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ADMIRAL’S LIGHT
[Illustration: ANNA HILLIARD
From a drawing by Martin Justice]
ADMIRAL’S LIGHT
by
HENRY MILNER RIDEOUT
Author of Beached Keels, The Siamese Cat, etc.
With Illustrations
[Illustration]
Boston and New York
Houghton, Mifflin and Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1907
Copyright 1907 by Henry Milner Rideout
All Rights Reserved
Published November 1907
To
NATHANIEL ALLISON, M. D.
CONTENTS
I. THE GYPSY MARE 1
II. CAPTAIN FLORIO 28
III. THE SAFFRON MAN 49
IV. PAN’S PIPES 69
V. THE HIGH WOODS 91
VI. THE COUNCIL 114
VII. HABAKKUK’S LIGHT 133
VIII. THE OTHER CAMP 157
IX. THE RUNNING BROOK 181
X. TONY PASSES 201
XI. THE RISK 223
NOTE. _The frontispiece is from a drawing by Martin Justice. The eleven
half-titles are from drawings by Charles H. Woodbury._
[Illustration]
ADMIRAL’S LIGHT
CHAPTER I
THE GYPSY MARE
Thrusting his tousled head through the trap-door, Miles made his third
and last inspection for the night. Fierce yellow light flooded the
glass cage; against the panes, like restless, irritated snowflakes,
a few belated moths fluttered in vain. The circular base of the lamp
cast downward a shadow so black as almost to appear a solid supporting
cone. At the edge of this Miles reared his shoulders higher. Under the
blue flannel shirt their weary movement was that of a sleepy boy; but
his thin, dark face shone grave as a man’s. He sniffed the familiar
smell of oil and hot brass, and glanced perfunctorily; the lamp burned
as bright as it had three hours ago, at midnight, or as it would burn
three hours hence, at sunrise,--with the same provoking virtue that
made his nocturnal rounds a waste of labor and sleep.
“Some one has to,” he said aloud. “Burn away, Beast!” With this
customary good-night, he clattered downstairs, locked the lighthouse
door, caught up his lantern, and went whistling along the narrow path
by the river. From below, to the left, stole the salt coolness of
seaweed bared at low tide,--a sharp aroma that set him wide awake. From
above, over a black phantom hill, peered Orion’s red shoulder-star.
Hurtling shadows of undergrowth before his lantern rose magnified,
parted in rout, wheeled slowly, fell prostrate and infinitely
prolonged. The grass fringe of his smooth-beaten trail gleamed with a
pearly rime of autumnal dew. “Nearly frost to-night,” thought the boy.
He raced down into a steep gully, drummed across a little foot-bridge,
took by scrambling assault the other bank, and on the crest, suddenly,
as their black wall yawned to engulf him, entered a low grove of pines
and cedars. The cold wet bristles bedewed his hands, as he skipped
along, now scuffing loudly on a worn ledge, now over a stretch of wet
touch-wood, the full, fern-bordered length of a vanished log, that made
him advance silent as a ghost.
A ghost--he often thought of that, for now came the one mild
excitement. Three times every night, his grandfather’s unofficial
deputy, he tramped this triangular beat, downhill, along the shore
between the two fixed lights, uphill again to the farmhouse. At first a
lark, this tramp had in the last year become dull monotony; his score,
penciled in the back of his beloved atlas, showed over a thousand
tours, on which nothing ever happened; and yet now and then, as he
neared the Admiral’s deck, he felt the childhood presentiment that just
ahead something would appear. Usually a nameless emotion, faint and
swiftly obliterated, it came now, in the early morning darkness, almost
as the pristine thrill.
At the place which had helped to name the whole shore, his path widened
into a clearing beside a low bluff. The lantern twirled its shadow-ribs
across a floor of rotten wood,--old ship’s planking, the few solid
remnants auger-bored. Here, beside a stout rail which now tottered
over the dark gulf, Admiral Bissant, the boy’s great-uncle, had walked
the quarter-deck in his dotage. Miles’s grandfather never mentioned
the tradition; but old Fisherman Bull had often told how, dropping
down river in the Mystic Tie, he had seen an aged figure pacing the
verge above, in faced uniform and cocked hat. “Givin’ orders he was,”
said the fisher, “to nobody--trompin’ an’ mumblin’ amongst the trees,
bossin’ hemlocks fer men.” To prove the story there remained uniform,
cocked hat, and sword as well, rescued by Uncle Christopher when the
old Bissant house burned, and now hung in the “front hall” of their
cottage. And these mouldering planks still outlined the landfast
quarter-deck. A ghost there must be, Ella said. Of course that was her
nonsense. Only a faint breeze of dawn sighed through the drooping
needles.
“Nothing ever happens,” thought Miles. He dived into a dark billow
of firs, brushed along with now and then a gossamer damp across his
cheeks, and following the outward curve of the shore, emerged on a
tiny promontory, down which a ragged wall of Norway pines sloped to
the second lighthouse,--another stunted white obelisk tipped with
radiance. Here again his inspection was needless; and soon he climbed
the homeward field, where fast encroaching fir-trees squatted like a
thinned regiment of dwarfs.
At the farmhouse door he blew out his lantern; and tiptoeing from the
stair-head past his grandfather’s room, undressed in the dark, and was
soon abed and asleep.
Full flood of autumn sunshine woke him; and from a late breakfast
alone, he went, as usual, straight to the “library.” Before a snapping
beech-wood fire, his grandfather, a tall, spare man, whose ruddy,
clean-shaven face was marked with severe wrinkles, paced in uncertain
fidgets, both hands clasping a Bible at his back.
“Get your Testament, sir,” he commanded querulously, without turning
his hook-nosed profile. Ella, the “girl” who had served their family
these thirty years, looked up and nodded furtive encouragement, then
bent to as furtive a study of the long words. Sitting beside her, Miles
could see the fat fingers, white and puckered from hot water, faltering
across the narrow columns, balking beneath Urbane, Stachys, Tryphena
and Tryphosa. When her turn came to read aloud, she omitted them one
and all, glibly, but with the air of a nervous knitter dropping
stitches. The old man, standing braced before the fire, affected not
to notice. It was one of his few compromises. He read on sonorously,
his head uplifted before the portrait of his brother, the Admiral, who
stared down from the canvas with the same ruddy face and close white
curls, the same beaked severity and intolerant poise.
Their devotions ended, Ella went bustling to her kitchen, and the head
of the Bissant family turned to its youngest survivor.
“Good-morning, sir! Are you any better prepared to-day?” With eyes of
a confused, smoky brightness, he surveyed his grandson, then searched
the few old books on the shelves. “Hmm! Sallust--yes, just so.
Come, begin--where’s the lesson, eh?--No, not there, either, take it
all!--Hmm!--Ah, here ’tis, boy: _Volturcius interrogatus de itinere_--”
“Please, sir,” said Miles humbly, “we don’t--it’s Saturday,
grandfather.”
“Eh, what the devil?” complained the old man. “So ’tis, boy, so ’tis.
Always Saturday.” Frowning vaguely, he thumped the book on the table.
“Well, and how d’ye propose to waste your time to-day?”
“Shooting, sir, if you don’t mind,” ventured Miles. “The law’s off on
patri--”
“Don’t let me hear that barbarism!” cried his grandfather bitterly.
“Must we talk like rustics? If you _will_ miscall the ruffed grouse,
sir, call it p-a-r-t--partridge! Say it!”
“Partridge, sir,” mumbled the boy sheepishly.
“Louder!”
“Partridge.”
“Again!”
“Partridge, sir.”
“Now go,” commanded his grandfather, “and write out that word fifty
times, before Monday’s lesson!--Come back here; who said I’d finished?
Write it with a capital R!”
“Yes, sir,” said Miles, and slipped from the room. The door closed, and
the rebuke vanished; for there stood the shotgun ready in the corner,
and Ella packing his basket. As he stepped out into autumn sunshine, he
repaid her with a promise,--
“I’ll bring home some good pat--partridges.”
“Fat ones?” she jeered, her freckled face again in the doorway. “Then
you’ll have to feed ’em first. A high old hunter are you! They’re still
in the lowlands a-stuffin’ alder-berries, thin as Macfarlane’s geese.”
“I didn’t say fat partridges, Ella,” he called back. A shrill protest
pursued him: “O-o-h, Master Miles, you did, because I heard you!”
Behind their house the hillside rose, abrupt, and slippery with ripe
yellow grass. After a brief climb Miles could look back over the warped
roof and see the convex field plunge toward the river. Pausing again
for breath, he could see the trunks of the two tall hackmatacks which
stood before the door, green pillars of an imaginary gate. From between
them two brown paths forked wide,--sides of the triangle described by
his nightly tour. Pines and underbrush of solemn evergreen hid the
distant base, but the twin lighthouses marked each extremity by a fat
white column, low and red-capped. Beyond these, in the crisp air, the
river shone steel-blue, streaked with tides, blackened with light
squalls, and throughout the two miles of its width, empty, except for
the dotted penciling of weirs, and for one dark fir knoll, the little
midway island. Yellow birches, scarlet maples, flamed like bale-fires
along the evergreen headlands on the other shore; but hay-fields of the
American borderers, over there, still remained verdant squares, dressed
in the living green of second crops.
He gained the crest, and shifting his gun, struck across a decrepit
orchard toward the green wall of the woods. Suddenly a white fleck,
through the pattern of gnarled boughs, stirred in the adjoining field.
A horse whinnied. The boy stopped in astonishment. What were men and
horses doing by the ruins of the old house? He changed his course.
Where the Admiral’s house, last sign of family prosperity, had long
ago burned to the ground, the cellar yawned like a grassy crater in
a pasture knoll. Hawthorns, a hedge grown high and wild, screened
the mound on its river side; and framed in glossy leaves and scarlet
clusters, a little man scrubbed vigorously the back of a tethered pony.
The beast was curiously piebald, blotched with snow white and dingy
gray.
Miles and the pony stared at each other. The man, without pausing,
turned a swarthy face, scowled, and then grinned.
“Hello, Squair,” he called slyly, “don’t give a poor chap away now,
will ye?”
“Give what away?” said Miles, wondering.
“Pipe-clay,” replied the stranger. He dangled a rag aloft, stirred it
in a bucket on the grass, and smeared another snow-white patch down
the pony’s flank. “How’s that, huh? Look a-here,”--his crafty black
eyes twinkled,--“I’ll tell you what, Squair. If you won’t give me away,
I’ll let ye finish the rest of him.”
Miles joyfully vaulted the rails. Horses, in his life, had been rare.
Hardly had he begun this new, odd, and delectable employment, before
the little man was seated on the mound of ruin, a luxurious critic.
“Don’t rub so hard.” He stuffed tobacco into a black pipe. “Ye ain’t
curryin’. Coat her smooth and even.”
Pleasure gave way, at last, to curiosity.
“What’s it for?” asked the boy.
“Well, now, ’tain’t my fault,” rejoined the stranger candidly. “But
our paterons _do_ like to see a white horse. No use o’ talkin’, they
do. Now Terry’s smart as the Old Sarpint, but he ain’t altogether a
thorough white. Not thorough and complete, he ain’t.”
“Why, he’s a gray!” cried Miles, patting the inquisitive muzzle.
“I give ye credit for that!” approved the man. “To them that didn’t
know him well, Terry _would_ seem grayish. I don’t deny they’s mottles,
suspicion o’ gray, in places, as you say.”
Behind the speaker, a black shape bounced up out of the ground. A large
Newfoundland dog, leaping from the cellar, raced down the bank, frisked
about Miles with wide-flung paws, made a kind of salmon leap into the
air, turned an amazing somersault, and, rebounding from the grass,
perched on the pony’s back. Next moment he sprang down again, and with
forepaws on the boy’s shoulders, barked riotously in his face.
“Oh!” cried Miles, dazed and deafened. “So that’s it. You keep a show!”
The little man blew upward a cloud of smoke in the sunlight, and nodded
lazily.
“Other side the hawthorn,” he grunted. “Go look.”
Spread to dry across the sheep-sorrel, long strips of canvas bore
inscriptions red and blue: “Gypsy Fair,” “Abram the Magician,”
“Performing Quadrupeds,” “Madge the Egyptian Seeress tells your
Future,” “Equine Theatre,” “Terry the Horseflesh Wonder,” “Ride the
Gypsy Mare.” The boy returned with round eyes alight. Here was the
Romany Rye, not in grandfather’s book, but in real life.
“Do you--do you keep a seeress?” he cried. “And a real magician?”
“Come here,” said the man mysteriously. “What’s wrong with your nose?”
He tweaked that organ viciously three times, and produced in swift
succession a whittled square of black tobacco, a stag-horn knife, a
blue cotton handkerchief. “Beats all,” he marveled. “Beats me, Squair,
why ye ever stowed those up there! Gettin’ hunchback, too, ain’t ye?
Bend over.” Miles felt the man’s hand slip beneath his collar, then
something cold between the shoulder-blades. “Well, no wonder,” said
the magician. There in his hand was a bell-mouthed flageolet, with
tarnished German-silver keys.
“Are you Abram?” asked the boy, laughing, but a little daunted.
The other nodded. “Onhitch Terry. Now ye watch.” Putting the flageolet
to his lips, he squealed forth a sprightly air. At the first notes
the pipe-clayed pony reared on his little hind-legs, and, keeping rude
time, staggered through a precarious pirouette.
“He can choose colors, too,” said his master, when Terry had dropped to
all fours, “and add sums, and fire me a pistol, and play me a toon on
bells.”
“And carry me on his back, standing up,” called a treble voice above
them. A barefoot girl with strange light-colored hair, and a woman in
gray calico, stood on the edge of the grassy crater.
“We’re campin’ in the cellar,” explained Abram,--“my little girl and my
wife; she’s Madge the Seeress.”
“Are you--are you,” faltered Miles, fearing to give offense--“are
you--Egyptians, please?”
“A descendant o’ Pharaoh,” said Abram gravely. “Born on the banks o’
the Nile. The Seeress’ll tell your fortune. Got any money?”
Miles grew cautious, remembering dark tales.
“No,” he said. “That is, hardly any. One twenty-cent piece and a lucky
penny.”
“Heard some jingle when ye clumb the fence,” objected the wizard.
“That was cat--cartridges,” retorted Miles, drawing back uneasily.
“For shame, Abe!” interposed the woman. “For shame! We’re not in the
tent now: no need lyin’ to innocents like that.--Come here, my boy,”
she said kindly.
Miles climbed toward the Seeress, embarrassed and deeply disappointed.
Her neat calico, her tired, honest face, smooth gray hair, and friendly
eyes were a sore disillusion. Where were elf-locks and eldritch voice?
He had hoped for Meg Merrilies.
“Did you ever hear tell of a Pharaoh named Tucker?” she asked, taking
his hand. “Me neither, and that’s my husband’s name. And if the Nile
ever flowed in Sagadahoc County, it run dry ’fore my day.” She smoothed
his open palm. “No one can tell fortunes, sonny, but I can tell
characters. This palm’s an honest palm; so take your time, go careful,
and you’ll grow to be an honest man. And a clever palm. There’s gentle
blood in the veins. That always speaks out. A good head, but the
heart’ll run away with it. Master power o’ friendship, few friends. I
guess there’s danger ahead o’ you, but else I’m much mistaken you come
o’ people fond o’ danger. You’ll do better by others than yourself--”
“Are you coming to our show?” interrupted the girl. Miles turned shyly.
Girls, at Admiral’s Light, were rare as horses. And though of about his
own age, this was a strange little creature. Her luminous brown eyes
seemed at once frank and shy; thoughtfulness in the tanned oval face
was changed, by a circumflex arch of eyebrows, to a mischievous, almost
elfin gravity; and her hair reminded him of oak leaves in winter,
except that they were dead and dull, and this color shone exceedingly
alive.
“Coming to our show?” she repeated: “this afternoon, uptown?”
“I can’t,” he stammered. “We’re too--We don’t go to many--many
entertainments.”
Madge the Seeress gave him an odd, shrewd glance of approval.
“Never mind,” she said. “Most of our show you’ve seen already. Would
you like to ride the Gypsy Mare, though?” The look on the boy’s face
answered. “Abe, let him.”
The man rose, grumbling, “A free ride, when he’s got twenty cents?”
but nevertheless disappeared behind the mound, and returned leading a
beautiful sleek white mare, already saddled. “No pipe-clay there!” He
tightened girth and shortened stirrups. “Up ye go, Squair!”
Miles had ridden Hab Belden’s plough-horse once or twice, but never a
mount like this. The mare footed among the sorrel, swift and gentle as
the fairy charger that cantered over eggs. He pulled up reluctantly,
with face glowing.
“A born trooper,” said Abram. “Straight back, close seat, flat thigh,
soople. Ye rode her like a gen’ral! Now would ye believe me, Squair, if
I spoke but the two words, she’d throw ye like a rocket. Five dollars
I offer in open tent for the man or boy that sticks her--and only two
ever done it. Want to try? Shall I speak to her?”
“Why, I don’t know,” began Miles.
“Fraid-cat!” laughed the girl.
“Speak to her,” he ordered tartly.
“Throw him, Jubilee!” cried the conjurer.
Miles felt the white body tremble under him, as in terror. With a
snort and a swoop, the mare plunged uncontrollably along the brow
of the hill, head down, switching herself double from side to side,
as a fish fights in a net. Losing his seat, Miles caught it again
by blind miracle, just as she spun dizzily and reared in lightning
estrapades. Hereditary instinct, the spirit of the cavalry captain,
his father, served him well. Sick with fear--not of a broken neck, but
of humiliation before that girl--he clung as in a desperate dream. He
felt the back hump like a dromedary’s, the close-bunched hoofs pound
the earth with quick, disintegrating jars. Some one shouted. He ducked.
A hawthorn bough furiously swept his back. The bole of an elm flashed
past, and he was conscious of powdered bark smeared on a smarting leg.
Then they fought it out, raging mare and raging rider, till with a
balk that nearly shot him over her neck, Jubilee stopped dead, and,
trembling as when she began, seemed gradually to sink beneath him. He
kicked out of stirrups, swung over, fell with a crushing pain in one
ankle, and, through an interminable leisure in which he tasted sour
sorrel, rolled clear from the flourishing hoofs.
Roaring blasphemy, the showman had snatched the bridle, and as the
white mare rose, was beating her over the head with a cudgel.
“Stop that!” cried Miles, from the ground.
“Roll, will ye?” screamed Abram, showering blows insanely. “Roll, God
nourish ye! Never learnt that trick o’ me! Roll, ye--Begin that once,
an’ my theayter’s ruined! Roll, ye--”
The woman raised Miles to his feet. “Not hurt, are you? Poor boy! Much
hurt?”
“No. Make him stop that!” he whimpered. A white-hot cord tied tighter
round his ankle. He limped forward, but the woman seized and carried
him toward the fence.
“Go home quick!” she whispered. “I know him. He’ll come at you or me
next, if you vex him now. Can you walk? Quick, then, go home.--Here,
Anna, see he gets back safe.”
Miles found himself in the orchard, dragging painfully, easing his
weight by the gun. At each halt the girl eyed him strangely. On the
slope above the house he suddenly lay down.
“Rest a minute,” he explained through clinched teeth. “I live down
there--you needn’t come.” The tawny hillside swam. His foot seemed to
shrink and swell, with alternating torture.
“A thorn’s in your cheek,” said the girl. “No, the other side.” He
pulled the sharp point out mechanically. “Didn’t that hurt? What’s your
name?”
“Miles Bissant,” he said indifferently. In a long stillness sounded
the dry, faint click of grasshoppers, snapping upward in short arcs
roundabout.
“Mine’s Anna Hilliard,” she volunteered; and after another silence,
“I’m sorry I said--that. Good-by.”
By her voice, she was crying. Through half-opening eyes, he saw her
hair glimmer. Something warm touched his cheek.
He sat up, indignant, rubbing the spot with more energy than if the
thorn had stung. A hard patter of bare feet fled up the path.
“What a silly girl!” thought Miles, in disgust. “Glad nobody was
round.”