"Blessed be them that 'spects nothin', they won't git
fooled."--Old Cy Walker.
Christmas Cove was never disturbed by aught except small boats, and few
of them. It was a long, crescent-shaped arm of the sea, parallel to the
ocean, and separated from it by a spruce-clad cliff; its placid surface
scarcely more than rippled or undulated outside, and so shallow was it
that each ebb tide left its sandy bottom bare.
A stream found devious way along this crescent when the outflow left it
bare. Mottled minnows, schools of white and green smelts, crabs of all
sorts and sizes, swam and sported up and down this broad, shallow brook
while the tide was away, and few of human kind ever watched them.
Alongside this cove and inward a dozen or more brown houses and a few
white ones faced its curving shore, a broad street with many elms and
ruts between which the grass grew separated the houses and cove, and a
small white church with a gilt fish for weather-vane on its steeple stood
midway of these dwellings.
A low range of green hills to the northward of this village shut off
the wintry winds, at the upper end of the street a stream from a cleft
in the hills crossed it, and here stood a mill, its roof green with
moss, its clapboards brown and whitened with mill dust, the log dam
above it half obscured by willows. To the right of this a short flume
was entirely hidden by alders, and above the dam lay a pond, entirely
covered with green lily-pads, and dotted by white blossoms all summer.
Beside the mill and nearer the roadway stood an ancient dwelling,
also moss-coated; two giant elms shaded it, and the entire impression
conveyed by the mill's drowsy rumble and splashing wheel on a hot
August afternoon was--find a shady spot and take a nap.
These were the summer conditions existent at Christmas Cove. The winter
ones may be left undescribed.
Just beyond where the mill stream crossed the road the highway divided,
one fork following the trend of these hills to where a railroad crossed
them, ten miles away; the other, running close to the upper and marshy
end of Christmas Cove to where a spile bridge connected the two uplands
and thence over to another village called Bayport. This, the larger
of the two, had once contained a shipyard, now idle, a score of its
dwellings were vacant, and the two hundred or more of its population
existed by farming, fishing, lobster-catching, and a small factory
devoted to the production of sardines duly labelled with a French name.
Christmas Cove, however, was more respectable, with its hundred
residents, mostly retired sea captains with an income, and no litter of
lobster pots or nets to obstruct its one long, narrow wharf which
reached out to deep water at the mouth of the cove. A few small pleasure
craft were tethered to the wharf, and gardens, cows, and poultry were
merely diversions here.
One other income it had, however, which was considered less plebeian than
Bayport's--the money a score of city-bred people left each summer.
Keeping boarders was all right at Christmas Cove. It did not smack of
trade and commerce. No smoke of engines, no dust of coal, no noise of
hammer and saw, were parts of it. No odor from a canning factory, no
wrack of dismantled boats, tarred nets, and broken traps, was connected
with it. The dwellings at Christmas Cove were roomy, few children were
now a part of its population--scarce enough to fill the one schoolhouse
presided over by Mr. Bell, and so each season a few dozen of the uneasy
horde, always anxious to leave home and board somewhere, came here.
A daily stage line--an ancient carryall drawn by one sleepy
horse--connected this village with the railroad. Its church bell called
the faithful to Thursday evening prayer-meeting and Sunday service with
unfailing regularity. Its one general store and post-office combined, was
the evening rendezvous for a score of sea captains--grizzled hulks who
had sailed into safe harbor here at last, and who watched the
weather, discussed the visitors, and swapped yarns year in and year out.
Here also, many years before, when Bayport was more prosperous, the
threads of a romance had been woven, and two brothers, Judson and Cyrus
Walker, born at Bayport, and sailing out of it, had paid court to two
sisters, Abigail and Amanda Grey, here at Christmas Cove.
It was, as such sailors' courtships ever are, intermittent. Six, eight,
and sometimes twelve months marked its interims, until finally only
one brother, Judson, returned to announce a shipwreck in mid-ocean,
a separation of their crew in two boats, and Abbie Grey, whom Cyrus
had smiled upon, was left to wait and watch and hope.
In time, also, Judson and "Mandy" joined fortunes. In time, and after
many voyages, during which he vainly tried to find some tidings of his
brother, Judson, now Captain Walker, gave up the sea, and with wife
and two young sons retired inland, purchased an abandoned farm in a
sequestered valley, and began another life.
Another mating had also occurred at Christmas Cove, for Abbie, the other
sister and the sweetheart of Cyrus, giving him up for lost, finally
consented to share the ancestral home of Captain Bemis--once a sailor and
now the miller, who had exchanged the sea's perils for that peaceful
vocation.
His father had ground grist here for a lifetime, and passed on. His
mother still survived when Abbie Grey, once the belle of the village and
a boarding-school graduate, married Captain Bemis, twice her age, and
her old-time romance became only a memory.
No children came to fill this great, cheerless house with laughter. The
old mother was laid away in due time, Abbie, once a handsome girl, grew
portly and became Aunt Abbie to neighboring children, and finally all
the village; and disappointed as she had cause to be, she turned her
thoughts to good works and religion.
But Cyrus, adrift in an open boat with half the crew, was finally
rescued by a whaler, after starvation had left him almost an imbecile.
A four-year, compulsory voyage to southern seas followed; then
another wreck and a year on an island, and then a chance meeting with
another sailor from Bayport, and from whom he learned two unpleasant
facts,--first that his sweetheart, Abbie Grey, was married; and secondly
that his brother had been lost at sea.
One was true, of course, and somewhat disheartening to Cyrus; the
other, as discomforting, but not true. It was simply a case of mistaken
identity, his own disappearance being confounded with that of his brother.
This story served the purpose of so affecting Cyrus that he resolved
never to set foot in either Christmas Cove or Bayport, and also never
to allow any one there to know that he was alive.
From now on, also, he deserted the sea and became a wanderer. He first
lived in the wilderness, where as trapper and hunter and lumberman he
learned the woodsman's habits; and when mid-life was reached, having
become sceptical of all things, he finally settled down at Greenvale.
Here, loving children and the woods, fields, brooks, and Nature more than
raiment, religion, and respectability, he became a village nondescript,
a social outcast, and--Old Cy Walker.