LOVEDAY GROWS MYSTERIOUS
Estelle was gone so long that I thought she must have stayed to the
one o’clock dinner; twelve or one o’clock dinners were universal in
Palmyra. But before we reached our apple dumpling dessert she came in,
with a glow that was more than that caused by the frosty air.
Dave didn’t come home to dinner. The distance from the shipyard was
too short to be any hindrance, and Cyrus always came, as a matter of
course, but Dave said that a workman could not make his toilet in
the middle of the day. He said it without the least bitterness; from
first to last there never was any bitterness about Dave. Sometimes
I thought Cyrus would have a higher opinion of him if he would take
his punishment--or his penance--less cheerfully. I suppose we should
not have liked Dave to sit at the table in his workman’s clothes, not
because he was a workman, but because he was Dave. I always thought,
while I ate, of Dave with the cold luncheon which he carried. Cyrus had
arranged a way for the workmen to heat their coffee--that was after
Estelle insisted upon carrying something hot to Dave. But I think it
was Dave himself who stopped her. While he was far from posing as a
martyr he was determined to do the real thing, as a workman should.
“No, I didn’t stay to dinner,” Estelle said in answer to Octavia’s
question. “There was turnip in the soup; it smelled all over the
house.” Estelle was fastidious to a degree, and so, indeed, was Dave,
far more so than the rest of us. “But I had some of Rob’s broth, which
he wouldn’t touch, and a bit of toast. I don’t want any dinner.”
She spoke absent-mindedly, and she didn’t reply to grandma and Octavia
who gently remonstrated, or to Loveday, who first scolded, and then
immediately had a piece of yesterday’s plum-pudding warmed for her.
Estelle was fond of plum-pudding and Loveday always saved a piece for
her, as she had done from the time she was a child.
But when I went to her room, an hour later, the plum-pudding was
untouched on the tray where Viola had set it, and Estelle was fiercely
setting a patch upon the knee of Dave’s blue overalls. Fiercely may be
a trifle too strong an adjective, but I know of no other that so well
describes the grim energy of her action. I think Dave’s unaccustomed
work must have been as fiercely done, for both pairs that he wore were
already worn out at the knees.
“Estelle, if you had found out anything--anything in Dave’s favor from
Rob--of course you would tell me,” I said.
“I don’t know but I should tell you, Bathsheba,” she said slowly. “But
there is nothing to tell. Rob is very elusive, you know; he is not in
the least like his father.”
“Certainly Uncle Horace is about as elusive as a sledge hammer,” said I.
“But I had my suspicions confirmed. He knows all about it, and he had
more to do with it than he will tell,” she declared positively.
“I don’t see how he could have had anything to do with it,” I retorted,
in my stupidly argumentative way, although I knew argument was useless,
even if all argument had not been exhausted on that subject. “He was
ill in bed at the time, and if he hadn’t been no one could ever suspect
him of having anything to do with horse-races. He never could bear to
see horses trained. The only time he and Dave ever quarreled was when
Dave broke in the colts. He didn’t send Dave to the races. Rob never
was the least bit coarse. I didn’t think Dave was, either----”
“But you lost all faith in him at the first trial!” interrupted
Estelle, not reproachfully, but in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Did--did Rob say that he thought that there was any excuse for Dave?”
I said. How could I say that he thought Dave didn’t do it, when Dave
had virtually owned that he did?
Estelle congealed at once. “I didn’t ask him,” she answered and took
such a great snip in the overalls that she was forced to cut out a
larger patch. But as new light shone in her eyes, there was no doubt
about it that her suspicions, whatever they were, had been confirmed.
But I, who did not, as she demanded, believe in Dave, was not accounted
worthy to be told what she had discovered. I thought, myself, it was
fancy. She admitted that there was nothing to tell and yet the look in
her eyes told me that there was something from which she shut me out.
I left her to her patching, and went across the bridge to Uncle
Horace’s myself. I had not thought of it until grandma said she wished
she had known that Estelle was going over, because she wanted to send
some calves-foot jelly to Rob. I said, at once, that I would go and
carry it.
Rob would be no more elusive to me than to Estelle. I remembered now
that she had never been one of his favorites. I had even fancied
sometimes that he was a little jealous of her influence over Dave.
“Loveday will take the jelly out of the mould for you,” grandma had
said. And I sought for Loveday, knowing that she was so dainty and
particular about her jelly that she disliked to have any one touch it.
But Loveday was not to be found, and Viola had retired to don the plaid
dress that was her afternoon toilet, adorned with cherry ribbons for
the beguiling of Leander Green, a persistent bachelor. So I emptied the
mould myself, taking care that the jelly rose should not be shorn of a
petal, and that it should be as daintily arranged as possible to tempt
the invalid’s appetite. And across the bridge I went, hearing the
workmen’s hammers from the shipyard on the way, with my heart sore for
Dave, and determined that if I thought from his actions that Rob really
knew anything about the matter he should not be elusive with me. I was
not one of the clever ones of the family, and I knew it, but I had the
persistency that always accompanied the Partridge nose.
I found Rob lying on a lounge in his own room. It was a chintz-covered
lounge and against its gay colors his face looked woefully wan and
wasted.
“Rob, you ought to have come home before,” I exclaimed, too frank in
my dismay at his changed looks. “Palmyra air and home nursing are the
things to make you pick up!” I added hastily and as cheerfully as I
could.
“I knew he didn’t want me to come--father, you know. He thinks I
haven’t any pluck.” There was a deep, anxious line between the boy’s
delicately-penciled brows. “Dave, now, ought to have been his son.”
“Dave!” I echoed wonderingly. “He can’t bear Dave!”
“That’s because he doesn’t know him. I do.” Rob had a kind of
triumphant air as of a great discoverer. “Whatever fathers and mothers
and teachers may think, it takes one fellow to know another. When it
comes to pluck, now, Dave is all there. He’s simply great!”
“But pluck isn’t everything,” I said seriously, “that is what you boys
call pluck. To be good is always the very hardest and bravest thing.”
I expected that my trite copy-book sentiment would elicit scorn. One
had to learn the art of putting things to our boys. But instead of
being scornful Rob became reflective.
“Perhaps that’s true. I rather think it is,” he said. “But sometimes
it isn’t so easy for a fellow to say what is goodness. And things put
you into such a fix that you can’t get out--unless you have brains and
pluck, like Dave.”
This was somewhat enigmatical; if it signified anything it was that
there had been some boyish “scrape” out of which Dave had extricated
one or both of them. Rob certainly seemed to have no sense whatever of
Dave’s moral lapse.
“Nothing--nothing could possibly place any one in such a position that
it would be necessary for such wrong-doing as Dave’s,” I said severely.
“Although Dave is my brother, and I am quite as fond of him as if he
were my own brother, yet I can’t help saying, Rob, that I think it is
very dangerous for you to make a hero of him.”
He started up from the couch, his face flushed and his blue eyes
blazing. He looked like the portrait of his beautiful young mother who
had died when he was a baby. There was something fine and lofty in his
expression; it was almost the look of an accusing angel.
“You--you don’t----” he began and faltered, it was, or I fancied that
it was, as Uncle Horace’s heavy steps sounded in the room below.
“Girls are such fools!” he growled, as he fell back upon his pillows.
“As much--as much as fifty of you wouldn’t be worth Dave’s little
finger!” The footstep had ceased to reach our ears now and his voice
arose high-keyed and shrill.
I bent over him, obeying a sudden impulse.
“Rob, if you know that Dave didn’t go to the races and--and lose his
money, if there was any strange mistake, of course it would be your
duty to tell--you would want to tell to clear Dave at any cost to
yourself.”
He started up again and scowled at me angrily.
“What cost could it be to me? I am not much of a fellow to go to races,
am I?--a fellow who has no more strength than a girl because every once
in a while he is choked to death for days and days and nights and
nights, and is a disgrace and a disappointment to his father!”
“Oh, not a disgrace, Rob, not a disgrace!” I interrupted. “I think it
would kill Uncle Horace if you were that. I hope you don’t think that
illness like yours could ever be a disgrace!”
“Kill him? kill father? I guess it would make him kill me, more
likely!” he said, with a queer, grim, little chuckle. “He thinks it’s a
disgrace to be weak and girly. It makes a fellow like that, Bathsheba,
to be the way I’ve been!” He spoke with sudden earnestness, his voice
growing husky. “No one understands all about it but Dave; it’s queer
when he’s so strong and plucky himself. Usually a plucky fellow thinks
you ought to be so, too. He thinks it’s just as easy! But Dave can
put himself in another fellow’s place; and we’ve been together such a
lot. He liked to go with me just as well as with the boys that were
stronger and different. He said so, anyway.” The boy suddenly raised
himself again and looked up wistfully into my face. “You don’t think he
was making believe because he pitied me, do you, Bathsheba? I’ve been
thinking of a good many things since I’ve been sick this time.”
He looked so pitiful, his angular figure quite devoid of boyish grace,
with narrow, stooping shoulders and sunken chest and his eyes so big
and dark with the great hollows around them, that tears suddenly filled
my eyes.
“I don’t think Dave ever made believe in his life,” I said heartily.
“At least he isn’t deceitful.”
“But you pity me,” he said, looking suspiciously at my tears. “I’ve
been thinking it would be better if I should die. That’s the way it
would turn out in a story-book, and then everything would be all right.”
“The way what would turn out? What would be all right?” I demanded
sharply.
“Why--why--Dave wouldn’t have to bother with me, and father would
never be ashamed of me any more.”
Of course I scolded him, calling him weak and foolish, and trying to
rouse him to the courage and the trust in God’s Providence that alone
could help him. I pitied him so that I almost forgot Dave and that my
errand had been to try to find evidence that he was innocent--or at
least less guilty than he seemed. I could not feel that I had found
anything at all satisfactory in that line. It did seem likely that Rob
knew more about the matter than he meant to tell, but it was scarcely
possible that it was anything that could clear Dave. When a fellow’s
inheritance was such a puny body as his, and an incurable disease, it
was better that he should die, persisted Rob. And I knew it was no
time for preaching, but I remembered the strong helpful text that was
engraved upon the tiles of the Deemster’s mantel:
“God’s Providence is Mine Inheritance.”
And I at once set out for home determined to get Estelle to print it,
in beautiful old English script, and paint a flower border and then
I would hang it in his room. Rob loved pretty things, like a girl. I
knew Estelle would be a little scornful at my idea of helping Rob with
a motto, I who was the practical one; but a small thing will sometimes
have a strong effect upon a morbid mind.
That was the idea that was uppermost in my mind as I hurried out of
the yard, by the long stables, to make a short cut to the river bank
and cross on the ice, when I ran into Loveday coming out of the old,
unused carriage-house. Now there was nothing astonishing in that, for
Marcella, Uncle Horace’s housekeeper, was Loveday’s second-cousin and
they often visited each other, but the astonishing thing was that
Loveday should start guiltily at sight of me, flush scarlet over to the
crisp black waves of her hair and thrust something that she held in her
hand hastily under her shawl--Loveday, whose greatest horror was of
“under-handedness” and who boasted that she never had had a secret in
her life.
I glanced back, involuntarily, at the old carriage-house. I remembered
suddenly that Hiram Nute’s photograph wagon was stored there for
the winter. A traveling photograph gallery had been one of Hiram’s
“combernations” of the last summer. It had suited his taste admirably.
“There wasn’t nowhere that you saw so much human nater, without it was
top of a tin-peddler’s wagon, as you did a takin’ folks’ photographs,”
he said.
Loveday withdrew her objection that it was “kind of flighty,” in view
of its paying qualities, and Hiram gave it up reluctantly and late, for
the winter. I remembered hearing that Uncle Horace had given him the
use of the old building as a storage house. I also remembered having
seen Hiram running the wagon in there just before Thanksgiving.
It seemed quite natural that Loveday should have gone into it, to see
that all was safe, Hiram having gone on one of his essence-peddling
tours into another State. But why--why should Loveday look guilty about
it? She stammered that she was going in a minute to see Marcella; she
hadn’t time to be gallivantin’ ’round, but seein’ there was sickness in
the house she expected ’twas folks’ duty to come and inquire. It struck
me that this was probably the first time in her life that Loveday had
prevaricated. The stress of the moment turned her pale and afterwards
she looked angry--either at herself or me. She had had some errand to
Hiram’s photograph wagon and it was a secret one; so much was easy to
gather from Loveday’s manner. But when even Loveday became mysterious I
felt that life was too involved a matter for my simple brains.
I left her with relief, and slid out upon the river; the strong west
wind blew me toward the shipyard, and I stopped to see Dave. I had
not been there since he had gone to work, partly because it was not an
attractive place in the winter, partly because I shrank from seeing him
at work there.
Dave evidently did not shrink from being seen. When I came near he was
swinging himself down from the stocks of the ship whose inside work he
was helping to finish. At first I could not discover to whom he was
talking, but I saw that he looked like a young Viking with his fine,
athletic shape and his blond coloring, even in his blue overalls, that
pair had one of Estelle’s patches upon the knee, and his rough working
jacket.
Alice Yorke and her father had been skating; they were such lovers
of the sport that they were not deterred, like the rest of us, by
the roughness of the ice which had frozen in little ridges after a
thaw. The doctor had broken one of his skates and had stopped at the
shipyard to repair it. It was to them that Dave was talking, when I
came up, with as graceful and nonchalant an air as if he were in the
most correct of evening dress at a reception. He had a hammer in his
hand and he unloaded his overalls’ pockets of nails and screws to find
something with which to mend Dr. Yorke’s skate.
If it had been one of the Palmyra girls, with whom he had been
acquainted from childhood, I should not have thought it strange; but
Alice Yorke had come from the city, and there was about her an air of
elegance and high-breeding that seemed to set her worlds apart from
a workman in overalls. But she evidently thought no more about that
little matter than did Dave, for they were having a most merry and
sociable time.
The skate mending took a long time; none of the party seemed in a
hurry. Dave’s capacious overalls’ pockets failed to yield a piece of
string that was needed and I went into the little counting-house in
search of it. I had seen a shadow across the window that I knew was
Cyrus’ tall angular form, and I wondered why he did not come out and
join the party. We fancied, although it was an astonishing thing to
fancy of Cyrus, that he went wherever he was likely to meet Alice
Yorke. He groped near-sightedly for the string in a drawer of his desk.
He did not say a word and his lips were tightly compressed.
My feelings were queerly divided. I was conscious that I had been
having a pride in Dave’s manliness that had made me almost forget his
moral failings. I read in Cyrus’ dark face that he was both ashamed of
Dave and a little jealous of him; we all think we can read the faces of
our own, and are often as blind as moles.
No, Cyrus would not come out; he was busy. But I knew that he continued
to pace the office floor after I had gone, as he had done before I came.
Alice Yorke and Dave were still keeping up their gay trifling, but
Alice turned her head eagerly toward the counting-house door as it
closed upon me, and she looked a little disappointed--at least a little
crest-fallen, when she saw that I was alone. Perhaps she was not
content, like the Palmyra girls, with one string to her bow, I thought
a little bitterly, for I didn’t want either of my boys played with,
mouse-fashion, by a mischief of a girl.
“Good gracious, you don’t think you have to take care of Cyrus, do
you?” Octavia had said to me scornfully.
But I still thought that Cyrus might have his weaknesses, like any
one else. It seemed to me that when one was enduring a long strain
of painful duty and self-sacrifice, it might be just the time when a
little consoling sweetness would easily reach his heart.
Dave walked home with me. I had waited for him after Alice and her
father had gone skating off over the rough surface of the river. His
working hours were soon over in these short winter days.
“There are so few men now, Dave,” I said wonderingly, as I watched the
dark shapes that plodded off in the wintry dusk.
“Another cut-down,” Dave answered shortly.
“But it never was done before in the winter; grandpa wouldn’t have
allowed it!” I cried.
“Can’t be helped,” said Dave concisely. “See here, don’t you talk to
Cyrus about it, nor to any one so that he’ll hear of it, but there’s
been a heavy loss. That brig that went down in the great storm off
Seguin was nearly all owned here. It was about all we had left, any of
us. And through some loose screw in the underwriters there won’t be a
cent of insurance. Haven’t you noticed how glum Cyrus has been looking
for a few days?”
“I noticed that he was looking glum when I went into the office for the
string,” I said. And Dave gave me a quick, quizzical glance.
Then, after a moment, he whistled sharply. “W-h-e-w! what dunces girls
are!” he said.
But this was a remark that had somewhat lost its force from long use.
As I have said before we are a candid family.
“Poor old Cyrus has a lot on his hands,” he continued seriously. “I
don’t think he has much of a head for business, and, if he had, I doubt
whether he could keep things from going all wrong as times are now. He
ought to have been a minister as he planned.”
“Dave, haven’t you a head for business? Couldn’t you take some of the
responsibility?” I said eagerly. In the first moment of dismay I didn’t
think of the poverty that menanced us but only of the family honor,
which seemed to me to be centred in the shipbuilding business.
“If I had a head for business I am hardly in a position, just now, to
offer my services as a responsible head of the firm!” said Dave dryly.
And he left me to go to his own room, humming a light air that Alice
Yorke sang.
The sense of misfortune deepened upon me suddenly. I heard the wolf at
the door and felt as if his gaunt length were slinking up the stairs
behind me, as I went to my room.
I sat down upon the edge of my bed with coat and hat still on and my
practical mind slipped away from the mystery of Dave’s wickedness
and from Rob’s pitiful condition, and even from the family honor as
involved in the shipbuilding business, to the possibility of adding
gilt-edged butter to the already famous sage cheese and preserves from
Groundnut Hill Farm.
I fear that my mind is scarcely large enough to contain more than one
idea at a time and that fact accounts for my being rather stupid when
Loveday came into my room, in the small hours of that night, with a bee
in her bonnet--or nightcap, rather, to be exact.
She had a large photograph in her hand; I recognized it at once as the
object that she had hastily hidden under her shawl as she came out of
Hiram Nute’s photograph wagon. She held her candle between the picture
and my sleepy eyes.
“What does it ’pear to you to be?” she demanded.
“A horse,” I said drowsily. It was a very poor photograph. It had been
taken when Hiram first started out with his new “combernation,” and
it was blurred and badly finished. Beneath the photograph was printed
“Prince Charley, Alf Reeder’s Great Racer.”
Had Loveday become suddenly insane, that she should arise from her bed
in the dead of the night to show me with trembling eagerness, this most
uninteresting photograph?
“Does it ’pear to you to be any horse you ever saw?” demanded Loveday
breathlessly.
I raised myself upon my elbow and looked at her in blinking
bewilderment. I had heard that it was the proper thing to humor insane
people.
“I’ve seen so few race-horses, and I don’t notice them much,” I
stammered. “It--it looks like a very fine horse.”
“Oh it does, does it? That’s the way it ’pears to you then.” Loveday
heaved a long sigh. “Now it looks to me like one of them poor old
creturs that are patched up and curry-combed and have plenty of oats
give ’em, and have the whip cracked over ’em, and another horse set to
runnin’ by ’em to see if they can’t get up a little spurt o’ life, with
their last breath, just to put money into somebody’s pocket. I used to
see such things up to the Newmarket mile-ground when I was a girl. But
there! I’m an old idiot, awakin’ you up like this in the middle of the
night. An idee ketched a holt of me, and when an idee ketches a holt
of me between midnight and sun-up I can’t get rid of it without I tell
somebody. I was kind of glad I woke up, too, for the lantern was hung
out acrost the river.”
I sprang up. The lantern was the signal hung out at Uncle Horace’s
when Rob was very ill and wanted Dave.
“You waked him? He’s gone over?” I gasped.
“La, yes; I watched him clear acrost the river in the moonlight, half
an hour ago,” said Loveday. “I expect nothin’ but what that boy is real
sick, but it never took that old horse out of my mind. Beats all what
an old idiot I be when an idee ketches a holt of me between midnight
and sun-up!”