What the Storm Did
Next morning nearly everyone in the town was talking about the storm.
Belle said what with the booming of the waves against the breakwater and
the wind rattling the shutters, she hadn't slept a wink all night. It
seemed as if every gust would surely take the house off its foundations.
Old Jeremy reported that it was one of the worst wind-storms ever known
along the Cape, wild enough to blow all the sand dunes into the sea.
They'd had the best shaking up and shifting around that they'd had in
years, he declared. Captain Ames' cranberry bog was buried so deep in
sand you couldn't see a blossom or a leaf. And there was sand drifted all
over the garden. It had whirled clear over the wall, till the bird pool
was half full of it.
Georgina listened languidly, feeling very comfortable and important with
her breakfast brought in to her on a tray. Tippy thought it was too
chilly for her in the dining-room where there was no fire. Jeremy had
kindled a cheerful blaze on the living-room hearth and his tales of
damage done to the shipping and to roofs and chimneys about town, seemed
to emphasize her own safety and comfort. The only thing which made the
storm seem a personal affair was the big limb blown off the willow tree.
Mrs. Triplett and Jeremy could remember a storm years ago which shifted
the sand until the whole face of the Cape seemed changed. That was before
the Government planted grass all over it, to bind it together with firm
roots. Later when the ring of an axe told that the willow limb was being
chopped in pieces, Georgina begged to be allowed to go outdoors.
"Let me go out and see the tracks of the storm," she urged. "I feel all
right. I'm all over the gas now."
But Mrs. Triplett preferred to run no risks. All she said to Georgina
was:
"No, after such a close call as you had yesterday you stay right here
where I can keep an eye on you, and take it quietly for a day or two,"
but when she went into the next room Georgina heard her say to Belle:
"There's no knowing how that gas may have affected her heart."
Georgina made a face at the first speech, but the second one made her lie
down languidly on the sofa with her finger on her pulse. She was half
persuaded that there was something wrong with the way it beat, and was
about to ask faintly if she couldn't have a little blackberry cordial
with her lunch, when she heard Richard's alley call outside and Captain
Kidd's quick bark.
She started up, forgetting all about the cordial and her pulse, and was
skipping to the front door when Tippy hurried in from the dining-room and
reached it first. She had a piece of an old coffee sack in her hand.
"Here!" she said abruptly to Richard, who was so surprised at the sudden
opening of the door that he nearly fell in against her.
"You catch that dog and hold him while I wipe his feet. I can't have any
dirty quadruped like that, tracking up my clean floors."
Georgina looked at the performance in amazement. Tippy scrubbing away at
Captain Kidd's muddy paws till all four of them were clean, and then
actually letting him come into the house and curl up on the hearth!
Tippy, who never touched dogs except with the end of a broom! She could
scarcely believe what her own eyes told her. She and Richard must have
had a "close call," indeed, closer than either of them realized, to make
such a wonderful change in Tippy.
And the change was towards Richard, too. She had never seemed to like him
much better than his dog. She blamed him for taking the cream bottles
when they played pirate, and she thought it made little girls boisterous
and rude to play with boys, and she wondered at Barby's letting Georgina
play with him. Several times she had done her wondering out loud, so that
Georgina heard her, and wanted to say things back--shocking things, such
as Rosa said to Joseph. But she never said them. There was always that
old silver porringer, sitting prim and lady-like upon the sideboard.
Things were different to-day. After the dog's paws were wiped dry Tippy
asked Richard how he felt after the accident, and she asked it as if she
really cared and wanted to know. And she brought in a plate of early
summer apples, the first in the market, and told him to help himself and
put some in his pocket. And there was the checker-board if they wanted to
play checkers or dominoes. Her unusual concern for their entertainment
impressed Georgina more than anything else she could have done with the
seriousness of the danger they had been in. She felt very solemn and
important, and thanked Tippy with a sweet, patient air, befitting one who
has just been brought up from the "valley of the shadow."
The moment they were alone Richard began breathlessly:
"Say. On the way here I went by that place where we buried the pouch, and
what do you think? The markers are out of sight and the whole place
itself is buried--just filled up level. What are we going to do about
it?"
The seriousness of the situation did not impress Georgina until he added,
"S'pose the person who lost it comes back for it? Maybe we'd be put in
prison."
"But nobody knows it's buried except you and me."
Richard scuffed one shoe against the other and looked into the fire.
"But Aunt Letty says there's no getting around it, 'Be sure your sin will
find you out,' always. And I'm awfully unlucky that way. Seems to me I
never did anything in my life that I oughtn't to a done, that I didn't
get found out. Aunt Letty has a book that she reads to me sometimes when
I'm going to bed, that proves it. Every story in it proves it. One is
about a traveler who murdered a man, and kept it secret for twenty years.
Then he gave it away, talking in his sleep. And one was a feather in a
boy's coat pocket. It led to its being found out that he was a chicken
thief. There's about forty such stories, and everyone of them prove your
sin is sure to find you out some time before you die, even if you cover
it up for years and years."
"But we didn't do any sin," protested Georgina. "We just buried a pouch
that the dog found, to keep it safe, and if a big wind came along and
covered it up so we can't find it, that isn't our fault. We didn't make
the wind blow, did we?"
"But there was gold money in that pouch," insisted Richard, "and it
wasn't ours, and maybe the letter was important and we ought to have
turned it over to Dad or Uncle Darcy or the police or somebody."
Aunt Letty's bedtime efforts to keep Richard's conscience tender were far
more effective than she had dreamed. He was quoting Aunt Letty now.
"We wouldn't want anybody to do _our_ things that way." Then a
thought of his own came to him, "You wouldn't want the police coming
round and taking you off to the lockup, would you? I saw 'em take Binney
Rogers one time, just because he broke a window that he didn't mean to.
He was only shying a rock at a sparrow. There was a cop on each side of
him a hold of his arm, and Binney's mother and sister were following
along behind crying and begging them not to take him something awful. But
all they could say didn't do a speck of good."
The picture carried weight. In spite of her light tone Georgina was
impressed, but she said defiantly:
"Well, nobody saw us do it."
"You don't know," was the gloomy answer. "Somebody might have been up in
the monument with a spy glass, looking down. There's always people up
there spying around, or out on the masts in the harbor, and if some
sleuth was put on the trail of that pouch the first thing that would
happen would be he'd come across the very person with the glass. It
always happens that way, and I know, because Binney Rogers has read
almost all the detective stories there is, and he said so."
A feeling of uneasiness began to clutch at Georgina's interior. Richard
spoke so knowingly and convincingly that she felt a real need for
blackberry cordial. But she said with a defiant little uplift of her
chin:
"Well, as long as we didn't mean to do anything wrong, I'm not going to
get scared about it. I'm just going to bear up and steer right on, and
keep hoping that everything will turn out all right so hard that it
will."
Her "line to live by" buoyed her up so successfully for the time being,
that Richard, too, felt the cheerful influence of it, and passed to more
cheerful subjects.
"We're going to be in all the papers," he announced. "A reporter called
up from Boston to ask Cousin James how it happened. There's only been a
few cases like ours in the whole United States. Won't you feel funny to
see your name in the paper? Captain Kidd will have his name in, too. I
heard Cousin James say over the telephone that he was the hero of the
hour; that if he hadn't given the alarm we wouldn't have been discovered
till it was too late."
Richard did not stay long. The finished portrait was to be hung in the
Art gallery in the Town Hall that morning and he wanted to be on hand at
the hanging. Later it would be sent to the New York exhibition.
"Daddy's going to let me go with him when Mr. Locke comes for him on his
yacht. He's going to take me because I sat still and let him get such a
good picture. It's the best he's ever done. We'll be gone a week."
"When are you going?" demanded Georgina.
"Oh, in a few days, whenever Mr. Locke comes."
"I hope we can find that pouch first," she answered. Already she was
beginning to feel little and forlorn and left behind. "It'll be awful
lonesome with you and Barby both gone."
Tippy came in soon after Richard left and sat down at the secretary.
"I've been thinking I ought to write to your mother and let her know
about yesterday's performance before she has a chance to hear it from
outsiders or the papers. It's a whole week to-day since she left."
"A week," echoed Georgina. "Is that all? It seems a month at least. It's
been so long."
Mrs. Triplett tossed her a calendar from the desk.
"Count it up for yourself," she said. "She left two days before your
birthday and this is the Wednesday after."
While Mrs. Triplett began her letter Georgina studied the calendar,
putting her finger on a date as she recalled the various happenings of
it. Each day had been long and full. That one afternoon when she and
Richard found the paper in the rifle seemed an age in itself. It seemed
months since they had promised Belle and Uncle Darcy to keep the secret.
She glanced up, about to say so, then bit her tongue, startled at having
so nearly betrayed the fact of their having a secret. Then the thought
came to her that Emmett's sin had found him out in as strange a way as
that of the man who talked in his sleep or the chicken thief to whom the
feather clung. It was one more proof added to the forty in Aunt Letty's
book. Richard's positiveness made a deeper impression on her than she
liked to acknowledge. She shut her eyes a moment, squinting them up so
tight that her eyelids wrinkled, and hoped as hard as she could hope that
everything would turn out all right.
"What on earth is the matter with you, child?" exclaimed Tippy, looking
up from her letter in time to catch Georgina with her face thus screwed
into wrinkles.
Georgina opened her eyes with a start.
"Nothing," was the embarrassed answer. "I was just thinking."