1922
I
I have seen the improbable turn true too often not to have it disturb me.
Suppose these memoirs still exist when the French royalist plot of 1805
and my father's peculiar role in it are forgotten. I cannot help but
remember it is a restless land across the water. But surely people will
continue to recollect. Surely these few pages, written with the sole
purpose of explaining my father's part in the affair, will not degenerate
into anything so pitifully fanciful as the story of a man who tried his
best to be a bad example because he could not be a good one.
It was my Uncle Jason who was with me when I learned of my father's
return to America. I still remember the look of sympathetic concern on
his broad, good-natured face, as I read my father's letter. There was
anxiety written there as he watched me, for my uncle was a kindly,
thoughtful man. For the moment he seemed to have quite forgotten the
affairs of his counting house, and the inventory of goods from France,
which a clerk had placed before him. Of late he had taken in me an
unaccustomed interest, in no wise allayed by the letter I was holding.
"So he is here," said my Uncle Jason.
"He is just arrived," I answered.
"I had heard of it," he remarked thoughtfully. "And you will see
him, Henry?"
"Yes," I replied, "since she asked me to."
"She had asked you? Your mother? You did not tell me that." His voice
had been sharp and reproachful, and then he had sighed. "After all," he
went on more gently, "he is your father, and you must respect him as
such, Henry, hard as it is to do so. I am sorry, almost, that he and I
have quarreled, for in many ways your father was a remarkable man who
might have gone far, except for his failing. God knows I did my best to
help him."
And he sighed again at the small success of his efforts and returned to
the papers that lay before him on the counting house table. His business
had become engrossing of late, and gave him little leisure.
"Do not be too hard on him, Henry," he said, as I departed.
It was ten years since I had seen my father, ten years when we change
more than we do during the rest of a lifetime. Ten years back we had
lived in a great house with lawns that ran down to the river where our
ships pulled at their moorings. My father and I had left the house
together--I for school, and my father--I have never learned where he had
gone. I was just beginning to see the starker outlines of a world that
has shaken off the shadows of youth when I saw him again.
I remember it was a morning early in autumn. The wind was fresh off the
sea, making the pounding of the surf on the beach seem very near as I
urged my horse from the neat, quiet streets of the town up the rutted
lane that led to the Shelton house. The tang of the salt marshes was in
the wind, and a touch of frost over the meadows told me the ducks would
soon be coming in from shelter. Already the leaves were falling off the
tall elms, twisting in little spirals through the clear October sunlight.
And yet, in spite of the wind and the sea and the clean light of the
forenoon, there was a sadness about the place, and an undercurrent of
uneasy silence that the rustling of the leaves and the noise of the surf
only seemed to accentuate. It was like the silence that falls about a
table when the guests have left it, and the chairs are empty and the
lights are growing dim. It was the silence that comes over all places
where there should be people, and yet where no one comes.
The shrubbery my grandfather had brought from England was more wild and
disordered than when I had seen it last. The weeds had choked the formal
garden that once grew before the front door. And the house--I had often
pictured that house in my memory--with its great arched doorway, its
small-paned windows and its gambrel roof. Once it had seemed to me a
massive and majestic structure. Now those ten years had made it shrink to
a lonely, crumbling building that overlooked the harbor mouth. Clematis
had swarmed over the bricks, a tangle of dead and living vines. The paint
was chipping from the doors and window ledges. Here and there a shutter
had broken loose and was sagging on rusted hinges. Houses are apt to
follow the direction their owners take.
I knew I was being watched, though I cannot tell how I knew it. Yet I saw
nothing until I was nearly at our door. I remember I was noticing the
green stain from the brass knocker on its paneling, when my horse snorted
and stopped dead in his tracks. From the overgrown clump of lilacs that
flanked the granite stone which served as a door-step something was
glinting in the sun, and then as I looked more closely, I saw a face
peering at me from between the twigs, a face of light mahogany with thick
lips that showed the presence of negro blood. It was Brutus, my father's
half-caste servant.
Dark and saturnine as ever, he glided out into the path in front of me,
thrusting something back into the sash around his waist, moved toward me,
and took my horse's head. His teeth shone when I spoke to him, but he
said never a word in return to my greeting. There was a touch of Indian
in his blood that made his speech short and laconic. Nevertheless, he was
glad to see me. He grasped my shoulder as I dismounted, and shook me
gently from side to side. His great form loomed before me, his lips
framed in a cheerful grin, his eyes appraising and friendly. And then I
noticed for the first time the livid welt of a cut across his cheek.
Brutus read my glance, but he only shook his head in answer.
"What do you mean, hiding in those bushes?" I asked him roughly.
"Always must see who is coming," said Brutus. "Monsieur may not want to
see who is coming--you understan'?"
"No," I said, "I don't understand."
His grasp on my shoulder tightened.
"Then you go home," he said, "You go home now. Something happen. Monsieur
very angry. Something bad--you understan'?"
"He is in the house?" I asked.
Brutus nodded.
"Then take this horse," I said, and swung open the front door.
A draft eddied through the broad old hallway as I stepped over the
threshold, and there was a smell of wood smoke that told me the chimneys
were still cold from disuse. Someone had stored the hall full of coils of
rope and sailcloth, but in the midst of it the same tall clock was
ticking out its cycle, and the portraits of the Shelton family still hung
against the white panels.
The long, brown rows of books still lined the walls of the morning room.
The long mahogany table in the center was still littered with maps and
papers. There were the same rusted muskets and small swords in the rack
by the fireplace, and in front of the fire in a great, high-backed
armchair my father was sitting. I paused with a curious feeling of doubt,
surprise and diffidence. Somehow I had pictured a different meeting and a
different man. He must surely have heard my step and the jingling of my
spurs as I crossed the room, but he never so much as raised his head. He
still rested, leaning indolently back, watching the flames dance up the
chimney. He was dressed in gray satin small clothes that went well with
his slender figure. His wig was fresh powdered, and his throat and wrists
were framed in spotless lace. The care of his person was almost the only
tribute he paid to his past.
I must have stood for twenty seconds watching him while he watched the
fire, before he turned and faced me, and when he did I had forgotten the
words I had framed to greet him. I knew he was preparing to meet a hard
ordeal. He knew as well as I there was no reason why I should be glad to
see him. Yet he showed never a trace of uncertainty. His eye never
wavered. His lips were drawn in the same supercilious upward curve that
gave him the expression I most often remembered. Ten years had not done
much to change him. The pallor I had remembered on his features had been
burned off by a tropical sun. That was all. There was hardly a wrinkle
about his eyes, hardly a tell-tale crease in his high forehead. Wherever
he had been, whatever he had done, his serenity was still unshaken. It
still lay over him, placid and impenetrable. And when he spoke, his voice
was cool and impassive and cast in pleasant modulation.
"So you are here," he remarked, as though he were weighing each word
carefully, "and why did you come? I think I told you in my letter there
was no need unless you wished."
There was something cold and unfriendly in his speech. I tried in vain to
fight down a rising feeling of antagonism, a vague sense of
disappointment. For a moment we glanced at each other coldly.
"I think, sir," I answered, "from a sense of curiosity."
Almost as soon as I had spoken, I was sorry, for some sixth sense told
me I had hurt him. With a lithe, effortless grace he rose from his chair
and faced me, and his smile, half amused, half tolerant, curved his
lips again.
"I should have known you would be frank," he said, "Your letter, my son,
refusing to accept my remittances, should have taught me as much, but we
grow forgetful as our feet weary of the path of life."
Yet I remember thinking that few people looked less weary than my father
as he stood there watching me. The primroses, it seemed, had afforded
pleasant footing.
I believe he read my thoughts, for it seemed to me that for an instant
genuine amusement was written in his glance, but there were few genuine
emotions he allowed free play.
"Perhaps," he suggested pleasantly, "it would interest you to know why
I have returned to these rather rigorous and uncongenial surroundings. If
not, I beg you to be frank again, Henry. There's nothing that I dread
more than being stupid."
"Sir," I objected, "I told you I was curious."
"To be sure you did," he admitted. "Can it be possible that I am becoming
absent-minded? Henry, I am going to tell you something very flattering.
Can you believe it? It is largely on your account that I consented to
revisit these familiar scenes!"
"No," I said, "I cannot, sir, since you ask me."
My father shrugged his shoulders. "Far be it from me to overstrain your
credulity, my son," he observed blandly. "Let us admit then there was
also some slight factor of expedience--but slight, Henry, almost
negligible, in fact. It happened that I was in a French port, and that
while there I should think of you."
"Sir," I said, "You startle me!"
But he continued, regardless of my interruption.
"And what should be there also, but the _Eclipse_, ready to set for home!
Quite suddenly I determined to sail her back. I, too, was curious, my
son." For a moment his voice lost its bantering note. "Curious," he
continued gravely, "to know whether you were a man like me, or one of
whom I might have reason to be proud.... So here we are, Henry. Who said
coincidence was the exception and not the rule?"
His last words drifted gently away, and in their wake followed an awkward
silence. The logs were hissing in the fire. I could hear the clock in the
hall outside, and the beating of the vines against the window panes. It
was no sound, certainly, that made me whirl around to look behind
me,--some instinct--that was all. There was Brutus, not two feet from my
back, with my father's cloak over his right arm, and my father's sword
held in his great fist.
"Do not disturb yourself, Brutus," said my father. "We are both
gentlemen, more or less, and will not come to blows. My cloak, Brutus.
I am sorry, my son, that we must wait till later in the day to
exchange ideas. Even here in America affairs seem to follow me. Will
you content yourself till evening? There are horses in the stable and
liquors in the cellar. Choose all or either, Henry. Personally, I find
them both amusing."
He stood motionless, however, even when his dark cloak was adjusted to
his shoulders, as though some matters were disturbing him; and then he
tapped his sword hilt with a precise, even motion of his fingers.
"Brutus," he said slowly, "I shall take my pistols also."
"Your pistols!" I echoed. "You have forgotten you are back in America."
He half turned toward me, and favored me with a serene, incurious glance.
"On the contrary," he said, "I am just beginning to remember."
And so without further words he left me. I followed him through our rear
doorway, out over the crumbling bricks of our terrace, which had been
built to overlook the river, and watched him walk slowly and thoughtfully
down the path with its border of elm trees, to his warehouses, where a
half dozen men had already started work.
The river was dark blue under a cloudless sky. The sunlight was playing
in restless sparkles where the wind ruffled the water's surface. Out near
the channel I could see the _Eclipse_ riding at anchor, her decks
littered with bales and gear, and the _Sun Maid_ and the _Sea Tern_, trim
and neat, and down deep in the water as though ready to put to sea. At
the head of our wharf were bales and boxes stacked in the odd confusion
that comes of a hasty discharge of cargo.
On the terrace where I was standing I could see the other wharves along
the waterfront, and the church spires and roofs of the town reared among
the trees that lined the busy streets. Toward the sand dunes the marshes
stretched away in russet gold into the autumn haze. The woods across the
river were bright patches of reds and yellows, pleasant and inviting in
the sunlight.
But I saw it all with only half an eye. I was still thinking of the dark
hall behind me, and the cold, unwelcome stillness of the shuttered rooms.
I could understand his depression, now that he had come back to it. But
there was something else.... I was still thinking of it when I looked at
the _Eclipse_ again. It would have been hard to find a craft of more
delicate, graceful lines. They often said he had a flair for ships and
women. A shifting current, some freak of the wind and tide, was making
her twist and pull at her anchor, and for a moment the sun struck clean
on her broadside. A gaping hole between decks had connected two of her
ports in a jagged rent.
It was not surprising. My father's ships were often fired on at sea. Nor
was it strange that Brutus had a half-healed scar on his cheek. But why
had my father gone armed to his own wharf? Perhaps I might have forgotten
if I had not visited the stables.
Our carriage harness still hung from the pegs, dried and twisted by the
years, and minus its silver trimmings. The sunlight filtered through
cracks in the roof, and danced through the dust mites to the rows of
vacant stalls. Near the door my horse was feeding comfortably, and beside
him stood two bays that shone from careful grooming. One was carrying a
saddle with a pair of pistols in the pocket. Yet not a hair had been
turned from riding.