THE BARBARY PIRATES
Although there was not much more than an hour of daylight left, the two
friends put off their mathematical researches and spent a little time in
exploring the ruins of the house. David opened the heavy, charred door
of his own refuge and showed Betsey the remains of the room inside with
the fragments of a brick staircase that had once wound upward above it.
“This end of the house was not destroyed at once, I think,” he said,
“and I believe a good deal of the furniture was got out of it, things
that you can still see at the cottage. The roof fell after a day or two
and carried the walls with it, so that there are some relics left in the
ruins still. This little room under the stairs must have been a den
belonging to Miss Miranda’s brother Ted, for I found a pair of spurs and
a rusty rifle, a melted silver cup, and some such things here. Beyond
must have been the library and a conservatory behind, at least there are
mountains of broken glass beside that wall.”
From here, then, had been rescued the toy-cupboard and such pieces of
heavy mahogany furniture as were still in use in the cottage and which
stood out in such strong contrast to the very plain chairs and tables of
painted pine that filled the rest of the Reynolds’ abode. The ivy that
had once climbed the high walls, that had crept around the leaded
windows and festooned the pillared doorway, now spread its mats of green
and its slim, rose colored tendrils over the desolate ruins and covered
what it could. Broken pictures still showed half buried under bricks and
plaster, while a mirror leaned crookedly against a wall, showing
fantastic patterns of shivered glass.
“This must have been the kitchen,” David went on as they progressed
farther. “Be careful how you climb about, these old walls are none too
solid.”
He himself, however, went clambering up heedless of precaution, his only
thought being, apparently, that harm might come to Betsey.
“That place beyond I’ve never explored,” he said; “wait here a minute
until I get to the top of that ridge of bricks. The weight of both of us
might make it begin to slide.”
“Don’t,” she objected, “it doesn’t look safe at all. Can’t you go to the
other—”
He had left her protests unheeded and had clambered half way up the
slope of broken débris, when she saw it begin to tremble under his feet,
then suddenly give way and carry him down out of her sight. She ran to
the edge to see, squeezed through the cleft made by the collapse of the
brick-heap and slid down after, to find David, a trifle scratched and
with his red hair full of brick-dust, standing gazing about him with
untroubled interest.
“This must have been the end of the house where the fire started,” he
commented. “See how much blacker the walls are and how even the bricks
are burned. And look, that must be a part of one of the chimneys still
left standing: you can see that the lightning struck it and split it to
the very base. I wonder, with all the frost and rain since the fire,
that it hasn’t fallen long ago. I don’t quite understand what this room
is. It seems to have been away from the house and on a lower level.”
Elizabeth balanced on the edge of a stone and looked at the confusion
about her, where rusty heaps of metal and coils of wire lay amid the
other rubbish.
“It must have been Mr. Reynolds’ workshop,” she suggested, “and see,
even those steel bars are melted together. The fire must surely have
been hottest just here.”
“I believe you’re right.” David was picking his way about looking at the
broken engine parts and the melted bits of steel. “I suppose he was
working even then on that same invention. I think it ought to be a very
great thing when it is done.”
“I think,” began Betsey, “that—oh, look, look!”
She stood transfixed with dismay, staring at something behind him. David
gave one glance and knew better than to pause and look again.
“Quick,” he cried, and, seizing her hand, dragged her, almost headlong,
across the open space and up another slope of sliding bricks.
The old chimney, split by the lightning and weakened by fire and frost,
was ready to tumble at the slightest shock and had received its final
impetus from the collapse of the neighboring wall. As Betsey looked at
it the whole mass was tottering and, but for David’s quickness, would
have engulfed them both. As it was they were nearly smothered by the
cloud of dust and crumbled mortar. Blinded and breathless, they
scrambled out of the hollow to safety. David’s dusty face had not lost
its cheerful smile, but he spoke with great decision.
“I was very wrong to let you go in there,” he said. “I might have seen
that the whole place is shaky and that the walls have been collapsing,
little by little, for years. We will not go near this end of it at
least, again.”
Elizabeth knelt by the pool to wash the dust from her face and hands,
while David, having done the same, went to fetch his geometry book.
“Now,” he said, sitting down by her with something of a sigh, “we really
must, I suppose, begin on that tiresome pyramid.”
They had a gay session there under the trees before the light began to
fail, while each, by instructing the other, succeeded in mastering all
former difficulties. In the end they fell to firing rapid questions at
each other, Betsey trying to trip David in his fluent statement of the
theorem, he in turn lying in wait for her on obscure points of the
proof, until neither could be shaken from the thoroughness with which
knowledge was now entrenched.
“How lucky it is,” said Betsey, putting down the book and leaning back
with her elbow on the rim of the pool, “that each of us stuck in a
different place! I hope it will often be that way and that we can help
each other more. Now why—” her method of finding things out was apt to
be by blunt questioning, a habit she could not easily put aside, “why
are you getting ready for college all alone when it is so much easier to
do it by going to school?”
David stretched his long legs in the grass and looked fixedly down into
the water.
“I was nearly ready to go two years ago,” he explained, “but I left
school instead and began to work, since I was too young to go to war. I
have no father and things were not going very well with my mother and me
while the war lasted, and besides every pair of hands was needed for the
extra labor. Now that peace has come, our affairs are better again and I
could go to college next autumn, except that there are some things I
still have to learn. I took this place with my uncle because I knew the
work would only last through the summer and then would leave me free. I
have a cousin who is a professor over at the college and who helps me
with my work, but I don’t have time to go to him often.”
Elizabeth was thinking, as she sat looking into the water, of how she
would feel if further education became suddenly as complicated for her
as it was for him. The knowledge of his difficulties tended to arouse
her own flagging zeal, so that she began to feel that obstinate pyramids
and elusive pirates could not really stand in the way of true
determination. As she sat reflecting, footsteps approached along the
grassy path and Miss Miranda’s voice sounded behind them.
“I have been looking for you everywhere,” she said. “Dick has been
trying to tell me about his adventures, but has only succeeded in
convincing me that it was a very desperate affair. Poor battered bird,
he will not sit on the wall and call out challenges to other crows soon
again. I have invited myself to have supper with you here beside the
pool, while you tell me all that has happened.”
She set down the basket that she had been carrying and began to spread a
table cloth on the grass.
“Michael is feeding Dobbin,” she said, “and I have telephoned to
Betsey’s house, so that all that you have to do is to sit down and eat.”
The suggestion was adopted with alacrity, for the appetites of the two
were keen, and their own evening meals seemed far away. Amid much mirth
was told the tale of poor Dick’s misfortunes, of his headlong flight
from his enemies and of the amazement of the pigeons on whose
hospitality he had so unceremoniously thrust himself. Of her talk with
the farmer’s wife, Betsey did not say so much, only delivered her
messages and accounted for the eggs.
“I thought I would drop them a hundred times,” she said at the end. “I
never knew that eggs could grow so heavy.”
She sat lazily on the grass, feeling rested and content, unmindful for
any further exertion than to dabble her fingers in the quiet pool. A
shimmering band of sunset light dyed the opposite half of the basin as
though the water had been set on fire. Miss Miranda, leaning comfortably
against a tree, had taken out her knitting.
“There is something wrong with Michael to-night,” she observed as she
clicked the needles in and out. “He is sitting on the bench by the gate
staring straight before him and not even smoking his pipe. When I asked
him what was the matter he only growled out that a black cat ran across
his path last night and that trouble was bound to follow. I suppose he
is reciting spells to himself, to drive off the evil. Certainly there
was no use in talking to him.”
Elizabeth was looking up at the ruined house, trying to imagine how it
had seemed, with lights in the windows, with fires on its deserted
hearthstones, with all the warm brightness of home shining through its
open doorway. Miss Miranda must have been thinking, with far greater and
more painful clearness, of much the same thing.
“I used to believe,” she said suddenly in midst of a silence, “when I
came home from school and crossed the lawn to that side door, that
burned, marred door in the wall that is the only one left, that it
opened on the dearest place in the world. The big, black cherry tree
that grows beside it used to spread such a cloud of white blossoms every
spring! I always thought, when I heard people talk of the narrow gate of
Heaven, that it must look just like my little dark door under the
blooming cherry tree.”
She moved over to sit by Elizabeth at the edge of the pool.
“It is not easy to come home to an empty, silent house that is not
really home,” she went on. “No one knows that better than I, my dear, or
would like more to make it up to you.”
Betsey moved closer and smiled up at her gratefully.
“You do make it up to me,” she said.
David, who was lying stretched out at Miss Miranda’s feet was busy at a
task of his own. It seemed that he was a persistent boy who would never
lay aside a piece of work until every detail that he could think of had
been added to make it complete. He had fetched some clay from the far
end of the garden and was modeling the frustum of a pyramid and those
three confusing portions into which it could be divided. Betsey watched
him idly, quite content that he should have the labor and she the
benefit. He demonstrated them with a flourish on the smooth rim of the
pool.
“You make it so clear,” remarked Miranda, “that I almost understand it
myself, although I had forgotten it ten years ago.”
“Your father must know all about such things,” David said rather
wistfully; “it discourages me to think of how much he knows. Do you
suppose he would care to have—to have any one help him in his shop, just
to sharpen tools and screw bolts and run errands?”
“He needs some one like that very greatly,” Miss Miranda answered. “As a
rule he likes to do his work alone for fear the news of what he is
trying to make will get about before he is ready. But I know you well
enough to be certain that you will give away no secrets.”
Elizabeth drew her dripping hand from the water and took up one of the
pyramids.
“I never thought I could understand it so clearly,” she said, “and now
if I could only remember about the Barbary pirates and the merchant
marine, I really could be almost sure of going to college.”
“Barbary pirates?” repeated Miss Miranda. “I happen to know something of
them, myself. How do they come to trouble you when they have all been
dead so long?”
“Oh, I just don’t seem to be able to remember when they lived, or what
they did,” Betsey sighed. “They seem to come in that dull middle period
in the history, between the Revolution and the Civil War, when nothing
particular ever seemed to happen and most of the Presidents were men
whose names you never heard before. It’s all very difficult.”
“Do you remember,” returned Miss Miranda, “that little green tree that
you saw in my toy cupboard, the first day that you came? It was put
there by my great-grandfather, who fought against those self-same
pirates and helped to put an end to their wrongdoing. If I should tell
you how he came into possession of the tree, I believe you could
remember better what happened in those early days and how America built
up her shipping, that merchant marine about which I have heard you
groan. Would you like to hear?”
“We would,” answered the two in a single breath.
“And may I go and bring the tree to show David?” Elizabeth asked. She
scarcely waited for permission but was off down the path having quite
forgotten her former weariness.
Michael was sitting on the bench as Miss Miranda had said, and would not
even respond to her greeting as she passed. He had been so friendly of
recent days that she stopped, surprised, and turned back to question
him.
“What is the matter Michael? Is it really the black cat that troubles
you so?”
“Matter enough,” he returned morosely, “even without the black cat.
There has been trouble brewing for long and I am thinking it is about to
break.”
“But why? What trouble? What makes you think so?” Betsey pressed her
questions anxiously. But his answers were most unsatisfactory.
“Oh, just trouble. And how do I know it is coming soon? I feel it in my
bones like.”
He would say no more and she was forced to go about her errand. As she
crossed the lawn by the house she saw that the workshop door was open to
the warm night air and that Mr. Reynolds was as busy as ever inside. It
made a quaint picture, the shadowy room, the brilliant circle of light,
the old man’s intent, intelligent face bent over his work, the black
crow sitting immovable as a statue on the corner of the table. A
pleasant noise of quietly whirring wheels came out of the door, a
peaceful, comfortable song that mingled with the cheery chirp of a
cricket in the grass. It was such a happy, untroubled scene. No
presentiment of evil could be lurking that night in any bones, but
Michael’s.
When Elizabeth returned with the little tree, David was as entranced
with it as she had been. It stood on the edge of the basin in the last
of the failing twilight and, in its airy grace of form and glittering of
jade and jewels, it seemed scarcely a thing of reality at all. Miss
Miranda laid her knitting on her knee for the light was gone at last.
The sunset colors had faded in the water and the fireflies were
beginning to wink and shine in the shadows of the pine trunks as she
began.