E-text prepared by Al Haines
Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustration.
See 18902-h.htm or 18902-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/8/9/0/18902/18902-h/18902-h.htm)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/8/9/0/18902/18902-h.zip)
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.