HOME AGAIN
The boys slept that night in clean linen on board the Maisie Adams,
Captain Nickerson’s new ship. What a thump Harry’s heart gave when he
saw the name on the stern and realized who it was that had come to
rescue him! A thought that had been vaguely his for long, a desire that
had been but a blush deep down in his heart, grew to a dominant purpose
in a moment, then. Maisie’s clear gray eyes shone out of memory with a
new light in them, and the thought of home-coming thrilled him with an
ecstasy more potent than ever before.
The next day the final papers in the mining deal were passed on board
Colonel Lane’s steamer, a splendid vessel, the T. H. Lane, named for
himself. It is thus that the pioneer of the present day exploits the far
regions of the earth. He comes with an army at his command, with every
resource that steam and modern invention and unlimited capital can
furnish, and at the nod of his head cities spring up, great industries
flourish, almost in a day.
What pleased Captain Nickerson more than anything else in the adventures
which Joe and Harry related to him was the story of the finding of
the stores of whalebone at the village of Nunaria. His own father had
been an officer in the unfortunate fleet, and the finding of the bone
seemed to come to him as a fitting inheritance. But before he sailed
north to make the discovery good he turned the vessel’s prow toward
Nome, and there transferred the boys to one of the numerous steamers
ready to sail for Seattle. The two should bear home the news of their
own good fortune,—home to the waiting, anxious mothers in the east.
And so they parted, and the boys, steaming south on a staunch vessel,
gazed with tears in their eyes on the smoke of the Maisie Adams, which
bore resolutely north again toward the straits and the fascinating,
mysterious, dangerous region where they had been the captives of the
frost for two long, eventful years. It may as well be said here that
Captain Nickerson found the long lost bone without difficulty, and on his
way south stopped at the little village of Point Lay, where he found
Harluk and Kroo living frugally and contentedly. Before he sailed away he
rewarded the gentle friends of the two boys with stores and supplies that
made them far richer than they had ever dreamed of being.
Seattle and civilization in very truth came next. How the city had grown,
and what a pleasure there was in its bustle, the roar of traffic, and the
throngs of well-dressed, busy men and women in its streets. Here they
stopped only long enough to replenish their wardrobes, bettered already
somewhat by the “slop chest” of the Maisie Adams, but still far from what
they should be, and to send two telegrams to the people at home. They
followed the messages on the first train for the east, and now let us
leave them, flying across country as fast as steam can carry them, and
see how matters stand at Quincy Point.
Like Captain Nickerson, Mr. Desmond had grown grayer in the years that
had passed. To take up the débris of a broken fortune and out of it
build a new one is no easy task. He had toiled faithfully, yet only a
very slender success had thus far rewarded him. There was depression in
his line of business, and the limited capital which the downfall of
the house had left him made it uphill work. Yet it was not so much the
business cares as anxiety as to the fate of his only son that weighed
most upon him. He had never for a moment given him up for lost, yet when
the first summer passed without news of the absent ones the stoop came
into his shoulders again, and the lines of care deepened on his face.
More and more he had come to depend on the simple, cheery faith of Mrs.
Desmond, whose hope and trust in the watchful care of Divine Providence
had never for a moment seemed to waver. What it had cost her to keep up
this cheery calm, no one but a wife and mother can tell. It is upon the
good women of the world that these burdens come, and right nobly do they
bear them.
It was on a bright day at the last of August that Mr. Desmond received
that telegram at his office, gave the clerks a half holiday as a slight
token of thanksgiving, and came down on the noon train. Mrs. Desmond met
him at the door.
“What is it, Frank?” she said. “Aren’t you well?”
“Why, yes,” replied Mr. Desmond, casting about for a way to break the
good news to her gently; as if news could be broken, or good news ever
needed it! “Why, yes, I’m more than well, I”—And then Mrs. Desmond took
him by the shoulders and looked once in his face, and knew.
“Who can deceive a lover?” said one of the wise ones of old, and these
two were lovers still and always would be. The father had brought the
happy story in his face, and when he clasped his wife in his arms and
told it in words, it was the second telling.
I’ve said something in this story about the rapidity with which news
travels in Eskimo land, but you ought to see it go in a New England
village. It flutters with the pigeons from house-top to house-top. It
comes to the doorstep with the morning’s milk, before you are up, and the
expressman leaves it with a package at eight at night. You may start the
story ahead of you and then follow it down street on a bicycle, but it
will leave you a poor second at the far end of the town. Thus it became
known before sunset that Harry Desmond, whom everybody thought had been
lost in the Arctic, was on his way home, alive and well, and great was
the rejoicing thereat. Everybody seemed to take especial pride in the
safe return of the young man, and the Adamses were in quite a flutter of
excitement about it.
“Isn’t it splendid?” said Mrs. Adams to Maisie. “I feel as if Harry quite
belonged to us since he pulled you out of the water that day nearly three
years ago. He must be almost a grown man now, and you’ve grown up quite a
bit yourself. How the time does fly!”
Maisie had indeed grown up quite a bit. The change from girlhood to young
womanhood, which seems to come so suddenly with the lengthening of the
skirt and the doing up of the hair, had come to her, and the coupling of
her name so intimately with Harry’s sent a swift flush mantling her round
cheek. Harry had been her playmate and friend since early childhood,
and now he was coming back grown up, and she was grown up too. She felt
her cheeks burn under her mother’s kindly scrutiny, and she hastened to
change the subject, but the thought of Harry came back now and then, and
the color with it.
Harry’s father and Mr. Adams met the two boys in Boston, but Joe left
immediately on the train for the Cape. His mother was waiting for him,
he knew, and the thought would brook no delay. Mrs. Desmond waited for
Harry at the house. She knew that if she came to the station, she could
not help laughing and crying over him at once, and the reticence of the
New England blood bade her avoid the chance of a scene. Queer thing, the
New England blood,—sensitive, full of pathos and lire and enthusiasm, all
masked beneath the cool steel of seeming indifference. All the neighbors
saw her meet him at the door quite sedately; none of them saw the passion
of mother love revealed after the door was shut, nor would she have had
them see it for worlds.
Harry sat for a long time with his strong brown hands clasped tight in
his mother’s slender white ones. Now she wondered at his height and manly
strength, again flushed with secret pride at the new look of character
and decision in his face, and vowed that she had lost her boy after
all,—he was a man now. He told them in brief the story of his adventures,
but said nothing of the placer mine and the bargain with Colonel Lane.
Somehow he wanted to wait on that, to keep it till the last.
“How has the business gone, father,” he asked after a while. “Did you
manage without me in the office?”
“Not over well,” replied his father soberly. “It has been a long hard
pull on very little capital. Still, we are getting on.”
Harry noted again the gray in his father’s hair and the lines of patient
determination about the mouth that had not been there when he went away,
and felt his heart thrill with joy at the thought that he had come back
amply able to help him. He knew now that he had not cared for the money
for its own sake. He had enjoyed the excitement of getting it. He had
been glad that he and Joe could go to college together; they had planned
that on the way home, and he felt now that he realized the value of a
college education as he had never done before. But here was a better use
for money than all that. He could lift the burden that his father had
borne so patiently and put the family back where it had been before the
business disaster. This was a greater happiness yet in his home-coming.
“Would fifty thousand dollars help you, father?” he asked quietly.
“It would indeed, my boy,” replied his father, smiling rather sadly, “but
I don’t see where I am to get it.”
“Well, I do,” said Harry triumphantly. “I’ve some things up my sleeve, as
the boys say, that I haven’t said anything about yet. I wanted them for
the last. In the first place, though, here’s a little present from the
Arctic for you and mother. Wait till I open my grip.”
His hands trembled as he pulled out the bandana handkerchief and opened
it, just as they had when he did the same thing for Colonel Lane up at
Candle Creek.
“Why, my son,” said his father in astonishment, “what’s this?”
“Gold, daddy, gold!” shouted Harry, dancing round the two in his
excitement and delight. “Just a little souvenir that I mined up in the
Arctic with my own hands. We got out twelve thousand, Joe and I. That’s
only a little of it, but I thought it would make a nice thing for a
present when I got home. There’s about a thousand there. I’ve got notes
for the rest.”
“Why, Harry!” ejaculated his mother, her eyes gleaming with delight in
her son’s success. “Don’t tear around so. The neighbors will think the
house is afire.”
“And so it will be in a minute, mother. That isn’t half of it. Look at
this, and this.” He threw down two long envelopes filled with documents.
“There’s notes of Colonel Lane, the millionaire mining magnate of
California, for about seventy thousand dollars, and there’s the papers
that show I am a quarter owner in the richest placer mine in all Alaska.”
His father’s eyes gleamed as he looked carefully at these papers, and
Harry gave his mother a hug that he must surely have learned of the polar
bears up at Point Lay.
“Mother,” he said, “when I was a little fellow” (you would have thought
him at least thirty now to hear that, though not to see him), “you used
to fry doughnuts for me and make one that was like a man. I want you to
fry me two now, big ones, and make ’em twins. That’s Joe and me up at
Candle Creek.”
Harry caught up his mother in his arms and danced a wild whirl about the
room, finally seating her breathless and laughing on the sofa, while
his father looked on with pride in his face and two tears shining on
his cheeks. No one but he knew what a load the tidings of good fortune
had lifted from his shoulders. With ample capital he would show the
business world what the house of Desmond could do. The stoop was out of
his shoulders again and Harry knew it, and would have gone through every
hardship of the two years again for the sight.
Supper was announced before they had done talking over this glorious
news, and Harry was not so excited but that he did full justice to home
cooking. In the evening there came a ring at the doorbell, and Mr. and
Mrs. Adams came in—and Maisie.
“Well,” Mr. Adams said, “you went away a boy and you have come back a man
grown. If being lost in the Arctic for two years or so will give people
such size and rugged health as that, I should advise it for lots of them.”
Harry blushed and stammered at the sight of Maisie. She had grown up too,
he thought, and how lovely she was! As for Maisie, she was cordially glad
to see him, but as demure about it as the most proper young lady should
be. Only when she went away she glanced up at him shyly and said,—
“Did you bring me that aurora borealis that you promised me the last
thing when you went away?”
Then indeed Harry found his tongue, though he blushed in the saying. “You
are like the aurora yourself. Come sailing with me to-morrow, will you
not?”
Maisie blushed too, as who would not at so direct a compliment from a
handsome, broad-shouldered young man.
“Why, yes, thank you,” she answered. “I’d like to very much. Shall it be
at ten? Your knockabout is down at the boat-house. Good-night.” And as
she tripped daintily down the broad walk to the street, Harry wondered
what need there was of street lamps when she was out.
During the evening Mr. Adams asked him if he was ready to make that
report concerning the whaling in Bering Sea and the Arctic, and was much
pleased when Harry handed him quite a pile of manuscript, some of it
written in pencil, and all stained with salt water.
“I’ll put this in better shape in a day or two,” he said. “It contains
all I could find out about the subject, and I think is accurate.”
“Well, well,” exclaimed Mr. Adams, “this looks good. The company is
already formed and ready to start business. They will be glad to get
this;” and he tucked it under his arm just as it was, saying it bore
greater evidence of reliability in that shape, and he wanted to show it
to the directors without change.
“Let us see,” he said, “you were to have a salary of twenty dollars a
month for this work, and you have been gone practically thirty months. I
will see that a check for six hundred dollars is made out to you.”
Harry had another thrill of pleasure at this. It was not the money so
much, but he felt that to have won Mr. Adams’s approval in this way was
worth while. He determined privately that Joe should have half. He had
certainly helped him earn it.
The next day was one of those rarely perfect days that often come to
New England in early September. The warmth of summer still lingers in
the air, but there is with it too the glow and exhilaration of autumn.
A faint breeze blew in from the west and lifted the August haze till
distant objects stood out clear and sharp in outline,—a glorious day.
It was quite a bit before ten when Harry called for Maisie, but she
was all ready, and chatted demurely of many things as they walked down
the well-remembered path to the boat-house. There Griggs, the ancient
ferryman, greeted Harry with a whoop, much like that he had raised two
years and a half before in answer to his shout for assistance.
“W-e-ll, I swanny!” he exclaimed. “But I’m glad to see ye. Allus knew
you’d get back somehow. How you have growed, though! Well, well! this is
like old times, ain’t it? Ain’t been a day go by but I think how you
swum for the young lady here, an’ I pulled you both out. How be ye?”
Harry shook hands with Griggs cordially, and noted that the old man had
not changed a particle in the time that had passed.
“Kept the boat all ready for ye ever since,” said Griggs. “S’pected you’d
be along some day and want a sail in her. Here she is.”
There she was, indeed, with every line and cleat in place, and Harry
felt as if greeting an old friend as he helped Maisie in and hoisted the
sail. The little boat glided gently down the river, and out into the
wider waters of the bay. As Harry looked about and noted every object in
the familiar scene, it seemed to him as if he had hardly been away a day
instead of two years and a half, as if the home life only was real, and
all the strange things that had happened to him had been but a dream. Yet
when he looked at Maisie and found her grown up to the verge of young
womanhood, he felt as if he had been away for years and years, and hardly
knew the dainty lady who sat on the windward side and trimmed ship as a
good sailor should. He was thoughtful and silent until Maisie looked up
at him roguishly, and said,—
“Well, why don’t you tell me all about it? It must be something very
serious that keeps you silent so long. You used to chatter fast enough.
Is it an Eskimo young lady?”
Harry laughed. “I’ve seen Eskimo young ladies,” he said, “though I wasn’t
thinking of them at just that moment. Some of them are quite pretty,
too,”—Maisie pouted a bit at this,—“though they don’t dress in what you
would call good taste.”
“Tell me about them, tell me all about everything,” said Maisie, and
Harry, nothing loth, launched into stories of his adventures, and the
strange sights he had seen, that lasted till it was time they were home
for lunch. He was modest in relating his own share in the dangers and
excitements, but Maisie saw through this and gave him perhaps a larger
share of credit than he deserved. How strong and handsome he was, she
thought. Of course he had been brave and noble, and now her eyes filled
with sudden tears, and again shone with excitement and admiration, as he
told of being lost in the Arctic pack, battling with the highbinders, and
being chased by the river ice on the Kowak.
And so this modern Desdemona listened to her sun-bronzed Othello until
the boat had swung gently back with the tide almost opposite the cottages
at Germantown.
There Harry finished the tale, and Maisie noted that they were almost
back again, with a sigh. A sudden impulse seized her.
“Let me take the boat in to the landing,” she said. “There isn’t much
wind.”
She slipped quickly to the stern and seated herself the other side of the
tiller. The boat was lazing along with the helm amidships and there was
no need for Harry to move. Maisie’s hand dropped beside his, and with a
sudden masterful impulse he laid his own over it.
And Maisie? She looked up at him with those clear, cool, beautiful eyes,
and he said— But I shan’t tell you what he said. It is no affair of ours,
and nobody was supposed to know it for a time, except, indeed, their own
fathers and mothers, who, of course, vowed that the young people were
altogether too young for such plans, and then gave their blessing.
Nobody was supposed to know, but it is funny how news will travel in a
New England village, and the fact is, all this occurred right opposite
the cottages, and as likely as not some one was using a field-glass at
that very moment.
At any rate, the knockabout sailed herself for several minutes right
across the place where Harry plunged in to save Maisie once, and only
the kindness of fate and a very light wind prevented them from being in
danger of another ducking.
Griggs, the old ferryman, was not so very far away either, and he looked
at them with a very knowing smile as they walked soberly up the path to
the house. So perhaps _he_ told, but I am not going to.