been the devil of a while takin' notice of Tiny," Janoah
persisted, not to be coaxed away from his subject. "Why, 'twas only
the other day when we was workin' out here that you yourself said the
way her folks had neglected her was outrageous."
"And it was, too, Mr. Eldridge," confessed Bob, flushing. "Our whole
family have treated Aunt Tiny shamefully. There is no excuse for it."
Before the honest admission of blame, Jan's mounting wrath grudgingly
calmed itself.
"Well," he grumbled in a more conciliatory tone, "as Willie says, mebbe
it's just as well not to go bringin' to life what's buried already.
Like as not there may have been some good reason for your folks never
comin' back to Wilton after once they'd left the place. Indiana's the
devil of a distance away--'most at the other end of the world, ain't
it? You might as well live in China as Indiana. I never could see
anyway what took people out of Wilton. There ain't a better spot on
earth to live than right here. Yet for all that, every one of the
Mortons 'cept Tiny (who showed her good sense, in my opinion) went
flockin' out of this town quick as they was growed, like as if they was
a lot of swarmin' bees. I doubt myself, too, if they're a whit better
off for it. Your father now--what does he make out to do in Indiana?"
"Father is in the grain business," replied Bob with a smile.
"The grain business, is he? An' likely he sets in an office all day
long, in out of the fresh air," continued Jan with contempt. "Plumb
foolish I call it, when he could be livin' in Wilton an' fishin', an'
clammin', an' enjoying himself. That's the way with so many folks.
They go kitin' off to the city to make money enough to buy one of them
automobiles. You won't ketch me with an automobile--no, nor a
motor-boat, neither; nor any other of them durn things that's goin' to
set me livin' like as if I was shot out of the cannon's mouth. What's
the good of bein' whizzed through life as if the old Nick himself was
at your heels--workin' faster, eatin' faster, dyin' faster? I see
nothin' to it--nothin' at all."
At the risk of rousing the philosopher's resentment, Bob burst into a
peal of laughter.
"But ain't it so now, I ask you? Ain't it just as I say?" insisted
Janoah Eldridge. "Argue as you will, what's the gain in it?"
To the speaker's apparent disappointment, the citizen from Indiana did
not accept the challenge for argument but instead observed pleasantly:
"I'll wager you will outlive all us city people, Mr. Eldridge."
"Course I will," was the old man's confident retort. "I'll be
a-sailin' in my dory when the whole lot of you motor-boat folks are
under the sod. You see if I ain't! An' speakin' of motor-boats,
Willie--I s'pose you ain't done nothin toward tacklin' Zenas Henry's
tribulations with that propeller, have you?"
The question was unexpected, and Willie colored uncomfortably. He was
not good at dissembling.
"'Twould mean quite a bit of thinkin' to get Zenas Henry out of his
troubles," returned he evasively. "'Tain't so simple as it looks."
Moving abruptly to the work-bench he began to overturn at random the
tools lying upon it.
Something in this unusual proceeding arrested Jan's attention, causing
him to glance with suspicion from Robert Morton to the inventor, and
from the inventor back to Robert Morton again. The elder man was
whistling "Tenting To-night," an air that had never been a favorite of
his; and the younger, with self-conscious zeal, was shredding into bits
a long curl of shavings.
Jan eyed both of them with distrust
"I figger we're goin' to have a spell of fine weather now," remarked
Willie with jaunty artificiality.
The offhand assertion was too casual to be real. Cloud and fog were
not dealt with in this cursory fashion in Wilton. It clinched Jan's
doubts into certainty. Something was being kept from him, something of
which this stranger, who had only been in the town a few hours, was
cognizant. For the first time in fifty years another had usurped his
place as Willie's confidant. It was monstrous! A tremor of jealous
rage thrilled through his frame, and he stiffened visibly.
"I reckon I'll be joggin' along home," said he, moving with dignity
toward the door.
"But you've only just come, Jan," protested Willie.
"I didn't come fur nothin' but to leave this hammer," Jan answered,
placing the implement on the long bench before which his friend was
standing.
"Maybe there was something you wanted to see Mr. Spence about,"
ventured Bob. "If there was I will--"
"No, there warn't," snapped Janoah. "Mister Spence ain't got nothin'
confidential to say to me--whatever he may have to say to other folks,"
and with this parting thrust he shot out of the door.
Bob gave a low whistle.
"What's the matter with the man?" he asked in amazement.
Willie flushed apologetically.
"Nothin'--nothin' in the world!" he answered. "Jan gets like that
sometimes. Don't you remember I told you he was kinder quick. It's
just possible it may have bothered him to see me talkin' to you. Don't
mind him."
"Do you think he suspected anything?"
"Mercy, no! Not he!" responded Willie comfortably. "He's liable to
fly off the handle like that a score of times a day. Don't you worry
'bout him. He'll be back before the mornin's over."
Nevertheless, sanguine as this prediction was, the hours wore on, and
Janoah Eldridge failed to make his appearance. In the meantime Bob and
Willie became so deeply engrossed in their new undertaking that they
were oblivious to his absence. They worked feverishly until noon,
devoured a hurried meal, and returned to the shop again, there to
resume their labors. By supper time they had made quite an encouraging
start on the model they required, their combined efforts having
accomplished in a single day what it would have taken Willie many an
hour to perfect.
The inventor was jubilant.
"Little I dreamed when you came to the front door, Bob, what I was
nettin'!" he exclaimed, clapping his hand vigorously on the young man's
shoulder. "You're a regular boat-builder, you are. The moon might 'a'
pogeed an' perigeed before I'd 'a' got as fur along as we have to-day.
How you've learned all you have about boats without ever goin' near the
water beats me. Now you ain't a-goin' to think of quittin' Wilton an'
leavin' me high an' dry with this propeller idee, are you? 'Twould be
a downright shabby trick."
Bob smiled into the old man's anxious face.
"I can't promise to see you to the finish for I must be back home
before many days, or I'll have my whole family down on me. Besides, I
have some business in New York to attend to," he said kindly. "But I
will arrange to stick around until the job is so well under way that
you won't need me. I am quite as interested in making the scheme a
success as you are. All is you mustn't let me wear out my welcome and
be a burden to Aunt Tiny."
"Law, Tiny'll admire to have you stay long as you can, if only because
you drag me into the house at meal time," chuckled Willie.
"At least I can do that," Bob returned.
"You can do that an' a durn sight more, youngster," the inventor
declared with earnestness. "I ain't had the pleasure I've had to-day
in all my life put together. To work with somebody as has learned the
right way to go ahead--it's wonderful. When me an' Jan tackle a job,
we generally begin at the wrong end of it an' blunder along, wastin'
time an' string without limit. If we hit it right it's more luck than
anything else."
Robert Morton, watching the mobile face, saw a pitiful sadness steal
into the blue eyes. A sudden shame surged over him.
"I ought to be able to do far more with my training than I have done,"
he answered humbly. "Dad has given me every chance."
"Think of it!" murmured Willie, scrutinizing him with hungering gaze.
"Think of havin' every chance to learn!"
For an interval he smoked in silence.
"Well," he asserted at length, "you've sure proved to-day that brains
with trainin' are better'n brains without. Now if Jan an' me--" he
broke off abruptly. "There! I wonder what in tunket's become of Jan,"
he speculated. "We've been so busy that he went clean out of my mind.
It's queer he didn't show up again. He ain't stayed away for a whole
day in all history. Mebbe he's took sick. I believe I'll trudge over
there an' find out what's got him. I mustn't go to neglectin' Jan,
inventin' or no inventin'."
He rose from his chair wearily.
"I reckon a note would do as well, though, as goin' over," he presently
remarked as an afterthought. "I could send one in the box an' ask him
to drop round an' set a spell before bedtime."
He caught up a piece of brown paper from the workbench, tore a ragged
corner from it, and hastily scrawled a message.
Bob watched the process with amusement.
"There!" announced the scribe when the epistle was finished. "I reckon
that'll fetch him. We'll put it in the box an' shoot it across to him."
Notwithstanding the dash implied in the term, it took no small length
of time for the diminutive receptacle to hitch its way through the
fields. The two men watched it jiggle along above the bushes of wild
roses, through verdant clumps of fragrant bayberry, and disappear into
the woods. Then they sat down to await Jan's appearance.
The twilight was rarely beautiful. In a sky of palest turquoise a
crescent moon hung low, its arc of silver poised above the tips of the
stunted pines, whose feathery outlines loomed black in the dusk. From
out the dimness the note of a vesper sparrow sounded and mingled its
sweetness with the faintly breathing ocean.
The men on the doorstep smoked silently, each absorbed in his own
reveries.
How peaceful it was there in the stillness, with the hush of evening
descending like a benediction on the darkening earth!
Bob sighed with contentment. His year of hard study was over, and now
that his well-earned rest had come he was surprised to discover how
tired he was. Already the peace of Wilton was stealing over him, its
dreamy atmosphere almost too beautiful to be real. From where he sat
he could see the trembling lights of the village jewelling the rim of
the bay like a circlet of stars. A man might do worse, he reflected,
than remain a few days in this sleepy little town. He liked Willie and
Celestina, too; indeed, he would have been without a heart not to have
appreciated their simple kindliness. Why should he hurry home? Would
not his father rejoice should he be content to stay and make his aunt a
short visit? There was no need to bind himself for any definite length
of time; he would merely drift and when he found himself becoming bored
flee. To be sure, about the last thing he had intended when setting
forth to the Cape was to linger there. He had come hither with
unwilling feet solely to please his parents, and having paid his
respects to his unknown relative he meant to depart West as speedily as
decency would permit, reasoning that it would be a mutual relief when
the visit was over.
But a single day in the cozy little house at the water's edge had
served to convince him how erroneous had been his premises. Instead of
being tiresome, his Aunt Celestina was proving a delightful
acquisition, toward whom he already found himself cherishing a warm
regard. And what a cook she was! After months of city food her bread,
pies, and cookies were ambrosial.
As for Willie--Bob had never before beheld so gentle, ingenuous and
lovable a personality. Undoubtedly the little inventor had genius.
What a pity he had been cheated of the opportunity for cultivating it!
There was something pathetic in the way he reached out for the
knowledge life had denied him; it reminded one of a patient child who
asks for water to slake his thirst.
If, for some inscrutable reason, fortune had granted him, Robert
Morton, the chance denied this groping soul, was it not almost an
obligation that, in so far as he was able, he should place at the
other's disposal the fruits of the education that had been his?
Presumably this motor-boat idea would not amount to much, for if such
an invention were plausible and of value, doubtless a score of nautical
authorities would have seized upon it long before now. But to work at
the plan would give the gentle dreamer in the silver-gray cottage
happiness, and after all happiness was not to be despised. If together
he and Willie could make tangible the notion that existed in the
latter's brain, the deed was certainly worth the doing. Moreover the
process would be an entertaining one, and after its completion he might
go away with a sense of having brightened at least one horizon by his
coming.
Thus reasoned Robert Morton as in the peace of that June evening he
casually shuffled the cards of fate, little suspecting that already a
factor in his destiny stronger than any of his arguments was soon to
make its influence felt and transform Wilton into a magnet so powerful
that against its spell he would be helpless as a child.
He was aroused from his meditations by the voice of Willie.
"Didn't you hear a little bell?" demanded the inventor. "A sort of
tinklin' noise?"
"I thought I did."
"It's the box comin' from Jan's," explained he. "Can you kitch a sight
of it?"
"I see it now."
Rising, the old man tugged at the string, urging the reluctant
messenger through the tangle of roses.
"By his writin' a note, I figger he ain't comin' over," he remarked, as
the object drew nearer. "I wonder what's stuck in his crop! Mebbe
Mis' Eldridge won't let him out. She's something of a Tartar--Arabella
is. Jan has to walk the plank, I can tell you."
By this time the cigar box swaying on the taut twine was within easy
reach. Willie raised its cover and took from its interior a crumpled
fragment of paper.
"Humph! He's mighty savin'!" he commented as he turned the missive
over. "He's writ on the other side of my letter. Let's see what he
has to say:
"'Can't come. Busy.'
"Well, did you ever!" gasped he, blankly. "_Busy_! Good Lord! Jan's
never been known to be busy in all his life. He don't even know the
feelin'. If Janoah Eldridge is busy, all I've got to say is, the
world's goin' to be swallered up by another deluge."
"Maybe, as you suggested, Mrs. Eldridge--"
"Oh, if it had been Mis' Eldridge, he wouldn't 'a' took the trouble to
send no such message as that," broke in Willie. "He'd simply 'a' writ
_Arabella_; there wouldn't 'a' been need fur more. No, sir!
Somethin's stepped on Jan's shadder, an' to-morrow I'll have to go
straight over there an' find out what it is."
CHAPTER V
AN APPARITION
The next morning, after loitering uneasily about the workshop a
sufficiently long time for Janoah Eldridge to make his appearance and
finding that his crony did not make his appearance, Willie reluctantly
took his worn visor cap down from the peg and drew it over his brows,
with the remark:
"Looks like Jan ain't headed this way to-day, either." He cast a
troubled glance through the dusty, multi-paned window of the shed.
"Much as I'm longin' to go ahead with this model, Bob, before I go
farther I've simply got to step over to the Eldridges an' straighten
him out. There's no help fur it."
"All right. Go ahead, Sir," reassuringly returned Bob. "I'll work
while you're gone. Things won't be at a complete standstill."
"I know that," Willie replied with a pleasant smile. "'Tain't that
that's frettin' me. It's just that I don't relish the notion of
shovin' my job onto your shoulders. 'Tain't as if you'd come to Wilton
to spend your time workin'. Celestina hinted last evenin' she was
afraid you bid fair to get but mighty little rest out of your vacation.
'Twas unlucky, she thought, that you hove into port just when I
happened to be kitched with a bigger idee than common."
"Nonsense!" Bob protested heartily. "Don't you and Aunt Tiny give
yourselves any uneasiness about me. I'm happy. I enjoy fussing round
the shop with you, Mr. Spence. I'd far rather you took me into what
you're doing than left me out. Besides, I don't intend to work every
minute while I'm here. Some fine day I mean to steal off by myself and
explore Wilton. I may even take a day's fishing."
"That's right, youngster, that's right!" ejaculated Willie. "That's
the proper spirit. If you'll just feel free to pull out when you
please it will take a load off my mind, an' I shall turn to tinkerin'
with a clear conscience."
"I will, I promise you."
"Then that's settled," sighed the inventor with relief. "I must say
you're about the best feller ever was to come a-visitin', Bob. You
ain't a mite of trouble to anybody."
With eyes still fastened on the bench with its chaos of tools, the old
man moved unwillingly toward the door; but on the threshold he paused.
"I'll be back quick's I can," he called. "Likely I'll bring Jan in
tow. I'd full as lief not tell him what we're doin' 'til next week if
I had my choice; still, things bein' as they are, mebbe it's as well
not to shut him out any longer. He gets miffed easy an' I wouldn't
have his feelin's hurt fur a pot of lobsters."
With a gentle smile he waved his hand and was gone.
Left alone in the long, low-studded room, Bob rolled up his sleeves and
to a brisk whistle began to plane down some pieces of thin board.
The bench at which he worked stood opposite a broad window from which,
framed in a wreath of grapevine, he could see the bay and the shelving
dunes beyond it. A catboat, with sails close-hauled, was making her
way out of the channel, a wake of snowy foam churning behind her in the
blue water. Through the door of the shed swept a breeze that rustled
the shavings on the floor and blended the fragrance of newly cut wood
with the warm perfume of sweet fern from the adjoining meadow.
For all its untidiness and confusion, its litter of boards, tools and
battered paint pots, the shop was unquestionably one of the most homey
corners of the Spence cottage. Its rough, unsheathed walls, mellowed
to a dull buff tone, were here and there adorned with prints culled by
Willie from magazines and newspapers. Likenesses of Lincoln and
Roosevelt flanked the windows with an American flag above them, and a
series of battleships and army scenes beneath. The inventor's taste,
however, had not run entirely to patriotic subjects, for scattered
along the walls, where shelves sagged with their burden of oilcans,
putty, nails and fishing tackle, were a variety of nautical
reproductions in color--a prize yacht heeling in the wind; a reach of
rough sea whose giant combers swirled about a wreck; glimpses of marsh
and dune typical of the land of the Cape dweller.
An air-tight stove, the solitary defence against cold and storm, stood
in the corner, and before its rusty hearth a rickety chair and an
overturned soap box were suggestively placed. But perhaps what told an
observer more about Willie Spence than did anything else was a bunch of
rarely beautiful sabbatia blooming in a pickle bottle and a wee black
kitten who disported herself unmolested among the tools cluttering the
deeply scarred workbench.
She was a mischievous kitten, a spoiled kitten; one who vented her
caprice on everything that had motion. Did a curl of shavings drop to
the ground, instantly Jezebel was at hand to catch it up in her
diminutive paws; toss it from her; steal up and fall upon it again; and
dragging it between her feet, roll over and over with it in a mad orgy
of delight. A shadow, a string, a flicker of metal was the signal for
a frolic. Let one's mood be austere as a monk's, with a single twist
of her absurdly tiny body this small creature shattered its gravity to
atoms. There was no such thing as dignity in Jezebel's presence.
Already three times Bob Morton had lifted the mite off the table and
three times back she had come, leaping in the path of his gleaming
plane as if its metallic whir and glimmering reflections were designed
solely for her amusement. In spite of his annoyance the man had
laughed and now, stooping, he caught up the tormentor and held her
aloft.
"You minx!" he cried, shaking the sprite gently. "What do you think I
am here for--to play with you?"
The kitten blinked at him out of her round blue eyes.
"You'll be getting your fur mittens cut off the next thing you know,"
went on Bob severely. "Scamper out of here!"
He set the little creature on the floor, aimed her toward the doorway
and gave her a stimulating push.
With a coquettish leap headlong into the sunshine darted Jezebel, only
to come suddenly into collision with a stranger who had crossed the
grass and was at that instant about to enter the workshop.
The newcomer was a girl, tall and slender, with lustrous masses of dark
hair that swept her cheek in wind-tossed ringlets. She had a
complexion vivid with health, an undignified little nose and a mouth
whose short upper lip lent to her face a half childish, half pouting
expression. But it was in her eyes that one forgot all else,--eyes
large, brown, and softly deep, with a quality that held the glance
compellingly. Her gown of thin pink material dampened by the sea air
clung to her figure in folds that accentuated her lithe youthfulness,
and as she stumbled over the kitten in full flight she broke into a
delicious laugh that showed two rows of pretty, white teeth and lured
from hiding an alluring dimple.
"You ridiculous little thing!" she exclaimed, snatching up the fleeing
culprit before she could make her escape and placing her in the warm
curve of her neck. "Do you know you almost tripped me up? Where are
your manners?"
Jezebel merely stared. So did Robert Morton.
The girl and the kitten were too disconcerting a spectacle. By herself
Jezebel was tantalizing enough; but in combination with the creature
who stood laughing on the threshold, the sight was so bewildering that
it not only overwhelmed but intoxicated.
It was evident the visitor was unconscious of his presence, for instead
of addressing him, she continued to toy with the wisp of animation
snuggled against her cheek.
"I do believe, Willie," she observed, without glancing up, "that
Jezebel grows more fascinating every time I see her."
Bob did not answer. He was in no mood to discuss Jezebel. If he
thought of her at all it was to contrast her inky fur with the white
throat against which she nestled and speculate as to whether she sensed
what a thrice-blessed kitten she was. It did flash through his mind as
he stood there that the two possessed a bewitching, irresistible
something in common, a something he was at a loss to characterize. It
did not matter, however, for he could not have defined even the
simplest thing at the moment, and this attribute of the kitten's and
the girl's was very complex.
Perhaps it was the silence that at last caused the visitor to raise her
eyes and look at him inquiringly. Then he saw a tremor of surprise
sweep over her, and a wave of crimson surge into her face.
"I beg your pardon," she gasped. "I thought Willie was here."
"Mr. Spence has stepped over to the Eldredges'. I'm expecting him back
every instant," Bob returned.
The girl's lashes fell. They were long and very beautiful as they lay
in a fringe against her cheek, yet exquisite as they were he longed to
see her eyes again.
"I'm Miss Morton's nephew from Indiana," the young man managed to
stammer, feeling some explanation might bridge the gulf of
embarrassment. "I am visiting here."
"Oh!"
Persistently she studied the toe of her shoe. If Bob had thought her
appealing before, now, demure against the background of budding apple
trees, with a shaft of sunlight on her hair, and the kitten cuddled
against her breast, she put to rout the few intelligent ideas remaining
to the young man.
Wonderingly, helplessly, he watched while she continued to caress the
minute creature in her arms.
"Are you staying here long?" she asked at length, gaining courage to
look up.
"I--eh--yes; that is--I hope so," Bob answered with sudden fervor.
"You like Wilton then."
"Tremendously!"
"Most strangers think the place has great beauty," observed his guest
innocently.
"There's more beauty here in Wilton than I ever saw before in all my
life," burst out Bob, then stopped suddenly and blushed.
His listener dimpled.
"Really?" she remarked, raising her delicately arched brows. "You are
enthusiastic about the Cape, aren't you!"
"Some parts of it."
"Where else have you been?"
The question came with disturbing directness.
"Oh--why--Middleboro, Tremont, Buzzard's Bay and Harwich," answered the
man hurriedly. As he named the list he was conscious that it smacked
rather too suggestively of a brakeman's, and he saw she thought so too,
for she turned aside to hide a smile.
"You might sit down; won't you?" he suggested, eager that she should
not depart.
Flecking the dust from the soap box with his handkerchief, he dragged
it forward and placed it near the workbench.
As she bent her head to accept the crude throne with a queen's
graciousness, Jezebel, roused into playful humor, thrust forth her
claws and, encountering Bob as he rose from his stooping posture, fixed
them with random firmness in his necktie.
Now it chanced that the tie was a four-in-hand of raw silk, very choice
in color but of a fatally loose oriental weave; and once entangled in
its meshes the task of extricating its delicate threads from the clutch
that gripped them seemed hopeless. It apparently failed to dawn on
either of the young persons brought into such embarrassingly close
contact by the dilemma that the kitten could be handed over to Bob; or
that the tie might be removed. Instead they drew together, trying
vainly to liberate the struggling Jezebel from her imprisonment. It
was not a simple undertaking and to add to its difficulties the
ungrateful beast, irritated by their endeavors, began to protest
violently.
"She'll tear your tie all to pieces," cried the stranger.
"No matter. I don't mind, if she doesn't scratch you."
"Oh, I am not afraid of her. If you can hold her a second longer, I
think I can free the last claw."
As the girl toiled at her precarious mission, Bob could feel her warm
breath fan his cheek and could catch the fragrant perfume of her hair.
So far as he was concerned, Jezebel might retain her hold on his
necktie forever. But, alas, the slim, white fingers were too deft and
he heard at last a triumphant:
"There!"
At the same instant the offending kitten was placed on the floor.
"You little monkey!" cried the man, smiling down at the furry object at
his feet.
"Isn't she!" echoed the visitor sympathetically. "There she goes, the
imp! What is left of your tie? Let me look at it."
"It's all right, thank you."
"There is just one thread ruffed up. I could fix it if I had a pin."
From her gown she produced one, but as she did so a spray of wild roses
slipped to the ground.
"You've dropped your flowers," said Bob, picking them up.
"Have I? Thank you. They are withered, anyway, I'm afraid."
Tossing the rosebuds on the bench, she began to draw into smoothness
the silken loop that defaced the tie.
"There!" she exclaimed, glancing up into his eyes and tilting her head
critically to one side. "That is ever so much better. You would
hardly notice it. Now I really must go. I have bothered you quite
enough."
"You have not bothered me at all," contradicted Bob emphatically.
"But I know I must have," she protested. "I've certainly delayed you.
Besides, it doesn't look as if Willie was coming back."
"Isn't there something I can do for you?"
"No, thank you. It was nothing important. In fact, it doesn't matter
at all. I just came to see if he could fix the clasp of my belt
buckle. It is broken, and he is so clever at mending things that I
thought perhaps he could mend this."
"Let me see it."
"Oh, I couldn't think of troubling you."
"But I should be glad to fix it if I could. If not, I could at least
hand it over to Willie's superior skill."
She laughed.
"I'm not certain whether Willie's skill is superior," was her arch
retort.
"Why not make a test case and find out?"
Still she hesitated.
"You're afraid to trust your property to me," Bob said, piqued by her
indecision.
"No, I'm not," was the quick response. "See? Here is the belt."
She drew from her pocket a narrow strip of white leather to which a
handsome silver buckle was attached and placed it in his hand.
He took it, inspected its fastening and looked with beating pulse at
the girdle's slender span.
"Do you think it can be mended?" she inquired anxiously.
"Of course it can."
"Oh, I'm so glad!"
"Give me a few days and you shall have it back as good as new."
"That will be splendid!" Her eyes shone with starry brightness. "You
see," she went on, "it was given me on my birthday by my--my--by some
one I care a great deal for--by my--" she stopped, embarrassed.
Robert Morton was too well mannered to put into words the interrogation
that trembled on his lips, but he might as well have done so, so
transparent was the questioning glance that traveled to her left hand
in search of the telltale solitaire. Even though his search was not
rewarded, he felt certain that the hand concealed in the folds of her
dress wore the fatal ring. Of course, mused he, with a shrug, he might
have guessed it. No such beauty as this was wandering unclaimed about
the world. Well, her fiancé, whoever he might be, was a lucky devil!
Without doubt, confound his impudence, his arm had traveled the pathway
of that band of leather scores of times.
One couldn't blame the dog! For want of a better vent for his
irritation, Bob took up the belt and again examined it. He had been
quite safe in boasting that the bauble should be returned to its owner
as good as new, for although he did not confess it, on its silver clasp
he had discovered the manufacturer's name. If the buckle could not be
repaired, another of similar pattern should replace it. Unquestionably
he was a fool to go to this trouble and expense for nothing. Yet was
it quite for nothing? Was it not worth while to win even a smile from
this creature whose approval gave one the sense of being knighted?
True, titles meant but little in these days of democracy but when
bestowed by such royalty-- She broke in on his reverie by extending
her hand. "Good-by," she said. "You have been very kind, Mr.--"
"My name is Morton--Bob Morton."
"Why! Then you must be the son of Aunt Tiny's brother?"
"_Aunt Tiny_!"
As she laughed he saw again the ravishing dimple and her even, white
teeth.
"Oh, she isn't my real aunt," she explained. "I just call her that
because I am so fond of her. I adore both her and Willie."
"Who is takin' my name in vain?" called a cheery voice, as the little
inventor rounded the corner of the shed and entered the room.
"Delight--as I live! I might 'a' known it was you. Well, well, dear
child, if I'm not glad to see you."
He placed his hands on her shoulders and beamed into her blushing face
while she bent and spread the loops of his soft tie out beneath his
chin.
"How nice of you, Willie dear, to come back before I had gone!" she
said, arranging the bow with exaggerated care.
"Bless your heart, I'd 'a' come back sooner had I known you were here,"
declared he affectionately. "What brings you, little lady?"
She pointed to the trinket dangling from Robert Morton's grasp.
"I snapped the clasp of my belt buckle, Willie--that lovely silver
buckle Zenas Henry gave me," she confessed with contrition. "How do
you suppose I could have been so careless? I have been heart-broken
ever since."
"Nonsense! Nonsense!" cried the old man, patting her hand. "Don't go
grievin' over a little thing like that. 'Tain't worth it. Break all
the buckles ever was made, but not your precious heart, my dear. Like
as not the thing can be mended."
"Mr. Morton says it can."
"If Bob says so, it's as good as done already," replied Willie
reassuringly. "He's a great one with tools. Why, if he was to stay in
Wilton, he'd be cuttin' me all out. So you an' he have been gettin'
acquainted, eh, while I was gone? That's right. I want he should know
what nice folks we've got in Wilton 'cause it's his first visit to the
Cape, an' if he don't like us mebbe he'll never come again."
"I thought Mr. Morton had visited other places on Cape Cod," observed
Delight, darting a mischievous glance at the abashed young man opposite.
"No, indeed!" blundered Willie. "He ain't been nowheres. Somebody's
got to show him all the sights. Mebbe if you get time you'll take a
hand in helpin' educate him."
"I should be glad to!"
Notwithstanding the prim response and her unsmiling lips, the young man
had a discomfited presentiment that she was laughing at him, and even
the farewell she flashed to him over her shoulder had a hectoring
quality in it that did not altogether restore his self-esteem.
"Who is she?" he gasped, when he had watched her out of sight.
"That girl? Do you mean to say you don't know--an' you a-talkin' to
her half the mornin'?" demanded the old man with amazement. "Why, it
never dawned on me to introduce you to her. I thought of course you
knew already who she was. Everybody in town knows Delight Hathaway,
an' loves her, too," he added softly. "She's Zenas Henry's daughter,
the one he brought ashore from the _Michleen_ an' adopted."
"Oh!"
A light began to break in on Bob's understanding.
"It's Zenas Henry's motor-boat we're tinkerin' with now," went on
Willie.
"I see!"
He waited eagerly for further information, but evidently his host
considered he had furnished all the data necessary, for instead of
enlarging on the subject he approached the bench and began to inspect
the model.
"I s'pose, with her bein' here, you didn't get ahead much while I was
gone," he ventured, an inflection of disappointment in his tone.
"No, I didn't."
"I didn't accomplish nothin', either," the little old man went on.
"Jan warn't to home; he'd gone fishin'."
His companion did not reply at once.
"I don't quite get my soundin's on Jan," he at length ruminated aloud.
"Somethin's wrong with him. I feel it in my bones."
"Perhaps not."
"There is, I tell you. I know Janoah Eldridge from crown to heel, an'
it ain't like him to go off fishin' by himself."
"I shouldn't fret about it if I were you," Bob said in an attempt to
comfort the disquieted inventor. "I'm sure he'll turn up all right."
Had the conversation been of a three-master in a gale; of buried
treasure; or of the ultimate salvation of the damned, the speaker would
at that moment have been equally optimistic.
The universe had suddenly become too radiant a place to harbor
calamity. Wilton was a paradise like the first Eden--a garden of
smiles, of dimples, of blushing cheeks--and of silver buckles.
He began to whistle softly to himself; then, sensing that Willie was
still unconvinced by his sanguine prediction, he added:
"And even if Mr. Eldridge shouldn't come back, I guess you and I could
manage without him."
"That's all very well up to a certain point, youngster," was the
retort. "But who's goin' to see me through this job after you've taken
wing?"
He pointed tragically to the beginnings of the model.
"Maybe I shan't take wing," announced Bob, looking absently at the
cluster of withered roses in his hand. "You--you see," he went on,
endeavoring to speak in off-hand fashion, "I've been thinking things
over and--and--I've about come to the conclusion--"
"Yes," interrupted Willie eagerly.
"That it is perhaps better for me to stay here until we get the
invention completed."
"You don't mean until the thing's done!"
"If it doesn't take too long, yes."
"Hurray!" shouted his host. "That's prime!" he rubbed his hands
together. "Under those conditions we'll pitch right in an' scurry the
work along fast as ever we can."
Robert Morton looked chagrined.
"I don't know that we need break our necks to rush the thing through at
a pace like that," he said, fumbling awkwardly with the flowers. "A
few weeks more or less wouldn't make any great difference."
"But I thought you said it was absolutely necessary for you to go
home--that you had important business in New York--that--" the old man
broke off dumbfounded.
Bob shook his head. "Oh, no, I think my affairs can be arranged," was
the sanguine response. "A piece of work like this would give me lots
of valuable experience, and I'm not sure but it is my duty to--"
The little old inventor scanned the speaker's flushed cheeks, his
averted eye and the drooping blossoms in his hand; then his brow
cleared and he smiled broadly:
"Duty ain't to be shunned," announced he with solemnity. "An' as for
experience, take it by an' large, I ain't sure but what you'll get a
heap of it by lingerin' on here--more, mebbe, than you realize."
CHAPTER VI
MARRYING AND GIVING IN MARRIAGE
That afternoon, after making this elaborate but by no means misleading
explanation to Willie, Bob sent off to a Boston jeweler a registered
package and while impatiently awaiting its return set to work with
redoubled zest at the new invention.
What an amazingly different aspect the motor-boat enterprise had
assumed since yesterday! Then his one idea had been to humor Willie's
whim and in return for the old man's hospitality lend such aid to the
undertaking as he was able. But now Zenas Henry's launch had suddenly
become a glorified object, sacred to the relatives of the divinity of
the workshop, and how and where the flotsam of the tides ensnared it
was of colossal importance. Into solving the nautical enigma Robert
Morton now threw every ounce of his energy and while at work artfully
drew from his companion every detail he could obtain of Delight
Hathaway's strange story.
He learned how the _Michleen_ had been wrecked on the Wilton Shoals in
the memorable gale of 1910; how the child's father had perished with
the ship, leaving his little daughter friendless in the world; how
Zenas Henry and the three aged captains had risked their lives to bring
the little one ashore; and how the Brewsters had taken her into their
home and brought her up. It was a simple tale and simply told, but the
heroism of the romance touched it with an epic quality that gripped the
listener's imagination and sympathies tenaciously. And now the waif
snatched from the grasp of the covetous sea had blossomed into this
exquisite being; this creature beloved, petted, and well-nigh spoiled
by a proudly exultant community.
For although legally a member of the Brewster family, Willie explained,
the girl had come to belong in a sense to the entire village. Had she
not been cast an orphan upon its shores, and were not its treacherous
shoals responsible for her misfortune? Wilton, to be sure, was not
actually answerable for the crimes those hidden sand bars perpetrated,
but nevertheless the fisherfolk could not quite shake themselves free
of the shadow cast upon them by the tragedies ever occurring at their
gateway. Too many of their people had gone down to the sea in ships
never to return for them to become callous to the disasters they were
continually forced to witness. The wreck of the _Michleen_ had been
one of the most pathetic of these horrors, and the welfare of the child
who in consequence of it had come into the hamlet's midst had become a
matter of universal concern.
"'Tain't to be wondered at the girl is loved," continued Willie. "At
first people took an interest in her, or tried to, from a sense of
duty, for you couldn't help bein' sorry for the little thing. But
'twarn't long before folks found out 'twarn't no hardship to be fond of
Delight Hathaway. She was livin' sunshine, that's what she was!
Wherever she went, be it one end of town or t'other, she brought
happiness. In time it got so that if you was to drop in where there
was sickness or trouble an' spied a nosegay of flowers, you could be
pretty sure Delight had been there. Why, Lyman Bearse's father, old
Lyman, that's so crabbed with rhumatism that it's a cross to live under
the same roof with him, will calm down gentle as a dove when Delight
goes to read to him. As for Mis' Furber, I reckon she'd never get to
the Junction to do a mite of shoppin' or marketin' but for Delight
stayin' with the babies whilst she was gone. I couldn't tell you half
what that girl does. She's here, there, an' everywhere. Now she's
gettin' up a party for the school children; now makin' a birthday cake
for somebody; now trimmin' a bunnit for Tiny or helpin' her plan out a
dress."
Willie stopped to rummage on a distant shelf for a level.
"Once," he went on, "Sarah Libbie Lewis asked me what Delight was goin'
to be. I told her there warn't no goin' to be about it; Delight was
bein' it right now. She didn't need to go soundin' for a mission in
life."
"I take it you are not in favor of careers for women, Mr. Spence,"
observed Robert Morton, who had been eagerly drinking in every word the
old man uttered.
"Yes, I am," contradicted the inventor. "There's times when a girl
needs a career, but there's other times when to desert one's plain duty
an' go huntin' a callin' is criminal. Queer how people will look right
over the top of what they don't want to see, ain't it? I s'pose its
human nature though," he mused.
A soft breeze stirred the shavings on the floor.
"Tiny thinks," resumed the quiet voice, "that I mix myself up too much
with other folks's concerns anyhow. Leastways, she says I let their
troubles weigh on me more'n I'd ought. But to save my life I can't
seem to help it. Don't you believe those on the outside of a tangle
sometimes see it straighter than them that is snarled up in the mess?"
Robert Morton nodded.
"That's the way I figger it," rambled on the old man. "Mebbe that's
the reason I can't keep my fingers out of the pie. You'd be surprised
enough if you was to know the things I've been dragged into in my
lifetime; family quarrels, will-makin's, business matters that I didn't
know no more about than the man in the moon. Why, I've even taken a
hand in love affairs!"
He broke into a peal of hearty laughter. "That's the beatereee!" he
declared, slapping his thigh. "'Magine me up to my ears in a love
affair! But I have been--scores of 'em, enough I reckon, put 'em all
together, to marry off the whole of Cape Cod."
"You must be quite an authority on the heart by this time," Robert
Morton ventured.
"I ain't," the other declared soberly. "You see, none of the snarls
was ever the same, so you kinder had to feel your way along every time
like as if you was navigatin' a new channel. Women may be all alike,
take 'em in the main, but they're almighty different when you get 'em
to the fine point, an' that's what raises the devil with makin' any
general rule for managin' 'em."
The philosopher held the piece of wood he had been planing to the light
and examined it critically.
"Once," he resumed, taking up his work again, "when Dave Furber was
courtin' Katie Bearse, I drove over to Sawyer's Falls with him to get
Katie a birthday present an' among other things we thought we'd buy
some candy. We went into a store, I recollect, where there was all
kinds spread out in trays, an' Dave an' me started to pick out what
we'd have. As I stood there attemptin' to decide, I couldn't help
thinkin' that selectin' that candy was a good deal like choosin' a
wife. You couldn't have all the different kinds, an' makin' up your
mind which you preferred was a seven-days' conundrum."
The little inventor took off his spectacles, wiped them, and replaced
them upon his nose.
"Luckily, as we was fixed, there was a chance in the box for quite a
few sorts, so that saved the day. But s'pose, I got to thinkin', you
could only have one variety out of the lot--which would you take?
That's the sticker you face when choosin' a wife. S'pose, for
instance, I was pinned down to nothin' but caramels. The caramel is a
good, square, sensible, dependable candy. You can see through the
paper exactly what you're gettin'. There's nothin' concealed or
lurkin' in a caramel. Moreover, it lasts a long time an' you don't get
tired of it. It's just like some women--not much to look at, but
wholesome an' with good wearin' qualities. Should you choose the
caramel, you'd feel sure you was doin' the wise thing, wouldn't you?"
Robert Morton smiled into the half-closed blue eyes that met his so
whimsically.
"But along in the next tray to the caramel," Willie went on, "was
bonbons--every color of the rainbow they were, an' pretty as could be;
an' they held all sorts of surprises inside 'em, too. They was
temptin'! But the minute you put your mind on it you knew they'd turn
out sweet and sickish, an' that after gettin' 'em you'd wish you
hadn't. There's plenty of women like that in the world. Mebbe you
ain't seen 'em, but I have."
"Yes."
"Besides these, there was dishes of sparklin' jelly things on the
counter, that the girl said warn't much use--gone in no time; they were
just meant to dress up the box. I called 'em brainless candies--just
silly an' expensive, an' if you look around you'll find women can match
'em. An' along with 'em you can put the candied violets an' sugared
rose leaves that only make a man out of pocket an' ain't a mite of use
to him."
Willie scanned his companion's face earnestly.
"Finally, after runnin' the collection over, it kinder come down to a
choice between caramels or chocolates. Even then I still stood firm
for the caramel, there bein' no way of makin' sure what I'd get inside
the chocolate. I warn't willin' to go it blind, I told Dave. A
chocolate's a sort of unknowable thing, ain't it? There's no fathomin'
it at sight. After you've got it you may be pleased to death with
what's inside it an' then again you may not. So we settled mostly on
caramels for Katie. I said to Dave comin' home it was lucky men warn't
held down to one sort of candy like they are to one sort of wife, an'
he most laughed his head off. Then he asked me what kind of sweet I
thought Katie was, an' I told him I reckoned she was the caramel
variety, an' he said he thought so, too. We warn't fur wrong neither,
for she's turned out 'bout as we figgered. Mebbe she ain't got the
looks or the sparkle of the bonbons or jelly things, but she's worn
almighty well, an' made Dave a splendid wife."
"With all your excellent theories about women, I wonder you never
picked out a wife for yourself, Mr. Spence," Robert Morton remarked
mischievously.
"Me get married?" questioned Willie, staring at the speaker open-eyed
over the top of his spectacles.
"Why not?"
"Why, bless your heart, I never thought of it!" answered the little man
naïvely. "It's taken 'bout all my time to get other folks spliced
together. Besides," he added, "I've had my inventin'."
He glanced out of the window at a moving figure, then shot abruptly to
the door and called to some one who was passing:
"Hi, Jack!"
A man in coast-guard uniform waved his hand.
"How are you, Willie?" he shouted.
"All right," was the reply. "How are you an' Sarah Libbie makin' out?"
"Same as ever."
"You ain't said nothin' to her yet?"
Robert Morton saw the burly fellow in the road sheepishly dig his heel
into the sand.
"N--o, not yet."
"An' never will!" ejaculated the inventor returning wrathfully to the
shop. "That feller," he explained as he resumed his seat, "has been
upwards, of twenty years tryin' to tell Sarah Libbie Lewis he's in love
with her. He knows it an' so does she, but somehow he just can't put
the fact into words. I'm clean out of patience with him. Why, one day
he actually had the face to come in here an' ask me to tell her--_me_!
What do you think of that?"
Robert Morton chuckled at his companion's rage.
"Did you?"
"Did I?" repeated Willie with scorn. "Can you see me doin' it? No,
siree! I just up an' told Jack Nickerson if he warn't man enough to do
his own courtin' he warn't man enough for any self-respectin' woman to
marry. An' furthermore, I said he needn't step foot over the sill of
this shop 'till he'd took some action in the matter. That hit him
pretty hard, I can tell you, 'cause he used to admire to come in here
an' set round whenever he warn't on duty. But he saw I meant it, an'
he ain't been since."
The old man paused.
"I kinder bit off my own nose when I took that stand," he admitted, an
intonation of regret in his tone, "'cause Jack's mighty good company.
Still, there was nothin' for it but firm handlin'."
"How long ago did you cast him out?" Bob asked with a chuckle.
"Oh, somethin' over a week or ten days ago," was the reply. "I thought
he might have made some progress by now. But I ain't given up hope of
him yet. He's been sorter quiet the last two times I've seen him, an'
I figger he's mullin' things over, an' mebbe screwin' up his courage."
The room was still save for the purr of the plane.
"I suppose you will be marrying Miss Hathaway off some day," observed
Bob a trifle self-consciously, without raising his eyes from his work.
"You bet I won't," came emphatically from the old inventor. "I've got
some courage but not enough for that. You see, the man that marries
her has got to have the nerve to face the whole village--brave Zenas
Henry, the three captains, an' Abbie Brewster, besides winnin' the girl
herself. 'Twill be some contract. No, you can be mortal sure I shan't
go meddlin' in no such love affair as that. Anyhow, I won't be needed,
for any man that Delight Hathaway would look at twice will be perfectly
capable of meetin' all comers; don't you worry."
With this dubious comfort Willie stamped with spirit out of the shop.
CHAPTER VII
A SECOND SPIRIT APPEARS
Days came and went, days golden and blue, until a week had passed, and
although Robert Morton haunted the post-office, nothing was heard from
the jeweler to whom he had sent the silver buckle. Neither did the
eager young man catch even a fleeting glimpse of its owner. It was, he
told himself, unlikely that she would come to the Spence house again.
When her property was repaired she probably would expect some one
either to let her know, or bring it to her. It was to the latter
alternative that Bob was pinning his hopes. The errand would provide a
perfectly natural excuse for him to go to the Brewster home, and once
there he would meet the girl's family and perhaps be asked to come
again. Until the trinket came back from Boston, therefore, he must
bide his time with patience.
Nevertheless the logic of these arguments did not prevent him from
turning sharply toward the door of the workshop whenever there was a
footfall on the grass. Any day, any hour, any moment the lady of his
dreams might appear once more. Had not Willie said that she sometimes
trimmed bonnets for Tiny? And was it not possible, yea, even likely
that his aunt might be needing a bonnet right away. Women were always
needing bonnets, argued the young man vaguely; at least, both his
mother and sister were, and he had not yet lived long enough in his
aunt's household to realize that with Tiny Morton the purchase of a
bonnet was not an equally casual enterprise. He even had the temerity
to ask Celestina when he saw her arrayed for the grange one afternoon
why she did not have a hat with pink in it and was chagrined to receive
the reply that she did not like pink; and that anyway her hat was well
enough as it was, and she shouldn't have another for a good couple of
years.
"I don't go throwin' money away on new hats like you city folks do,"
she said somewhat tartly. "A hat has to do me three seasons for best
an' a fourth for common. I've too much to do to go chasin' after the
fashions. I leave that to Bart Coffin's wife."
"Who is Bart Coffin?" inquired Bob, amused by her show of spirit.
"You ain't met Bart?"
"Not yet."
"Well, you will. He's the one who always used to stow all his catch of
fish in the bow of the boat 'cause he said it was easier to row
downhill. He ain't no heavyweight for brains as you can see, an' years
ago he married a wife feather-headed as himself. He did it out of
whole cloth, too, so he's got no one to blame if he don't like his
bargain. At the time of the weddin' he was terrible stuck up about his
bride, an' he gave her a black satin dress that outdid anything the
town had ever laid eyes on. It was loaded down with ruffles, an' jet,
an' lace, an' fitted her like as if she was poured into it. Folks said
it was made in Brockton, but whether it was or not there's no way of
knowin'. Anyhow, back she pranced to Wilton in that gown an' for a
year or more, whenever there was a church fair, or a meetin' of the
Eastern Star, or a funeral, you'd be certain of seein' Minnie Coffin
there in her black satin. There wasn't a lay-out in town could touch
it, an' by an' by it got so that it set the mark on every gatherin'
that was held, those where Minnie's satin didn't appear bein' rated as
of no account." Celestina paused, and her mouth took an upward curve,
as if some pleasant reverie engrossed her. "But after a while," she
presently went on, "there came an upheaval in the styles; sleeves got
smaller, an' skirts began to be nipped in. Minnie's dress warn't wore
a particle but it looked as out-of-date as Joseph's coat would look on
Willie. The women sorter nudged one another an' said that now Mis'
Bartley Coffin would have to step down a peg an' stop bein' leader of
the fashions."
Celestina ceased rocking and leaned forward impressively.
"But did she?" declaimed she with oratorical eloquence. "Did she? Not
a bit of it. Minnie got pictures an' patterns from Boston; scanted the
skirt; took in the sleeves; made a wide girdle with the breadths she
took out of the front--an' there she was again, high-steppin' as ever!"
Robert Morton laughed with appreciation.
"Since then," continued Celestina, "for at least fifteen years she's
been makin' that dress over an' over. Now she'll get a new breadth of
goods or a couple of breadths, turn the others upside down or cut 'em
over, an' by keepin' everlastingly at it she contrives to look like the
pictures in the papers most of the time. It's maddenin' to the rest of
us. Abbie Brewster knows Minnie well an' somewhere in a book she's got
set down the gyrations of that dress. I wouldn't be bothered recordin'
it but Abbie always was a methodical soul. She could give you the date
of every inch of satin in the whole thing. Just now there's 1914
sleeves; the front breadths are 1918; the back ones 1911. Most of the
waist is January, 1912, with a June, 1913, vest. Half the girdle is
made out of 1910 satin, an' half out of 1919. Of course there's lights
when the blacks don't all look the same; still, unless you got close up
you wouldn't notice it, an' Minnie Coffin keeps on settin' the styles
for the town like she always has."
The narrator paused for breath.
"She's makin' it over again right now," she announced, rising from her
chair and moving toward the pantry. "You can always tell when she is
'cause she pulls down all her front curtains an' won't come to the door
when folks knock. The shades was down when Abbie an' me drove by there
last week an' to make sure Abbie got out an' tapped to' see if
anybody'd come to let us in, but nobody did. We said then: '_Minnie's
resurrectin' the black satin_.' You mark my words she'll be in church
in it Sunday. It generally takes her about ten days to get it done. I
was expectin' she'd give it another overhauling, for she ain't done
nothin' to it for three months at least an' the styles have changed
quite a little in that time. Sometimes I tell Willie I believe we'll
live to see her laid out in that dress yet."
"You can bet Bart would draw a sigh of relief if we did," chimed in the
inventor. "Why, the money that woman's spent pullin' that durn thing
to pieces an' puttin' it together again is a caution. Bart said you'd
be dumbfounded if you could know what he's paid out. If the coffin lid
was once clamped down on the pest he'd raise a hallelujah, poor feller."
"Willie!" gasped the horrified Celestina.
"Oh, I ain't sayin' he'd be glad to see Minnie goin'," the little old
man protested. "But that black satin has been a bone of contention
ever since the day it was bought. To begin with, it cost about ten
times what Bart calculated 'twould; he told me that himself. An' it's
been runnin' up in money ever since. When he got it he kinder figgered
'twould be an investment somethin' like one of them twenty-year
endowments, an' that for nigh onto a quarter of a century Minnie
wouldn't need much of anything else. But his reckonin' was agog. It's
been nothin' but that black satin all his married life. Let alone the
price of continually reenforcin' it, the wear an' tear on Minnie's
nerves when she's tinkerin' with it is somethin' awful. Bart says that
dress ain't never out of her mind. She's rasped an' peevish all the
time plannin' how she can fit the pieces in to look like the pictures.
It's worse than fussin' over the cut-up puzzles folks do. Sometimes at
night she'll wake him out of a sound sleep to tell him she's just
thought how she can eke new sleeves out of the side panels, or make a
pleated front for the waist out of the girdle. I guess Bart don't get
much rest durin' makin'-over spells. I saw him yesterday at the
post-office an' he was glum as an oyster; an' when I asked him was he
sick all he said was he hoped there'd be no black satins in heaven."
"I told you she was fixin' it over!" cried Celestina triumphantly. "So
you was at the store, was you, Willie? You didn't say nothin' about
it."
"I forgot I went," confessed the little man. "Lemme see! I believe
'twas more nails took me down."
"Did you get any mail?"
"No--yes--I dunno. 'Pears like I did get somethin'. If I did, it's in
the pocket of my other coat."
Going into the hall he returned with a small white package which he
gave to Celestina.
"It ain't for me," said she, after she had examined the address. "It's
Bob's."
"Bob's, eh?" queried the inventor. "I didn't notice, not havin' on my
readin' glasses. So it's Bob's, is it?"
"Yes," answered Celestina, eyeing the neat parcel curiously.
"Whoever's sendin' you a bundle all tied up with white paper an' pink
string, Bob? It looks like it was jewelry."
Quickly Willie sprang to the rescue.
"Oh, Bob's been gettin' some repairin' done for the Brewsters,"
explained he. "Delight's buckle was broke an' knowin' the best place
to send it, he mailed it up to town."
"Oh," responded Celestina, glancing from one to the other with a half
satisfied air.
"Let's have the thing out an' see how it looks, Bob," Willie went on.
Blushingly Robert Morton undid the box.
Yes, there amid wrappings of tissue paper, on a bed of blue cotton
wool, rested the buckle of silver, its burnished surface sparkling in
the light.
He took it out and inspected it carefully.
"It is all O. K.," observed he, with an attempt at indifference. "See
what a fine piece of work they made of it."
The old man took from the table drawer a long leather case, drew out
another pair of spectacles which he exchanged for the ones he was
already wearing, and after scrutinizing the buckle and scowling at it
for an interval he carried it to the window.
"What's the matter?" Bob demanded, instantly alert. "Isn't the
repairing properly done?"
"'Tain't the repairin' I'm lookin' at," Willie returned slowly. "I've
no quarrel with that."
Still he continued to twist and turn the disc of silver, now holding it
at arm's length, now bringing it close to his eye with a puzzled
intentness.
Robert Morton could stand the suspense no longer.
"What's wrong with it?" he at last burst out.
Willie did not look up but evidently he caught the note of impatience
in the younger man's tone, for he drawled quizzically:
"Don't it strike you as a mite peculiar that a buckle should go to
Boston with D. L. H. on it an' come home marked C. L. G.?"
"_What_!"
"That's what's on it--C. L. G. See for yourself."
"It can't be."
"Come an' have a look."
The inventor placed the trinket in Robert Morton's hand.
"C. L. G.," repeated he, as he deciphered the intertwined letters of
the monogram. "You are right, sure as fate! Jove!"
"They've sent you the wrong girl," remarked Willie. "It's clear as a
bell on a still night. There must have been two girls an' two buckles,
an' the jeweler's mixed 'em up; you've got the other lady's."
"That's a nice mess!" Bob ejaculated irritably. "Why, I'd rather have
given a hundred dollars than have this happen. I'll wring that man's
neck!"
"Easy, youngster! Easy!" cautioned Willie. "Don't go heavin' all your
cargo overboard 'till you find you're really sinkin'. 'Tain't likely
Miss C. L. G. will care a row of pins for Miss D. L. H.'s buckle.
She'll be sendin' out an S. O. S. for her own an' will be ready to join
you in flayin' the jeweler. Give the poor varmint time, an' he'll
shift things round all right."
"But Miss Hathaway--"
"Delight's lived the best part of two weeks without that buckle, an'
she don't look none the worse for not havin' it. I saw her in the
post-office only yesterday an'--"
"Did you?" cried Bob eagerly, then stopped short, flushed, and bit his
lip.
"Yes, she was there," Willie returned serenely, without appearing to
have noticed his guest's agitation. "Young Farwell from Cambridge--the
one that has all the money--was talkin' to her, an' she had that
Harvard professor who boards at the Brewsters' along too; Carlton his
name is, Jasper Carlton. He's a mighty good-lookin' chap." He stole a
glance at the face that glowered out of the window. "Had you chose to
stroll down to the store with me like I asked you to, you might 'a'
seen her yourself."
"Oh, I--I--didn't need to see her," stammered Bob.
"Mebbe not," was the tranquil answer. "An' she didn't need to see you,
neither, judgin' from the way she was talkin' an' laughin' with them
other fellers. Still a young man is never the worse for chattin' with
a nice girl. Now, son, if I was you, I wouldn't get stirred up over
this jewelry business. We'll get a rise out of Miss C. L. G. pretty
soon an' when she comes to the surface--"
"Who's that at the gate, Willie?" called Celestina from the kitchen.
"What?"
"There's somebody at the gate in a big red automobile. She's comin'
in. You go an' see what she wants, 'cause my apron ain't fresh.
Likely she's lost her way or else is huntin' board."
Although Willie shuffled obediently into the hall he was not in time to
prevent the sonorous peal of the bell.
"Yes, he's here," they heard him say. "Of course you can speak to him.
He's just inside. Won't you step in?"
Then without further ado, and with utter disregard of Celestina's
rumpled apron, the door opened and the little inventor ushered into the
string-entangled sitting room a dainty, city-bred girl in a sport suit
of white serge. She was not only pretty but she was perfectly groomed
and was possessed of a fascinating vivacity and charm. Everything
about her was vivid: the gloss of her brown hair, the sparkle of her
eyes, her color, her smile, her immaculate clothes--all were dazzling.
She carried her splendor with an air of complete sureness as if she was
accustomed to the supremacy it won for her and expected it. Yet the
audacity of her pose had in it a certain fitness and was piquant rather
than offensive.
The instant she crossed the threshold, Robert Morton leaped to meet her
with outstretched hands.
"Cynthia Galbraith!" he cried. "How ever came you here?"
A ripple of teasing laughter came from the girl.
"You are surprised then; I thought you would be."
"Surprised? I can't believe it."
"If you'd written as you should have done, you wouldn't have been at
all amazed to see me," answered the newcomer severely.
"I meant to write," the culprit asserted uneasily.
"Maybe you will inform me what you are doing on Cape Cod," went on the
lady in an accusing tone.
"How did you know I was here?"
"You can't guess?"
"No, I haven't a glimmer."
From the pocket of her shell-pink sweater she drew forth a small white
box of startlingly familiar appearance.
"Does this belong to you?" demanded she.
Beneath the mockery of her eyes Robert Morton could feel the color
mount to his temples.
"Well, well!" he said, with a ghastly attempt at gaiety, "So you were
C. L. G."
"Naturally. Didn't the initials suggest the possibility?"
"No--eh--yes; that is, I hadn't thought about it," he floundered.
"It's funny how things come about sometimes, isn't it? I want you to
meet my aunt, Miss Morton, and my friend Mr. Spence. I am visiting
here."
Immediately the dainty Miss Cynthia was all smiles.
"So it is relatives that bring you to the Cape!" said she.
Robert Morton nodded. She seemed mollified.
"Didn't Roger write you that we had taken a house at Belleport for the
season?" she asked.
"No," replied Bob. "I haven't heard from him for weeks."
"He's a brute. Yes, we came down in May just after I got back from
California. We are crazy over the place. The family will be wild when
I tell them you are here. My brother," she went on, turning with a
pretty graciousness toward Celestina, "was Bob's roommate at Harvard.
In that way we came to know him very well and have always kept up the
acquaintance."
"Do you come from the West, same as my nephew does?" questioned
Celestina when there was a pause.
The little lady raised her eyebrows deprecatingly.
"No, indeed! The East is quite good enough for us. We are from New
York. The boys, however, were always visiting back and forth," she
added with haste, "so we have quite an affection for Indiana even if we
don't live there." She shot a conciliatory smile in Robert Morton's
direction. "Couldn't you go back with me in the car, Bob," she asked
turning toward him, "and spring a surprise on the household? Dad's
down, Mother's here, and also Grandmother Lee; and the mighty and
illustrious Roger, fresh from his law office on Fifth Avenue, is
expected Friday. Do come."
"I am afraid I can't to-day," Bob answered.
"Why, Bob, there ain't the least reason in the world you shouldn't go,"
put in Celestina.
The young man fingered the package in his hand nervously.
"I really couldn't, Cynthia," he repeated, ignoring the interruption.
"I'd like immensely to come another day, though. But to-day Mr. Spence
and I have a piece of work on hand--"
He paused, discomfited at meeting the astonished gaze of Willie's mild
blue eyes.
"Of course you know best," Cynthia replied, drawing in her chin with
some hauteur. "I shouldn't think of urging you."
"I'd be bully glad to come another day," reiterated Robert Morton,
fully conscious he had offended his fair guest, yet determined to stand
his ground. "Tell the affluent Roger to slide over in his racer
sometime when he has nothing better to do and get me."
"He will probably only be here for the week-end," retorted Cynthia
coldly.
"Sunday, then; why not Sunday? Mr. Spence and I do not work Sundays."
"All right, if you positively won't come to-day. But I don't see why
you can't come now and Sunday, too."
"I couldn't do it, dear lady."
"Well, Sunday then, if that is the earliest you can make it."
She smiled an adieu to Willie and Celestina, and with her little head
proudly set preceded Bob to her car. But although the great engine
throbbed and purred, it was some time before it left the gate and
flashed its way down the high road toward Belleport.
After it had gone and Bob was once more in the house, Celestina had a
score of questions with which to greet him. How remarkable it was that
the owner of the missing jewelry should be some one he knew! The
Galbraiths must be well-to-do. What was the brother like? Did he
favor his sister?
These and numberless other inquiries like them furnished Celestina with
conversation for the rest of the day. Willie, on the contrary, was
peculiarly silent, and although his furtive glance traveled at frequent
intervals over his young friend's face, he made no comment concerning
Miss Cynthia L. Galbraith and her silver buckle.
CHAPTER VIII
SHADOWS
In the meantime the two men resumed their labors in the shop, touching
shoulders before the bench where their tools lay. They planed and
chiselled and sawed together as before, but as they worked each was
conscious that a barrier of sudden reserve had sprung up between them,
obstructing the perfect confidence that had previously existed. At
first the old inventor tried to bridge this gulf with trivial jests,
but as these passed unnoticed he at length lapsed into silence. Now
and then, as he stole a look at his companion, he thought he detected
in the youthful face a suppressed nervousness and irritation that found
welcome vent in the hammer's vigorous blow. Nevertheless, as the
younger man vouchsafed no information regarding the morning's
adventure, Willie asked no questions.
He would have given a great deal to have satisfied himself about
Cynthia Galbraith. It was easily seen that her family were persons of
wealth and position with whom Robert Morton was on terms of the
greatest intimacy. It even demanded no very skilled psychologist to
perceive the girl's sentiment toward his guest, for Miss Galbraith was
a petulent, self-willed creature who did not trouble to conceal her
preferences. Her attitude was transparent as the day. But with what
feeling did Robert Morton regard her? That was the burning question
the little man longed to have answered.
Wearily he sighed. Alas, human nature was a frail, incalculable
phenomenon.
How was it likely a young man with his fortune to make would regard a
girl as rich and attractive as Cynthia Galbraith, especially if her
brother chanced to be his best friend and all her family reached forth
welcoming arms to him.
Willie was not a matchmaker. Had he been impugned with the accusation
he would have denied it indignantly: Nevertheless, he had been mixed up
in too many romances not to find the relation between the sexes a
problem of engrossing interest. Furthermore, of late he had been doing
a little private castle-building, the foundations of which now abruptly
collapsed into ruins at his feet. The cornerstone of this
dream-structure had been laid the day he had first seen Robert Morton
and Delight Hathaway together. What a well-mated pair they were! For
years it had been his unwhispered ambition to see his favorite happily
married to a man who was worthy of the priceless treasure.
The Brewster household was aging fast. Captain Jonas, Captain
Benjamin, and Captain Phineas were now old men; even Zenas Henry's hair
had thinned and whitened above his temples, and Abbie, once so
tireless, was becoming content to drop her cares on younger shoulders.
Yes, Wilton was growing old, thought the inventor sadly, and he and
Celestina were unquestionably keeping pace with the rest. In the
natural course of events, before many years Delight would be deprived
of her protectors and be left alone in the great world to fend for
herself. She was well able to do so, for she was resourceful and
capable and would never be forced to marry for a home as was many a
lonely woman. Nor would she ever come to want; the village would see
to that. Notwithstanding this certainty, however, he could not bear to
think of a time when there would be no one to stand between her and the
harsher side of life; no man who would count the championship a
privilege, an honor, his dearest duty.
Wilton had never offered a husband of the type pictured in Willie's
mind. The hamlet could boast of but few young men, and the greater
part of those who lingered within its borders had done so because they
lacked the ambition and initiative to hew out for themselves elsewhere
broader fields of activity. Those of ability had gravitated to the
colleges, the business schools, or gone to test their strength in the
city's marts of commerce. Who could blame them for not resting content
with baiting lobster pots and dredging for scallops? Were he a young
man with his path untrodden before him he would have been one of the
first to do the same, Willie confessed. Did he not constantly covet
their youth and opportunity? Nevertheless, praiseworthy as their
motive had been, the fact remained that nowhere in the village was
there a man the peer of Delight Hathaway. Rare in her girlish beauty,
rarer yet in her promise of womanhood, what a prize she would be for
him who had the fineness of fiber to appreciate the guerdon!
Willie was wont to attest that he himself was not a marrying man; yet
notwithstanding the assertion, deep down within the fastness of his
soul he had had his visions,--visions pure, exalted and characteristic
of his sensitively attuned nature. They were the exquisite secrets of
his life; the unfulfilled dreams that had kept him holy; a part of the
divine in him; echoes of hungers and longings that reached unsatisfied
into a world other than this. Earth had failed to consummate the loves
and ambitions of the dreamer. His had been a flattened, warped,
starved existence whose perfecting was not of this sphere. And as
without bitterness he reviewed the glories that had passed him by, he
prayed that these bounties might not also be denied her who, rounding
into the full splendor of her womanhood, was worthy of the best heaven
had to bestow.
From her childhood he had watched her virtues unfold and none of their
potentialities had gone unobserved by the quiet little old man.
Through the beauty of his own soul he had been enabled to translate the
beauties of another, until gradually Delight Hathaway had come to
symbolize for him universal woman, the prototype of all that was
purest, most selfless, most tender; most to be revered, watched over,
beloved. Yet for all his worship the girl remained for him very human,
a creature with bewitching and appealing ways. In the same spirit in
which he rejoiced in the tint of a rose's petal or the shell-like flush
of a cloud at dawn did he find pleasure in the crimson that colored her
cheek, in the perfection of her features, in the shadowy, fathomless
depths of her eyes. Father, brother, lover, artist, at her shrine he
offered up a composite devotion which sought only her happiness.
With such an attitude of mind to satisfy was it a marvel that in the
matter of selecting a husband for his divinity Willie was difficult to
please; or that he studied with a criticism quite as jealous as Zenas
Henry's own every male who crossed the girl's path?
Yet with all his idealism Willie was a keen observer of life, and from
the first moment of their meeting he had detected in Robert Morton
qualities more nearly akin to his standards than he had discovered in
any of the other outsiders who had come into the hamlet. There was,
for example, the son of the Farwells who owned the great colonial
mansion on the point,--Billy Farwell, with his racing car and his dogs
and his general air of elegance and idleness. Delight had known him
since she was a child. And there was Jasper Carlton, the scholarly
scientist, years the girl's senior, who annually came to board with the
Brewsters during the vacation months. Both of these men paid court to
the village beauty, Billy with a half patronizing, half audacious
assurance born of years of intimacy; and the professor with that
old-fashioned reserve and deference characteristic of the older
generation. There were days when the two caused Willie such
perturbation of spirit that he would willingly have knocked their heads
together or cheerfully have wrung their necks.
Delight unhesitatingly acknowledged that she liked both of them and
harmlessly coquetted first with the one, then with the other, until the
old inventor was at his wit's end to fathom which she actually favored
or whether she seriously favored either of them. Yet irreproachable as
were these suitors, to place a man of Bob Morton's attributes in the
same category with them seemed absurd. Why, he was head and shoulders
above them mentally, morally, physically,--from whichever angle one
viewed him. Moreover, blood will tell, and was he not of the fine old
Morton stock? Whatever the Carlton forbears might be, young Farwell's
ancestry was not an enviable one. Yes, Willie had settled Delight's
future to his entire satisfaction and for nights had been sleeping
peacefully, confident that with such a husband as Robert Morton her
happiness and good fortune would be assured.
And then, like a thunderbolt out of the heavens, had come this Cynthia
Galbraith with her fetching clothes, her affluence and her air of
proprietorship! By what right had she acquired her monopoly of Bob
Morton, and was its exclusiveness gratifying or irksome to its
recipient? Might not this strange young man, concerning whom Willie
was forced to own he actually knew nothing, be playing a double game,
and the frankness of his face belie his real nature? And was it not
possible that his annoyance and irritation were caused by having been
trapped in it?
Well, avowed Willie, he would see that Delight encountered this Don
Giovanni but seldom, at least until he gave a more trustworthy account
of himself than he had vouchsafed up to the present moment. Contrary
to the common law, the guest must be rated as guilty until he had
proved himself innocent. Yet as he darted a glance at the earnest
young face bending over the workbench Willie's conscience smote him and
he questioned whether he might not be doing his comrade a dire
injustice. The thought caused him to flush uncomfortably, and he
flushed still redder when Bob suddenly straightened up and met his eye.
Both men stood alert, held tensely by the same sound. It was the low
music of a girlish voice humming a snatch of song, and it was
accompanied by the soft crackling of the needles that carpeted the
grove of pine between the Spence and Brewster houses. In another
instant Delight Hathaway strolled slowly out of the wood and entered
the workshop. With her coming a radiance of sunshine seemed to flood
the shabby room. She nodded a greeting to Bob, then went straight to
Willie and, placing her hands affectionately on his shoulders, looked
down into his face. They made a pretty picture, the bent old man with
his russet cheeks and thin white hair, and the girl erect as an arrow
and beautiful as a young Diana.
The little inventor lifted his mild blue eyes to meet the haunting eyes
of hazel.
"Well, well, my dear," he said, as he covered one of her hands with his
own worn brown one, "so you have come for your buckle, have you? It is
all done, honey, an' good as the day when 'twas made. Bob has it in
his pocket for you this minute."
By a strange magic the truth and sunlight of the girl's presence had
for the time being dispelled all baser suspicions and Willie smiled
kindly at the man beside him.
Holding out the crisp white package, Robert Morton came forward.
Delight looked questioningly from the box with its immaculate paper and
neat pink string to its giver.
"He found he couldn't fix it himself," explained Willie, immediately
interpreting the interrogation. "Neither him or I were guns enough for
the job. So Bob got somebody he knew of to tinker it up."
"That was certainly very kind," returned Delight with gravity. "If you
will tell me what it cost I--"
Again the old man stepped into the breach.
"Oh, I figger 'twarn't much," said he with easy unconcern. "The feller
who did it was used to mendin' jewelry an' knew just how to set about
it, so it didn't put him out of his way none."
"Yes," echoed Bob, with a grateful smile toward Willie. "It made him
no trouble at all."
The two men watched the delicate fingers unfasten the package.
"See how nice 'tis," Willie went on. "You'd never know there was a
thing the matter with it."
"It's wonderful!" she cried.
Her pleasure put to flight the old inventor's last compunction at his
compromise with truth.
"I am so pleased, Mr. Morton!" she went on. "You are quite sure there
was no expense."
"Nothing to speak of. I'm glad you like it," murmured the young man.
"Indeed I do!"
She stretched the band of white leather round her waist and Bob noticed
how easily its clasp met.
"There!" exclaimed she, raising her hand in mocking imitation of a
military salute, "isn't that fine?"
Willie laughed with involuntary admiration at the gesture, and as for
Robert Morton he could have gone down on his knees before her and
kissed her diminutive white shoe.
The girl did not prolong the tableau. All too soon she relaxed from
rigidity into gaiety and came flitting to the work bench.
"What are you doing, Willie dear?" she asked. "You know you never have
secrets from me. What is this marvellous thing you are busy with?"
Before answering, Willie glanced mysteriously about.
"It's because I know you can keep secrets that I ain't afraid to trust
you with 'em," said he. "Bob an' I are workin' on the quiet at an idee
I was kitched with a day or two ago. It's a bigger scheme than most of
the ones I've tackled, an' it may not turn out to be anything at all;
still, Bob has studied boats an' knows a heap about 'em, an' he
believes somethin' can be made of it. But 'til our fish is hooked we
ain't shoutin' that we've caught one. If the contrivance works," went
on the little old man eagerly, "it will be a bonanza for Zenas Henry.
It's--" he lowered his voice almost to a whisper, "it's an idee to keep
motor-boats from gettin' snagged."
The words were scarcely out of his mouth before his listeners saw him
start and look apprehensively toward the door.
They were no longer alone. On the threshold of the workshop stood
Janoah Eldridge.
CHAPTER IX
A WIDENING OF THE BREACH
"So," piped Janoah, "that's what you're doin', is it, Willie Spence?
Well, you needn't 'a' been so all-fired still about it. I guessed as
much all the time." There was an acid flavor in the words. "Yes, I
knowed it from the beginnin' well as if I'd been here, even if you did
shut me out an' take this city feller in to help you in place of me.
Mebbe he has studied 'bout boats; but how do you know what he's up to?
How do you know, anyhow, who he is or where he came from? He says, of
course, that he's Tiny's nephew, an' he may be, fur all I can tell; but
what proof have you he ain't somebody else who's come here to steal
your ideas an' get money for 'em?"
There was a moment of stunned silence, as the barbs from his tongue
pierced the stillness.
Then Delight stepped in front of the interloper.
"How dare you, Janoah Eldridge!" she cried. "How dare you insult
Willie's friend and--and--mine! You've no right to speak so about Mr.
Morton."
Before her indignation Janoah quailed. In all his life he had never
before seen Delight Hathaway angry, and something in her flashing eyes
and flaming cheeks startled him.
"I--I--warn't meanin' to say 'twas actually so," mumbled he
apologetically. "Like as not the young man's 'xactly what he claims to
be. Still, Willie's awful gullible, an' there's times when a word of
warnin' ain't such a bad thing. I'm sorry if you didn't like it."
"I didn't like it, not at all," the girl returned, only slightly
mollified by his conciliatory tone. "If you are anything of a
gentleman you will apologize to Mr. Morton immediately."
"Ain't I just said I was sorry?" hedged the sheepish Janoah.
"Indeed, there is no need for anything further," Robert Morton
protested. "Perhaps, knowing me so little, it was only natural that he
should distrust me."
"It was neither natural nor courteous," came hotly from Delight, "and I
for one am mortified that any visitor to the village should receive
such treatment."
Then as if clearing her skirts of the offending Mr. Eldridge, she drew
herself to her full height and swept magnificently out the door. An
awkward silence followed her departure.
Robert Morton hesitated, glancing uneasily from Willie to Janoah,
scented a storm and, slipping softly from the shop, went in pursuit of
the retreating figure.
"For goodness sake, Janoah, whatever set you makin' a speech like
that?" Willie demanded, when the two were alone. "Have you gone plumb
crazy? The very notion of your lightin' into that innocent young
feller! What are you thinkin' of?"
"Mebbe he ain't so innocent as he seems," the accuser sneered.
The little old man faced him sharply.
"Come," he persisted, "let's have this thing out. What do you know
about him?"
"What do you?" retorted Janoah, evading the question.
The inventor paused, chagrined.
"You don't know nothin' an' I don't know nothin'," continued Janoah,
seizing the advantage he had gained. "Each of us is welcome to his
opinion, ain't he? It's a free country. You're all fur believin' the
chap's an angel out of heaven. You've swallered down every word he's
uttered like as if it was gospel truth, an' took him into your own
house same's if he was a relation. There's fish that gobble down bait
just that way. I ain't that kind. Young men don't bury themselves up
in a quiet spot like Wilton without they've got somethin' up their
sleeve."
Staring intently at his friend, he noted with satisfaction that
Willie's brow had clouded into a frown.
"Is it to be expected, I ask you now, is it to be expected that a
spirited young sprig of a college feller such as him relishes spendin'
his time workin' away in this shop day in an' day out? What's he doin'
it fur, tell me that? This world ain't a benevolent institution, an'
the folks in it don't go throwin' their elbow-grease away unless they
look to get somethin' out of it. This Morton boy has boned down here
like a slave. What's in it fur him?"
"Why, it's his vacation an'--"
"Vacation!" interrupted Janoah scornfully. "You call it a vacation, do
you, for him to be workin' away here with you? You honestly think he
hankers after doin' it?"
"He said he did."
"An' you believed it, I s'pose, same's you credited the rest of his
talk," jeered Mr. Eldridge. "Look out the winder, Willie Spence, an'
tell me, if you was twenty instead of 'most seventy, if you'd be
stayin' indoors a-carpenterin' these summer days when you could be
outside?"
He swept a hand dramatically toward the casement and in spite of
himself the old man obeyed his injunction and looked.
A dome blue as larkspur arched the sky and to its farthest bound the
sea, reflecting its azure tints, flashed and sparkled as if set with
stars of gold. Along the shore where glittered reaches of hard white
sand and a gentle breeze tossed into billows the salt grass edging the
margin of the little creeks, fishermen launching their dories called to
one another, their voices floating upward on the still air with musical
clearness.
"Would you be puttin' in your vacation a-workin' all summer, Willie, if
you was the age of that young man?" repeated Janoah.
"He ain't here for all summer," protested the unhappy inventor,
catching at a straw. "He's only goin' to stay a little while."
"He was here fur over night at first, warn't he?" inquired the
tormentor. "Then it lengthened into a week; an' the Lord only knows
now how much longer he's plannin' to hang round the place. Besides, if
he's only makin' a short visit, it's less likely than ever he'd want to
put in the whole of it tinkerin' with you. He'd be goin' about seein'
Wilton, sailin', fishin', swimmin' or clammin', like other folks do
that come here fur the summer, if he was a normal human bein'. But has
he been anywheres yet? No, sir! I've had my weather eye out, an' I
can answer for it that the feller ain't once poked his head out of this
shop. What's made him so keen fur stayin' in Wilton an' workin'?"
Willie did not answer, but he took a great bandanna with a flaming
border of scarlet from his pocket and mopped his forehead nervously.
"That young chap," resumed Janoah, holding up a grimy finger which he
shook impressively at the wretched figure opposite, "is here for one of
two reasons. You can like 'em or not, but they're true. He's either
here to steal your ideas from you, or he's got his eye on Delight
Hathaway."
He saw his victim start violently.
"Mebbe it's the one, mebbe it's the other; I ain't sayin'," announced
Janoah with malicious pleasure. "It may even be both reasons put
together. He's aimin' fur some landin' place, you can be certain of
that, an' I'm warnin yer as a friend to look out fur him, that's all."
"I--I--don't believe it," burst out the little inventor, his benumbed
faculties beginning slowly to assemble themselves. "Why, there ain't a
finer, better-spoken young man to be found than Bob Morton."
Janoah caught up the final phrase with derision.
"The better spoken he is the more watchin' he'll bear," remarked he.
"There's many a villain with an oily gift of gab."
"I'll not believe it!" Willie reiterated.
Mr. Eldridge shrugged his shoulders.
"Take it or leave it," he said. "You're welcome to your own way. Only
don't say I didn't warn yer."
Flinging this parting shot backward into the room, Janoah Eldridge
passed out into the rose-scented sunshine.
With a sad look in his eyes Willie let him go, watching the tall form
as it strode waist-high through the brakes and sweet fern that patched
the meadow. It was his first real quarrel with Janoah. Since boyhood
they had been friends, the gentleness of the little inventor bridging
the many disagreements that had arisen between them. Now had come this
mammoth difference, a divergence of standard too vital to be smoothed
over by a gloss of cajolery. Willie was angry through every fiber of
his being. Slowly it seeped into his consciousness that Janoah's
fundamental philosophy and his own were at odds; their attitude of mind
as antagonistic as the poles. Against trust loomed suspicion, against
generosity narrowness, against optimism pessimism. Janoah believed the
worst of the individual while he, Willie, reason as he might,
inherently believed the best. One creed was the fruit of a jealous and
envious personality that rejoiced rather than grieved over the
limitations of our human clay; the other was a result of that charity
_that beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things_,
because of a divine faith in the God in man.
For a long time Willie stood there thinking, his gaze fixed upon the
gently swaying plumage of the pines. The shock of his discovery left
him suddenly feeling very sad and very much alone. It was as if he had
buried the friend of half a century. Yet even to bring Janoah back he
could not retract the words he had uttered or exchange the light he
followed for Janoah's sinister beckonings. In spite of a certain
reasonableness in the pessimist's logic; in spite of circumstances he
was incapable of explaining; in spite, even, of Cynthia Galbraith, a
latent belief in Robert Morton's integrity crystallized into certainty,
and he rose to his feet freed of the doubts that had previously
assailed him.
At the instant of this emancipation the young man himself entered.
What had passed during the interval since he had gone out of the
workshop Willie could only surmise, but it had evidently been of
sufficiently inspiring a character to bring into his countenance a
radiance almost supernatural in its splendor. Nevertheless he did not
speak but stood immovable before the little old inventor as if awaiting
a judge's decree, the glory fading from his eyes and a half-veiled
anxiety stealing into them.
Willie smiled and, reaching up, placed his hands on the broad shoulders
that towered opposite.
"I'm sorry, Bob," he affirmed with a sweetness as winning as a woman's.
"You mustn't mind what Jan said. He's gettin' old an' a mite crabbed,
an' he's kinder foolish about me, mebbe. I wouldn't 'a' had him hurt
your feelin's--"
Robert Morton caught the expression of pain in the troubled face and
cut the apology short.
"It's all right, Mr. Spence," he cried. "Don't give it another
thought. So long as you remain my friend I don't care what Mr.
Eldridge thinks. We'll pass it off as jealousy and let it go at that."
The old man tried to smile, but the corners of his mouth drooped and he
sighed instead. To have Janoah's weaknesses thus nakedly set forth by
another was a very different thing from recognizing them himself, and
instinctively his loyalty rose in protest.
"Mebbe 'twas jealousy," he replied. "Folks have always stood out that
Janoah was jealous. But somehow I'd rather think 'twas tryin' to look
after me an' my affairs that misled him. S'pose we call it a sort of
slab-sided friendliness."
"We'll call it anything you like," assented Bob, with a happy laugh.
This time Willie laughed also.
"So she stood by you, did she?" queried he with quick understanding.
"Yes."
"'Twas like her."
"It was like both of you."
The old man raised a hand in protest against the gratitude the remark
implied.
"Delight ain't often wrong; she's a fair dealer." Then he added
significantly, "Them as ain't fair with her deserve no salvation."
"Hanging would be too good for the man who was not square with a girl
like that," came from Robert Morton with an emphasis unmistakable in
its sincerity.
CHAPTER X
A CONSPIRACY
On Sunday morning, when a menacing east wind whipped the billows into
foam and a breath of storm brooded in the air, the Galbraiths' great
touring car rolled up to Willie's cottage, and from it stepped not only
Robert Morton's old college chum, Roger Galbraith, but also his father,
a finely built, middle-aged man whose decisive manner and quick speech
characterized the leader and dictator.
He was smooth-shaven after the English fashion and from beneath shaggy
iron-gray brows a pair of dark eyes, piercing in their intensity,
looked out. The face was lined as if the stress of living had drawn
its muscles into habitual tensity, and except when a smile relieved the
setness of the mouth his countenance was stern to severity. His son,
on the other hand, possessed none of his father's force of personality.
Although his features were almost a replica of those of the older man,
they lacked strength; it was as if the second impression taken from the
type had been less clear-cut and positive. The eyes were clear rather
than penetrating, the mouth and chin handsome but mobile; even the
well-rounded physique lacked the rugged qualities that proclaimed its
development to have been the result of a Spartan combat with the world
and instead bore the more artificial sturdiness acquired from sports
and athletics.
Nevertheless Roger Galbraith, if not the warrior his progenitor had
been, presented no unmanly appearance. Neither self-indulgence nor
effeminacy branded him. In fact, there was in his manner a certain
magnetism and warmth of sympathy that the elder man could not boast,
and it was because of this asset he had never wanted for friends and
probably never would want for them. Through the talisman of charm he
would exact from others the service which the more autocratic nature
commanded.
Yet in spite of the opposition of their personalities, Robert Morton
cherished toward both father and son a sincere affection which differed
only in the quality of the response the two men called forth. Mr.
Galbraith he admired and revered; Roger he loved.
Had he but known it, each of the Galbraiths in their turn esteemed
Robert Morton for widely contrasting reasons. The New York financier
found in him a youth after his own heart,--a fine student and hard
worker, who had fought his way to an education because necessity
confronted him with the choice of going armed or unarmed into life's
fray. Although comfortably off, Mr. Morton senior was a man of limited
income whose children had been forced to battle for what they had
wrested from fortune. Success had not come easily to any of them, and
the winning of it had left in its wake a self-reliance and independence
surprisingly mature. Ironically enough, this power to fend for himself
which Mr. Galbraith so heartily endorsed and respected in Bob was the
very characteristic of which he had deprived his own boy, the vast
fortune the capitalist had rolled up eliminating all struggle from
Roger's career. Every barrier had been removed, every thwarting force
had been brought into abeyance, and afterward, with an inconsistency
typical of human nature, the leveler of the road fretted at his son's
lack of aggressiveness, his eyes, ordinarily so hawklike in their
vision, blinded to the fact that what his son was he had to a great
extent made him, and if the product caused secret disappointment he had
no one to thank for it but himself. Instead his reasoning took the
bias that the younger man, having been given every opportunity, should
logically have increased the Galbraith force of character rather than
have diminished it, and very impatient was he that such had not proved
to be the case.
Robert Morton was much more akin to the Galbraith stock, the financier
argued. He had all the dog-like persistency, the fighter's love of the
game, the courage that will not admit defeat. Although he would not
have confessed it, Mr. Galbraith would have given half his fortune to
have interchanged the personalities of the two young men. Could Roger
have been blessed with Bob's attributes, the dream of his life would
have been fulfilled. Money was a potent slave. In the great man's
hands it had wrought a magician's marvels. But this miracle, alas, it
was powerless to accomplish. Roger was his son, his only son, whom he
adored with instinctive passion; for whom he coveted every good gift;
and in whose future the hopes of his life were bound up. Long since he
had abandoned expecting the impossible; he must take the boy as he was,
rejoicing that Heaven had sent him as good a one. Yet notwithstanding
this philosophy, Mr. Galbraith never saw the two young men together
that the envy he stifled did not awaken, and the question rise to his
lips:
"Why could I not have had such a son?"
The interrogation clamored now as he came up the walk to the doorway
where Robert Morton was standing.
"Well, my boy, I'm glad to see you," exclaimed he with heartiness.
"You are looking fit as a racer."
"And feeling so, Mr. Galbraith," smiled Bob. "You are looking well
yourself."
"Never was better in my life."
As he stood still, sweeping his keen gaze over his surroundings, a
telegraphic glance of greeting passed between the two classmates.
"How are you, old man?" said Roger.
"Bully, kipper. It's great to see you again," was the reply.
That was all, but they did not need more to assure each other of their
friendship.
"You have a wonderful location here, Bob," observed Mr. Galbraith who
had been studying the view. "I never saw anything finer. What a site
for a hotel!"
Robert Morton could not but smile at the characteristic comment of the
man of finance.
"You would have trouble rooting Mr. Spence out of this spot, I'm
afraid," said he.
"Mr. Spence?"
"He is my host. My aunt, Miss Morton, is his housekeeper."
Robert Morton had learned never to waste words when talking with Mr.
Galbraith.
"I see. I should be glad to meet your aunt and Mr. Spence."
"I know they would like to meet you too, sir. They are just inside.
Won't you come in?"
Leading the way, Bob threw open the door into the little sitting room.
In anticipation of the visit Celestina had arrayed herself in a fresh
print dress and ruffled apron and had compelled Willie to replace his
jumper with a suit of homespun and flatten his locks into water-soaked
rigidity. By the exchange both persons had lost a certain
picturesqueness which Bob could not but deplore. Nevertheless the fact
did not greatly matter, for it was not toward them that the capitalist
turned his glance. Instead his swiftly moving eyes traveled with one
sweep over the cobweb of strings that enmeshed the interior and without
regard for etiquette he blurted out:
"Heavens! What's all this?"
The remark, so genuine in its amazement, might under other conditions
have provoked resentment but now it merely raised a laugh.
"I don't wonder you ask, sir," replied Willie, stepping forward
good-humoredly. "'Tain't a common sight, I'll admit. We get used to
it here an' think nothin' about it; but I reckon it must strike
outsiders as 'tarnal queer."
"What are you trying to do?" queried the capitalist, still too much
interested to heed conventionalities.
Simply and with artless naïvete Willie explained the significance of
the strings while the New Yorker listened, and as the old man told his
story it was apparent that Mr. Galbraith was not only amused but was
vastly interested.
"I say, Mr. Spence, you should have been an inventor," he exclaimed,
when the tale was finished.
He saw a wistful light come into the aged face.
"I mean," he corrected hastily, "you should have a workshop with all
the trappings to help you carry out your schemes."
"Oh, Mr. Spence has a workshop," Robert Morton interrupted. "The
nicest kind of a one."
"Would you like to see it?" inquired Willie.
"I should, very much."
"I'm afraid it's no place to take you, sir," objected Celestina,
horrified at the suggestion. "It ain't been swept out since the
deluge. Willie won't have it cleaned. He says he'd never be able to
find anything again if it was."
Mr. Galbraith laughed.
"Workshops do not need cleaning, do they, Mr. Spence?" said he. "I
remember the chaos my father's tool-house always was in; it never was
in order and we all liked it the better because it wasn't."
Celestina sighed and turned away.
"Ain't it just the irony of fate," murmured she to Bob, "that after
slickin' up every room in the house so'st it would be presentable,
Willie should tow them folks from New York out into the woodshed? I
might 'a' saved myself the trouble."
Robert Morton slipped a comforting arm round her ample waist.
"Never you mind, Aunt Tiny," he whispered. "The Galbraiths have rooms
enough of their own to look at; but they haven't a workshop like
Willie's."
He patted her arm sympathetically and then, giving her a reassuring
little squeeze to console her, followed his guests.
It had not crossed his mind until he went in pursuit of them that if
they visited the shop they must perforce be brought face to face with
Willie's latest invention still in its embryo state; and it was evident
that in the pride of entertaining such distinguished strangers the
little old man had also forgotten it, for as Bob entered he caught
sight of him fumbling awkwardly with a piece of sailcloth snatched up
in a hurried attempt to conceal from view this last child of his
genius. He had not been quick enough, however, to elude the
capitalist's sharp scrutiny, and before he could prevent discovery the
eager eyes had lighted on the unfinished model on the bench.
"What are you up to here?" demanded Richard Galbraith.
There was no help for it. Willie never juggled with the truth, and
even if he had been accustomed to do so it would have taken a quicker
witted charlatan than he to evade such an alert questioner. Therefore
in another moment he had launched forth on a full exposition of the
latest notion that had laid hold upon his fancy.
Mr. Galbraith listened until the gentle drawling voice had ceased.
"By Jove!" he ejaculated. "You've got an idea here. Did you know it?"
The inventor smiled.
"Bob an' I kinder thought we had," returned he modestly.
"Bob is helping you?"
"Oh, I'm only putting in an oar," the young man hastened to say. "The
plan was entirely Mr. Spence's. I am simply working out some of the
details."
"Bob knows a good deal more about boats than perhaps he'll own," Mr.
Galbraith asserted to Willie. "I fancy you've found that out already.
You are fortunate to have his aid."
"Almighty fortunate," Willie agreed; then, glancing narrowly at his
visitor, he added: "Then you think there's some likelihood that a
scheme such as this might work. 'Tain't a plumb crazy notion?"
"Not a bit of it. It isn't crazy at all. On the contrary, it should
be perfectly workable, and if it proved so, there would be a mine of
money in it."
"You don't say!"
It was plain that the comment contained less enthusiasm for the
prospective fortune than for the indorsement of the idea.
The New Yorker, however, said nothing more about the invention. He
browsed about the shop with unfeigned pleasure, poking in among the
cans of paint, oil, and varnish, rattling the nails in the dingy
cigar-boxes, and examining the tools and myriad primitive devices
Willie had contrived to aid him in his work.
"I was brought up in a shop like this," he at length exclaimed, "and I
haven't been inside such a place since. It carries me back to my
boyhood."
A strangely softened mood possessed him, and when at last he stepped
out on the grass he lingered a moment beneath the arch of grapevine and
looked back into the low, sun-flecked interior of the shop as if loath
to leave it.
"I am glad to have seen you, Mr. Spence," he said, "and Miss Morton,
too. Bob couldn't be in a pleasanter spot than this. I hope sometime
you will let me come over again and visit you while we are in
Belleport."
"Sartain, sartain, sir!" cried Willie with delight. "Tiny an' me would
admire to have you come whenever the cravin' strikes you. We're
almighty fond of Bob, an' any friends of his will always be welcome."
The little old man went with them to the car and loitered to watch them
roll away.
"You'll see me back to-night," called Bob from the front seat.
"Not to-night, to-morrow," Roger corrected laughingly.
"Well, to-morrow then," smiled the young man.
The engine pulsed, there was a quick throb of energy, and off they
sped. Almost without a sound the motor shot along the sand of the
Harbor Road and whirled into the pine-shaded thoroughfare that led
toward Belleport.
"A fine old fellow that!" mused Mr. Galbraith aloud. "What a pity he
could not have had his chance in life."
Bob nodded.
"I suppose he hasn't a cent to carry out any of these schemes of his."
"No, I am afraid he hasn't."
The financier lit a cigar and puffed at it in thoughtful silence.
"That motor-boat idea of his now--why, if it could be perfected and
boomed properly, it would make his fortune."
"Do you think so?"
"I know it."
Again the humming of the engine was the only sound.
"Do you know, Bob, I've half a mind to get Snelling down here and set
him to work at that job. What should you say?"
"Snelling? You mean the expert from your ship-building plant?"
"Yes. Wouldn't it be a good plan?"
Robert Morton hesitated.
"There is no question that a man of Mr. Snelling's ability would be a
tremendous asset in handling such a proposition," he agreed cautiously.
"Snelling could drop in as if to see you," went on the capitalist.
"You could fix up all that so there would not be any need of the old
fellow suspecting who he was. Once there he could pitch in and help
the scheme along. It is going to be quite an undertaking before you
get through with it, and the more hands there are to carry it out, the
better, in my opinion."
"Yes, it is going to be much more of a job than I realized at first,"
Bob admitted. "It certainly would be a great help to have Mr.
Snelling's aid. But could you spare him? And would he want to come
and duff in on this sort of an enterprise?"
"If I telegraphed Snelling to come he would come; and when here he
would do whatever he was told," replied Mr. Galbraith, bringing his
lips sharply together.
"It's very kind of you!"
"Pooh! the idea amuses me. I'll provide any materials you may need,
too. Snelling shall have an order to that effect so that he can call
on the Long Island plant for anything he wants."
"That will be splendid, Mr. Galbraith; but where do you come in?"
"I'll have my fun, never you fear," returned the capitalist. "In the
first place I'd like nothing better than to do that little old fellow a
good turn. There is something pathetic about him. Sometimes it is
hard to believe that life gives everybody a square deal, isn't it?
That man, for instance. He has the brain and the creative impulse, but
he has been cheated of his opportunity. I should enjoy giving him a
boost. Occasionally I fling away a small sum on a whim that catches my
fancy; now its German marks, now an abandoned farm. This time it shall
be Mr. Willie Spence and his motor-boat idee."
He laughed.
"I appreciate it tremendously," Bob said.
"There, there, we won't speak of it any more," the elder man protested,
cutting him short. "I will telegraph Snelling and you may arrange the
rest. The old inventor isn't to suspect a thing--remember."
"No, sir."
"That is all, then."
With a finality Robert Morton dared not transgress, the older man
lapsed into silence and Bob had no choice but to suppress his gratitude
and resign himself to listening to the rhythmic beat of the
automobile's great engine.
CHAPTER XI
THE GALBRAITH HOUSEHOLD
The estate the Galbraiths had leased stood baldly upon a rise
overlooking the sea in the midst of the fashionable colony adjacent to
Wilton, and was one of those blots which the city luxury-lover affixes
to a community whose keynote is simplicity. Its expanse of veranda,
its fluttering green and white awnings, its giant tubs of blossoming
hydrangeas, to say nothing of its Italian garden with rose-laden
pergolas, were as out of place as if Saint Peter's itself had been
dropped down into a tiny New England fishing hamlet.
The house, it is true, did not lack beauty, for it was well
proportioned and gracefully planned, and there was no denying that one
found, perhaps, more comfort on its screened and shaded piazzas than
was to be enjoyed on Willie Spence's unprotected doorstep.
Nevertheless, there was too much of everything about it: too many
rambler roses, too many rustic baskets and mighty palms; too many urns,
and stone benches, and sundials and fountains. Still, as the car
stopped at the door, the great wicker chairs with their scarlet
cushions presented a gay picture and so, too, did Mrs. Galbraith and
Cynthia who immediately rose from a breezy corner and came forward.
The older woman was tall and handsome and in her youth must have
possessed great beauty; even now she carried with a spoiled air almost
girlish the costly gowns and jewels that her husband, proud of her
looks, lavished upon her. She had a languid grace very fascinating in
its indifference and spoke with a pretty little accent that echoed of
the South. For all her attractiveness, Cynthia could not compare in
charm with her mother whose femininity lured all men toward her as does
a magnet steel.
Bob leaped from the car almost before it had come to a stop and went to
her side, bending low over her heavily ringed hand.
"We're so glad to see you, Bobbie!" she smiled. "The very nicest thing
that could have happened was to find you here."
"It is indeed a delightful surprise for me," Robert Morton answered.
"How are you, Cynthia?"
Cynthia, who was standing in the background, frowned.
"You've been long enough getting here," declared she petulantly.
"Where on earth have you been? We decided you must have got stalled on
the road."
"Oh, no," interrupted her father, coming up the steps. "We made the
run over and back without a particle of trouble. What delayed us was
that we stopped to visit with Bob's aunt and the old gentleman with
whom he is staying. Such a quaint character, Maida! You really should
see him. I had all I could do to tear myself away from the place."
His wife raised her delicately penciled brows.
"We do not often see you so enthusiastic, Richard."
"They are charming people, I assure you. I don't wonder Bob prefers
staying over there to coming here," chuckled the financier.
"Oh, I say, Mr. Galbraith--" began Bob; but his host interrupted him.
"That is a rather rough accusation, isn't it?" declared he, "and it's
not quite fair, either. To tell the truth, Bob's deep in some
important work."
There was a light, scornful laugh from Cynthia.
"He is, my lady. You needn't be so incredulous," her brother put in.
"Bob is busy with a boat-building project. Dad's got interested in it,
too."
Cynthia pursed her lips with a little grimace.
"Ask him if you don't believe it," persisted Roger.
"Yes," went on Mr. Galbraith, "that old chap over at Wilton has an idea
that may make all our fortunes, Bob's included."
There was a general laugh.
"Well," pouted Cynthia, glancing down at the toe of her immaculate
buckskin shoe, "I call it very tiresome for Bob to have to work all his
vacation."
"I don't have to," Robert Morton objected. "I am simply doing it for
fun. Can't you understand the sport of--"
"No, she can't," her brother asserted. "Cynthia never sees any fun in
working."
"Roger!" Mrs. Galbraith drawled gently.
"Well, I don't like to work," owned the girl with delicious audacity.
"I detest it. Why should I pretend to like it when I don't?"
"Cynthia is one of the lilies of the field; she's just made for
ornament," called Roger over his shoulder as he passed into the house.
"There is something in being ornamental, isn't there, daughter?" said
Mr. Galbraith, dropping into a chair and lighting a fresh cigar.
She was decorative, there was no mistake about that. The skirt of
heavy white satin clung to her slight figure in faultless lines, and
her sweater of a rose shade was no more lovely in tint than was the
faint flush in her cheeks. Every hair of the elaborate coiffure had
been coaxed skilfully into place by a hand that understood the cunning,
and wherever nature had been guilty of an oversight art had supplied
the defect. Yes, Cynthia Galbraith was quite a perfect product,
thought Bob, as he surveyed her there beneath the awning.
"I thought Madam Lee was here," the young man presently remarked, as he
glanced about.
Mrs. Galbraith's face clouded.
"Mother is not well to-day," she answered. "Careful as we are of her
she has in some way taken cold. She is not really ill, but we thought
it wise for her to keep her room. She is heartbroken not to be
downstairs and I promised that after she had had her luncheon and nap
you would go up and see her."
"Surely!" Robert Morton cried emphatically.
"Mother is so devoted to you, Bobbie," went on Mrs. Galbraith.
"Sometimes I think she cares much more for you than she does for her
own grandchildren."
"Nonsense! Of course she doesn't."
"I'm not so certain," laughed the elder woman lightly. "You know she
is tremendously strong in her likes and dislikes. All the Lees are.
We're a headstrong family where our affections are concerned. You,
Bob, are the apple of her eye."
"She has always been mighty kind to me," the young man affirmed
soberly. "I never saw my own grandmothers; both of them died before I
came into the world. So, you see, if it were not for borrowing Roger's
and Cynthia's, I should be quite bereft."
The party rose and moved through the cool hall into the dining room.
A delicious luncheon, perfectly served by a velvet-footed maid and the
old colored butler, followed, and there was a great deal of
conversation, a great deal of reminiscing and a great deal of laughter.
Cynthia complained that the claret cup was too sweet and that the ices
were not frozen enough and had much to say of the ice cream at
Maillard's.
"But you are far from Maillard's now, my dear," her mother remarked,
"and you must make the best of things."
"Being on Cape Cod you are almighty lucky to get any ice cream at all,"
announced Roger with brotherly zest.
"Roger, why will you tease your sister so? You hector Cynthia every
moment you are in the house."
"Oh, she knows I don't mean it," grinned Roger. "I just have to take
the starch out of her now and then, don't I, Cynthia Ann?"
"Roger!" fretted his sister. "I wish you wouldn't call me Cynthia
_Ann_! I can't imagine why you've taken to doing so lately."
"Chiefly because you do not like it, my dear," was the retort. "If I
were not so sure of getting a rise out of you every time, perhaps I
might be tempted to stop."
"You children quarrel like a pair of apes," Mr. Galbraith said. "If I
did not know that underneath you were perfectly devoted to each other,
I should be worried to death about you."
"You needn't waste any worry on Cynthia Ann and me, Dad," Roger
declared. "Bad as she is, she's the best sister I've got, and I rather
like her in spite of her faults."
A smile passed between the two.
"You've some faults of your own, remember," observed the girl, with a
grimace.
"Not a one, mademoiselle, not a one! I swear it," was the instant
retort. "Coming into the family first, I picked the cream of the Lee
and Galbraith qualities and gave you what was left."
"I command you two to stop your bickering," Mr. Galbraith said at last.
"You are wasting the whole luncheon, squabbling. You'd much better be
deciding what you are going to do with Bob for the rest of the day."
"I thought I'd take him out in the knockabout," Roger suggested. "That
is, if he would like to go. The tide will be just right and there is a
fine breeze."
"You may take him if you will get him home at tea time," Mrs. Galbraith
said. "Your grandmother has set her heart on seeing him this afternoon
and you know she retires soon after dinner."
"You wouldn't have any time to sail at all, Roger," put in Cynthia.
"Especially if you should get stuck on a bar as you did the other day."
"We should have two hours."
"Why don't you take the launch, Roger?" his mother inquired.
"And get snagged in the eel grass--not on your life!"
"Bob and Mr. Spence are going to do away with all that eel grass, you
know," called his father, sauntering out of doors.
"I'll wait until they do, then," was the grim retort.
"I should think Bob would a great deal rather go for a motor-ride,"
Cynthia ventured, her eyes fixed impersonally on the landscape.
"I suppose you'd like to cart him off in your car."
"It doesn't make any difference whose car he goes in, does it?"
"Well, ra--_ther_! If he goes in yours there's no room for me; if he
goes in mine there is no room for you. That's the difference."
"Children, do stop tearing Bob to fragments," lisped Mrs. Galbraith
with some amusement. "If you keep on pulling him to pieces he won't go
anywhere. Now Roger, you take Bob sailing and have a good visit with
him, and bring him back so he can have tea with your grandmother at
five; this evening the rest of us will have our chance to see him."
She did not look at Cynthia, but with a woman's forethought she
remembered that the verandas were roomy and that the moon was full soon
after dinner. Cynthia remembered it too and smiled.
"Yes, go ahead, Roger," she called. "Take Bob round the bay. It is a
lovely sail and as he hasn't been here before he will enjoy it."
* * * * * *
It was only a little past five when the two young men returned, a glow
of health and pleasure on their faces.
"Now, Bobbie, do make haste," Mrs. Galbraith said, coming to meet him.
"Mother's tea has already gone up, and you know how she detests
waiting. Her maid is there in the hall to show you the way. Hurry
along, dear boy."
Robert Morton needed no second bidding and at once followed the
middle-aged English woman up the staircase and into a small,
chintz-hung sitting room that looked out on the sea.
At the farther end of it, seated before a low tea table, was a stately,
white-haired lady, very erect, very handsome and very elegantly dressed
in a gown of soft black material. At the neck, which was turned away,
she wore a fichu of filmy lace tinted by time to a creamy tone and held
in place by an old-fashioned medallion of seed pearls. White ruffles
at the wrists drooped over her delicately veined hands and showed only
the occasional flash of a ring and her perfectly manicured finger tips.
Summer or winter, fair weather or foul, Madam Lee never varied this
costume, and it seemed to possess some measure of its owner's eternal
youth, for it was always fresh and its lustrous folds always swept the
ground in the same dignified fashion. Indeed for those who knew Madam
Lee to think of her in any other guise would have been impossible. Her
silvered hair was parted and rippled over her forehead to her ears
where it was slightly puffed and caught back with combs of shell, and
from beneath it two little black eyes peered out with a bird's
alertness of gaze. Although age had claimed her strength, it was
evident from the woman's vivacious expression that she had lost none of
her interest in life and as she now sat before the silver-laden tea
table there was a girlish anticipation in her eager pose.
"Ah, you scamp!" cried she, when she heard her visitor's footstep in
the upper hall, "I have been waiting for you a full five minutes. I
don't wait for every one, I would have you know. Come here and give an
account of yourself."
The young man bent and softly touched her cheek with his lips.
She put out her hand and let it linger affectionately in his as he
dropped into the chair beside her.
"I can't begin to tell you how glad I am to see you, Bob," she went on,
in a voice soft and exquisitely modulated. "We had no idea you were on
the Cape. But for that jeweler's stupidity we should have thought you
had gone west long ago. Considering what good friends you and Roger
are, you are the worst of correspondents; and you never write to me."
"I know it," owned Robert Morton with disarming honesty. "It's beastly
of me."
"No, dear. On the contrary it is very like a man," contradicted Madam
Lee with a pretty little laugh. "However, I am not going to scold you
about it now. I have seen too many men in my day. First let me pour
your tea. Then you shall tell me all that you have been doing. I hear
you are visiting a new aunt whom you have just unearthed."
"Yes."
"How do you like her?"
Bob chuckled at the characteristic directness of the question.
"Very much indeed."
"That's nice. Since relatives are not of our choosing, it is pleasant
to find they are not bores."
Again the young man smiled.
"And this old gentleman for whom she keeps house--what of him?"
It was plain Madam Lee had all the facts well in mind.
As best he could Bob sketched Willie in a few swift strokes.
"Humph! An interesting old fellow. I should like to see him,"
declared Madam Lee when the narrative was done. "And so you are
working on this motor-boat with him?"
"Yes."
"How long have you been here?"
"Ten days."
"And when do you go back to your family?"
"I don't quite know," hesitated the big fellow. "There is still a
great deal to do on this invention we are working at."
His companion eyed him shrewdly.
"And the girl--where does she live?" she asked, reaching for Bob's cup.
He colored with surprise.
"The girl?" he repeated, disconcerted.
"Of course there is a girl," went on the woman.
"What makes you think so?"
"Oh, Bob, Bob! Isn't there always a girl on every young man's horizon?"
"I suppose so--generally speaking," he confessed with a laugh.
"Suppose we abandon the abstract term and come down to this girl in
particular," his interrogator said.
"Why are you so sure there is one?" he hedged teasingly.
"My dear boy, how absurd of you!" returned the sharp-eyed old lady with
a twinkle of merriment. "In the first place, all the motor-boats in
the world couldn't keep a young man like you chained up indefinitely in
a sleepy little Cape Cod village. Besides, Cynthia told me."
"Cynthia? She doesn't know anything about it."
"That is precisely how I knew," piped Madam Lee triumphantly.
"What did she tell you?"
"She did not tell me anything," was the reply. "She simply came back
from Wilton in a wretched humor and when I inquired of her whether she
had her buckle back again, she answered with such spirit that there was
no mistaking its cause. Of course she had the wit to know you were not
wearing a belt of that pattern; nor your aunt nor Mr. Spence, either."
"The belt and buckle belong to a girl--"
"A girl! You surprise me," she murmured derisively.
Robert Morton waited a moment, then, without heeding her mischievous
comment, added gravely:
"A friend of Mr. Spence's."
"I see."
The old lady smoothed the satin folds of her gown thoughtfully before
she spoke, then continued with extreme gentleness:
"Tell me all about her."
"I couldn't do that," declared Robert Morton. "There aren't words
enough to give you any idea how lovely she is or how good."
Nevertheless, because he had so eager and sympathetic a listener, he at
length began shyly to unfold the story of Delight Hathaway's strange
life. He told it reverently and with a lover's tenderness, touching on
the girl's tragic advent into the hamlet of Wilton, on her beauty, and
on her poverty.
"What a romance!" exclaimed Madam Lee meditatively, when the tale was
done. "And they know nothing of the child's previous history?"
"Next to nothing. The girl's mother died when she was born and the
little tot lived all her life aboard ship with her father."
"Had neither the father nor mother any relatives?"
"Apparently not. The mate of the ship said he had never heard the
Captain mention any."
"Poor little waif! And these people who took her in have been kind to
her? She is fond of them?"
"She adores them!"
The old lady stirred her tea absently.
"But, Bob dear, has the girl any education?" she inquired presently.
"That is the miracle of it!" ejaculated he. "When she was small, one
of the summer residents, a Mrs. Farwell, who had a tutor for her son,
suggested the two children have their lessons together. As a
consequence the girl is a fine French scholar; has read broadly both
foreign and English literature; is familiar with ancient and modern
history and mathematics; and recently a professor from Harvard, who has
boarded summers with the family, has instructed her in the natural
sciences. She is much better educated than most of the society girls
I've met."
"Than my granddaughter Cynthia, I dare say," was the quick comment.
"Oh--eh--"
"You need not try to be polite, Bob. I am not proud of Cynthia's
education," asserted Madam Lee. "For all her wealth and all her
opportunity to make herself accomplished she has never mastered one
thing. If she could even sew well or keep house I should rejoice. But
she can't. As for languages, music, art--bah! She is as ignorant as
if she had been brought up in a home in the slums. A thin society
veneer such as the typical fashionable boarding-school washes over the
outside and a little helter-skelter reading and travel is all Cynthia
has acquired. A real education entailed too much effort. So she is
what we see her,--a thoughtless, extravagant, pleasure-seeking
creature. She is a great disappointment to me, a great disappointment!"
Robert Morton did not reply.
"Come now, Bob. Why don't you agree with me?"
"I am fond of Cynthia," said the young man in a low tone.
"I know you are. Sometimes I have worried lest you were too fond of
her."
There was no response.
"Cynthia is not the wife for you, my dear boy, and never was. I am
older than you and I know life. Moreover, I love you very dearly.
Were you of my own blood I believe I could not care more deeply for you
than I do. It would break my heart to see you make a foolish
marriage--to see yo
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