CONFIDENCES
The blast struck the light tower so heavily that Ralph Endicott felt the
whole structure vibrate as he followed Tobias up the spiral stairway
after supper. In spite of the lightkeeper's jollity and Miss Heppy's
kindness, the supper had seemed to hearten but little the spirits of the
young man.
He had offered to attend Tobias in his duty at the top of the tower more
for the purpose of getting away from the women than for any other
reason. He seized the broom and followed Tobias with the scraper out
upon the open gallery. If the storm had seemed furious before supper,
it had risen to a top gale now. The two men could scarcely face it on
the windward side.
The gale came in blasts that slapped their burden of snow against the
lighthouse with great force. Ralph was barely able to keep his feet.
But the sturdy lightkeeper went about the task with a certain phlegm.
They managed to free the glass of its curtain of snow. Then Ralph
staggered around to the sheltered gallery, on the heels of Tobias. The
younger man's was a gloomy face when they once more entered the lamp
room.
"Cheer up," said Tobias, getting his breath and eyeing Ralph aslant.
"They tell me the worst is yet to come. Though I tell you fair,
Ralphie, if the last end o' my life is anywhere as hard as what happened
me when I shipped cabin boy on the old _Sarah Drinkwater_, the good Lord
help me to bear it!
"Why, Ralphie, from the time she was warped out o' the dock at
Provincetown till we unloaded them box shocks at Santiago I didn't git
to git my clothes off--no, sir!
"We _did_ have bad weather, I cal'late, though I never got out on deck
often enough the whole endurin' v'y'ge to observe the sea and sky. I
was washing dishes, making up berths, cleaning pots and pans, peeling
'taters and turmits, and seeding raisins for the skipper's plum duff
most o' the time.
"Seeding raisins! Oh, sugar, I got to thinkin' that if that was all
going to sea meant, I might better have got a job in a scullery and kept
on an even footing. And I purty nigh got my lips in such a pucker
whistling while I seeded them raisins (cookie wouldn't trust me
otherwise) that I never did get 'em straight since.
"Say, lemme tell you!" proceeded Tobias, his weather-stained face
beaming in the glow of the great Argand light. "Cap'n Drinkwater
demanded his plum duff for supper ev'ry endurin' day of the v'y'ge, no
matter what the weather was. He had an old black cook, Sam Snowball,
that had got so's he could make that pudding to the queen's taste.
"Lemme tell you! The skipper was that stingy that he fed the crew rusty
pork and weevilly beans, and a grade of salt horse that would make a
crew of Skowegians mutiny. But the _Sarah Drinkwater_ never made long
enough v'y'ges for her crew to mutiny--no, sir!
"But that plum duff--oh, sugar! Bein' the boy, I never got more'n the
lickin's of the dish. If I got enough 'taters and salt horse to fill my
belly so's to keep my pants up, I was lucky. The skipper and the mate
divided the duff between 'em.
"Ahem!" he added critically, "you don't look as though there was any
plums at all in your duff, Ralph."
"There isn't," returned the young man shortly.
"Oh, sugar!" ejaculated the lightkeeper, drawing forth a short clay pipe
and a sack of cut tobacco. "I cal'late that you folks with money have
more real troubles than what we poor folks do."
"Huh! _Money!_" scoffed Endicott.
"Yep. It's mighty poor bait for fish, I cal'late. You can't even chum
with it."
"Money isn't everything," said the young man shrugging his shoulders.
"True. True as preaching," cried Tobias. "But 'twill buy most
everything you're likely to need in this world. And you've got enough,
Ralph, to keep you from getting gray-headed before your time worrying
about where your three meals a day are coming from. I don't see what
can be wrong with you. And that purty gal----"
"Now stop, Tobias Bassett!" exclaimed Endicott. "Don't keep reminding me
of Lorna. I get enough of that at home."
"Wal!" gasped the lightkeeper. "For you to speak so of Lorna! Why,
that's the main-skys'l-pole of the whole suit of spars--only needs the
main-truck to cap it. What do you mean?"
"Now, mind you," Endicott said earnestly. "I haven't a thing to say
against Lorna. She's a nice girl--for some other fellow. But I declare
to you, Tobias, _I won't marry her_."
"Oh, sugar!"
"Just because my Uncle Henry and her Aunt Ida have planned for us to do
so since we were little tads running about the beaches here, is no
reason why I should be tied up to Lorna forever and ever, Amen!"
"That's a mighty hard sayin'----"
"You think, like everybody else, that Lorna and I were made for each
other. We weren't! We'd fight all the time. We always do fight. Look
at to-night. The first little thing that goes wrong she jumps at me.
I'm sick of playing dog and rolling over every time Lorna orders me to.
"And look at the mess we're in to-night!"
"What's the matter with you, boy?" demanded the lighthouse keeper.
"You're under shelter. There's grub enough in the light to stave off
starvation for a spell. Nothing can't happen to your buzz-cart worse
than its being drifted under with snow."
"Oh, you don't understand, Tobias!" said the exasperated Ralph. "Our
going off in my car the way we did, and not getting back to-night--why!
it'll be all over Harbor Bar that we've eloped."
"I see," said the lightkeeper between puffs of his short pipe. Then:
"You don't cal'late to marry Lorna?"
"I won't have her thrown at me."
"I never had no gal throwed at me," Tobias reflected. "I dunno how
'twould feel. But I will say that if I had to catch such a throw as
Lorna Nicholet, I surely wouldn't make a muff of it!"
"That's all right," observed Endicott. "I'm not saying she isn't a nice
enough girl. But I don't believe she really wants me any more than I
want her. In fact, I know there was another fellow last year that she
was interested in. A chap named Conny Degger. He was in my class at
college. Kind of a sport, but I guess he's all right, at that. But
Lorna's Aunt Ida broke it up. Wouldn't let Conny shine around Lorna any
more when she learned about it.
"They've got us both thrown and tied, Tobias! That's the way Uncle
Henry, and Aunt Ida, and all the rest of my family and Lorna's people
have got us fixed. They act as though we'd just got to marry each
other. And after this mischance--breaking down here in the
snow--they'll all say we're disgraced forever if we don't announce the
engagement."
"Oh, sugar!" said the lightkeeper again, puffing away placidly.
In the kitchen Lorna Nicholet was making a confidante of Miss Heppy
quite as Ralph had trusted Tobias. Nor was the girl less determined to
thwart the intention of her family in this matrimonial affair, than was
Ralph in his attitude toward his relatives.
"For love's sake!" murmured the lightkeeper's sister, realizing at last
how much in earnest the girl was, "Miss Ida'll near about have a
conniption. She's set her heart on you an' Ralph marrying, for years."
"And his Uncle Henry is just as foolish," sighed Lorna, wiping her eyes.
"Why will old people never have sense enough to let young people's
affairs alone?"
"Well, now, as you might say," Miss Heppy observed, "Miss Ida and Henry
Endicott ain't re'lly old. Forty-odd ain't what ye might call aged--not
in a way of speaking. But I cal'late they are some sot in their ways."
"'Some sot' is right, Miss Heppy," repeated Lorna, suddenly giggling and
her vivid face a-smile once more. "In her own case Aunt Ida is a
misogamist; yet she urges marriage on me. And Ralph's Uncle Henry is a
misogynist in any case. Why he is so anxious to force Ralph into the
wedded state I do not see."
"Seems to me them air purty hard names to call your aunt and Henry
Endicott," murmured Miss Heppy.
"Oh!" Lorna laughed again. "They just mean that Aunt Ida hates
marriage and Uncle Henry hates women."
Miss Heppy waggled a doubtful head.
"They wasn't like that when I first remember them, Lorny," she said.
"Miss Ida Nicholet is a fine looking woman now. She was a pretty sight
for anybody's eyes when she was your age, or thereabout."
"I know she was quite a belle when she was young," Lorna agreed, rather
carelessly.
"And Henry Endicott wasn't any--what did you call him jest now?"
"A misogynist--a hater of women."
"He didn't hate 'em none when he come here that first summer," said Miss
Heppy, with a reflective smile. "He was a young professor at some
college then. I expect he didn't know as much about inventing things
then as what he does now. But he knowed more how to please women. He
pleased your Aunt Ida right well, I cal'late."
"Never! You don't mean it, Miss Heppy!" exclaimed Lorna, sensing a
romance.
"Yes, I thought then Miss Ida and Henry Endicott would make a match of
it. But somehow--well, such things don't always go the way you expect
them to. Both your aunt and Professor Endicott were high-strung--same's
you and Ralph be, Lorny."
"Why," cried the girl smiling again, "I'd never fight with Ralph at all
if they didn't try to make us marry. I wonder if it is so, that Aunt
Ida and Ralph's uncle were once fond of each other! If they could not
make a match of it, why are they so determined to force Ralph and me
into a marriage?"
"Mebbe because they see their mistake," Miss Heppy said judiciously. "I
don't believe your aunt and Henry Endicott have been any too happy
endurin' these past twenty-odd years."
"Tell me!" urged the girl, her cheeks aglow and her eyes dancing. "Is
remaining single all your life such a _great_ cross, Miss Heppy? Are
there not some compensations?"
The woman looked up from darning the big blue wool sock that could have
fitted none but her brother's foot. The smile with which she favored
the girl had much tenderness as well as retrospection in it.
"I don't believe that any woman over thirty is ever single from choice,
Lorny. She may never find the man she wants to marry. Or something
separates her from the one she is sure-'nough fitted to mate with. So,
she must make the best of it."
"But _you_, Miss Heppy?" asked Lorna, boldly. "Why didn't you ever
marry?"
"Why--I _was_ cal'lating on doing so, when I was a gal," said the woman
gently. "Listen!"
The girl, startled, looked all about the room and then back into Miss
Heppy's softly smiling face.
"Do you hear it, Lorny? The sea a-roaring over the reef and the wind
wailing about the light? That's my answer to your question. I seen so
many women in my young days left lone and lorn because of that sea. Ah,
my deary, 'tain't the men that go down to the sea in ships that suffer
most. 'Tis their wives and mothers, and the little children they leave
behind.
"When I was a young gal I never had a chance to meet ary men but them
that airned their bread on the deep waters. My father was drowned off
Hatteras, two brothers older than Tobias were of the crew of the
windjammer, _Seahawk_. She never got around the Horn on her last
v'y'ge. In seventeen homes about Clinkerport and Twin Rocks, the women
mourned their dead on the _Seahawk_.
"No, no. I didn't stay single from choice. But I shut my ears and eyes
to ary man that heard the call of the sea. And I never met no other,
Lorny."
The uproar of the storm was an accompaniment to Miss Heppy's story. The
solemnity of it quenched any further expression of what Lorna Nicholet
considered her troubles. Within the kitchen there was silence for a
space.