CAPTAIN FLORIO
“Runagates,” said his grandfather, with mournful relish. “I had hoped
you--but what’s in the blood will out. All runagates!”
Athwart the dim panes of the bedchamber, hackmatack boughs swayed to
the chill drone of a dying wind. A rigid profile against twilight, the
old man spoke as to some third presence. Often the boy had seen that
profile, ploughing a furrow of thought which cast him aside; yet he
stirred on his pillows uneasily, almost guiltily.
[Illustration]
“So with Christopher,” continued the speaker, “and so with your
father Godfrey. When they strayed off into the world, what did they
become? A sailor to be drowned and a soldier to be killed. My sons were
small comfort.”
“My father,” objected Miles, timid yet indignant, “was fighting for--”
“And what if he was?” exclaimed his grandfather, turning with a violent
start. “Does that excuse you, sir, for scouring the country with gypsy
thieves? Eh? And risking your neck at horse-jockey tricks? And lying
useless abed this fortnight, while Ella and I do your work at the
lights? Next you’ll slip off, like them, and then the contract for the
light-keeping will be taken away, and I’ll become a pauper indeed.
Runagates! Eh? What’s that? What did you mutter?”
“Nothing, sir,” said Miles. He understood now the old man’s gloom, and
lay still, with long thoughts of pity and contrition. The rebuke was
just: had he not been lying here, his head full of day-dreams, plans,
vainglorious romance? He could ride--he had proved that; he loved the
sea with an inborn longing. Which, then, was the better life, soldier’s
or sailor’s? Dull peace at home, he had thought, was not to be endured.
The brief spice of action, of danger, had so edged his fancy that
the whole fortnight had passed among conjured shapes of adventure:
brigantines navigated through seas not in the atlas, coral islands
raised against the dawn, typhoons weathered, cannibals beaten off--were
these better than a red whirl of cavalry, with trumpets, with sabres,
with leather creaking like Jubilee’s saddle? The choice had seemed, at
times, easy and immediate. And now grandfather had somehow scolded him
to his senses. He could not put the new emotion into words, but in a
flash he had seen that this pictured joy of living was the mere pride
of life.
“What’s wrong?” grumbled the old man.
“Ankle twinged. Nothing,” replied Miles. He could not explain what
brightness had died out.--Ella’s step mounted toward them, and the
shadow spokes of banisters wheeled in a striped flange across the
ceiling, before he spoke again.
“Don’t worry about all that, grandfather.”
The advice, the audacity, surprised them both; neither was aware that
between boyhood and youth a door had closed forever.
Closed it had, nevertheless, and Miles, when afoot once more and
outdoors, wondered vaguely at the change in his little world.
Frost-bitten fields, white-caps on the border river, birch groves and
maple shifting their bleak reticulation against a sky that threatened
snow,--these formed a background for new and sober thoughts. He had
lost the conviction that his future must be different, transplanted
and transformed, bright with surprise, excitement, and good fortune.
All that was nonsense. Here lay his life, studying by day, trudging by
night down to the twin lamps; for variety, he wore now his threadbare
reefer, now his mittens and great helmet of moth-eaten fur; now plodded
on snowshoes over drifts, where powdered gold puffed upward, at each
step, into the lantern-light; now cleared the tower windows of damp
snowflakes; now waded in hip-boots through pools of freshet. One deeply
starred spring night, he surprised himself recalling that the girl’s
name was different from Abram’s. “Perhaps she was adopted,” he thought,
as he sniffed the damp sweetness of reviving earth, “or an orphan,
like me.” On the heels of this, he could excuse her folly: “I was hurt,
of course, and she felt sorry that she’d stumped me. Perhaps Abram
would beat her, too--” Why should he speculate, so long afterward,
about persons whom he would never see again?
The next years saw him grow into a young man, silent, grave, with a
tranquillity that a stranger might have mistaken for contentment.
On one point, indeed, he was contented: his grandfather, who had
rebuked his father’s memory, could find no major fault with the second
generation.
One June evening he lay stretched on the mouldered planks of the
Admiral’s deck, a book of next day’s lessons opened flat before him.
A sunset swarm of midges, down-sifted by a breath of air, suddenly
confused Euclid’s lines and dots with a dance of jigging motes. Miles
swept an impatient hand, glanced off the page, and forgot both insects
and trapezoids. A boat was making straight toward him,--a green
“lap-streak” dinghy, rowed by some Yankee from across the river, and
carrying on the stern thwart a jaunty passenger in light gray. No
sooner had the boat nosed the undulating fringe of seaweed than the
stranger sprang nimbly to the rocks, and scrambled over their slippery,
tangled hummocks, in a diagonal course up the beach. He disappeared
under a shoulder of the bank, and, as Miles still lay wondering,
suddenly emerged from the firs beside the old quarter-deck.
“Hello!” he said, with an odd, pleasant intonation. “May I come in?
Jolly little nook for reading, haven’t you? No, don’t get up. Just tell
me how to strike the path to the house, above there, will you?”
Except the tender’s gig, no boat ever touched at Admiral’s Light. No
such visitor, certainly, had landed within Miles’s recollection. Burly
but active, with the body of a blacksmith or pugilist clad in pale gray
flannels of a knowing, worldly cut, he seemed at once young and mature,
sophisticated and breezily adventurous. The same hand which held two
primly folded gloves bore on its back a foul anchor tattooed in blue.
Bright gray eyes in a swarthy face, clean cutwater profile, reckless
good-humor playing about the lips, bespoke one who had taken a man’s
share of life with a boy’s share of amusement.
“Do you know the old gentleman that lives up there?” he continued.
“Your grandfather, eh? Well, now, perhaps you can tell me. Had he a
relative named Christopher?”
“That was my uncle,” said Miles, getting to his feet.
“The dickens! You!” cried the stranger, and grasped his hand. “You!
Doesn’t that beat the merry Hell--elujah? You Kit Bissant’s nephew! He
stood up for me when I was a prentice your size. Ever hear him tell
about Florio? Tony Florio? No? That’s so, why should he? His nephew, by
Jove! Isn’t it a funny little world, though?” With twinkling eyes, he
studied the boy’s face, then turned abruptly. “I’m off to tackle the
old gentleman. See you later!”
His footsteps rang hollow and distant on the gully foot-bridge. Miles,
listening, felt unreasonably glad. Unreasonably, as often, in spite
of all geography, a long hill suggests a hidden prospect of plain or
ocean, as a turn of woodland road beckons to some joyful ambush or
far-thought pilgrimage, so the landfall of this stranger, the alacrity
and vigor of his contact, promised immediate events. Just what events,
the youth, with all his eager surmise while climbing homeward through
attenuate shadows, could not guess.
Their evening meal--a haddock usually, with cornbread, tea, berries,
or cheese-cakes--the old man always called dinner, and further
dignified by appearing in the crumpled broadcloth and linen of a bygone
generation. To-night he entered with even greater solemnity, leading to
their bare little table the sun-burned man in gray.
“My grandson Miles, Captain Florio,” he said. And bending his fierce
old countenance toward the one flickering candle, he added in the same
breath: “For the bounty of the present day, and of all days past and to
come, we thank thee, O Lord, and now seek thy blessing.” With the same
stiff ceremony, he did the honors for the haddock, presided over the
raspberries, and ignored the flustered awkwardness of Ella.
The stranger appeared to enjoy both his fare and his company.
“Beautiful country hereabout, Mr. Bissant,” he declared heartily.
“Beautiful, by George! Shore life for me, if ’twas all like this.
I tell you, Miles, we’ll have a jolly time together. Show me your
lighthouses to-morrow night, will you? Right! What are they, fixed? You
know, once when I was wrecked off the Hook of Indramaiu--”
He rambled into stories of orient and tropic seas. Had they been
of anthropophagi and antres vast, Miles could have listened no more
hungrily; for even at second hand, this was the life which he once
had dreamed. The sole incredibility was that such a brilliant tropic
wanderer should now shine out in their gloomy, sequestered house. The
mountain had come to Mahomet, the world to a captive. His grandfather,
visiting Miles at bedtime, brought explanation.
“My boy,” he said--and for the first time in their life together he
spoke with hesitation, almost as though making excuses to an equal--“my
boy, Captain Florio is to be our--that is, hmm! well, our lodger.”
Frowning at the candle flame, he brought out the word defiantly. “I
should never consent to this--mercenary relation, but it seems--he was
a friend of my son Christopher’s. He will stay with us for some time.
It’s--it’s unnecessary to say more. Good-night.”
Humiliation underlay the speech--humiliation which Miles felt dimly,
but could not share. A lodger’s money, even a damaged pride, counted
little against the change from apathy to interest, from silence to
fireside and table talk, from routine to variety. Next morning, indeed,
five minutes after lessons, Miles had forgotten that the relation was
mercenary.
“Hello,” Florio hailed him. In jersey and puttees, he looked like some
heavy-weight amateur training in retirement. “Look here, how’s this?
Caught Ella carrying water uphill from that gully below. There’s a
spring above.” He waved up toward the site of the burned mansion.
“That hill’s too steep,” said Miles.
“Ho-ho!” laughed the other. “You’re a bright boy, aren’t you, now? Come
along topside with me.”
Two joyful days followed, in which they built a little wooden aqueduct
from the Admiral’s Spring down to a trough at Ella’s very door. When
nails gave out, the seafarer joined their supports with marvelous
temporary lashings. “Chinese trick,” he grinned. “Now we’ll run the
flowage down into your gully. How’s that, señor?”
With ties no less secure he had bound Miles to admiration, as much by
his manual cunning, his boyish enthusiasm for practical designs, as
by his galloping accompaniment of strange tales. Hammering or sawing
like a born carpenter, he recalled sharp, flashing pictures of life in
antipodes,--pearl-divers in Polynesia, “sun-downers,” mutinous coolies
at sea, plague-stricken pilgrims to Mecca dying like flies, aboard
ship; midnight murderers in sampans.
“Damn it, no Captains and Misters!” he cried once. “There, I didn’t
mean--your grandfather’ll ship me off for swearing! But call me Tony.
Let’s be chums.”
Chums, therefore, they became, though not without capitulation. The
lighthouses first showed them certain differences.
“Do you mean,” cried the wanderer, as they stood, one evening, in the
glare of the lamp-room, “do you mean to say you leave a warm bed twice
every night to watch these two tame lightning-bugs? Let ’em burn, boy!
Get your sleep. What the devil, they’ll not go out; or if they did,
who’d know? Must be as many as one schooner a fortnight pass that ledge
after dark. Ho, ho! You stay in bed!”
“But it’s our agreement,” Miles protested.
The sailor’s gray eyes twinkled.
“Roman sentinel, eh? That’s nonsense, boy. Take your beauty sleep. Let
’em burn.”
“Why, ’twouldn’t be honest,” said the young keeper, somewhat shocked.
“Honest?” jeered Florio. Then his tone changed. “Oh, well, no harm
done. Strict ideas--I s’pose somebody’s bound to have ’em. Tough on
you, all the same.”
The upshot of their argument was that with high good-nature Tony
insisted on making the last rounds himself. “I’m used to night work.
This is my pidgin. You go to bed.”
The volunteer was faithful. Often thereafter, waking by force of habit
at midnight or three in the morning, Miles rose from his pillow to
watch, for a luxurious instant, the sailor’s lantern bobbing along
through underbrush far below. He dropped asleep with drowsy gratitude.
Yet in spite of kindness and the ascendency of experience, his new
friend left something unfinished, dubious, unexplained. To grandfather,
the man was another commercial contract like the light-keeping,
a fender against evil days, a presence courteously tolerated; to
Ella--and, through her, perhaps, to the outer world--a “visitin’
gentleman,” friend of the late Captain Christopher; to Miles, a frank
companion and--what?
Why should a man in the thirties, ebullient and a rover, suddenly
choose to vegetate? Grandfather had called him “Mercury Resting.” For
all his cheerful enthusiasm, the sailor could care little about their
northern valley, the sad, rugged beauty of their border. When Miles
proposed a favorite tramp, he had replied: “Kilmarnock Brook? What’s to
see there? Nothing but scenery.” Nor could books dull the edge of his
restlessness. “No, thank you. Not much on reading,” he replied, when
grandfather gave him the freedom of the meagre “library.” And later,
out of doors, he explained to Miles: “Print’s nearly all lies. Now
_them_, why, every day, right in the open air, you can meet live men
that’ll tell you _them_--fresh lies, not old ones,--and act ’em out to
boot. So why rack eyesight over print?” Meantime, he taught Miles to
box, and with his aid rebuilt the kitchen chimney, pruned the deserted
orchard, shored up the Admiral’s quarter-deck. Yet these employments
could not last.
Again, he had said, “I’m alone in the world.” And yet after a tranquil
month, he was plainly fretting about letters. He and Miles often
traversed the river road, up hill and down, to the half-deserted
village of Kilmarnock; and always on the final crest, the red granite
ledge where, sudden as a night-hawk’s downward wheel, the freed vision
of the climbers fell wide over a landward prospect, following toward
the sunset alternate wedges of bright water and black crenelated
headlands,--there, always, the sailor paused and sat down.
“I’ll smoke here,” he said. “Great view, eh? Land and water, land and
water--in layers, like Ella’s chocolate pie o’ Sundays.” Then, nodding
toward the slate-gray houses clustered far below in a meadow cove: “You
go on down and ask. May be a letter, this time.”
Once, when Miles clambered up again, empty-handed as ever, the sailor
sat musing.
“Can you keep a secret?” he asked, with a glance at once introverted
and shrewd. “We’re mates, aren’t we? Right, then. You’re the sort a man
can trust. If a stranger comes asking for me, or any foreign-looking
man, you know, you keep your tongue at home, and come straight to me,
first. I’ll tell you why, some day. Long story--”
He watched a slim pillar of smoke rising from a cottage chimney, out of
evening shadow, to vanish in the breeze on their glowing height. Then
he sprang up, and started briskly homeward.
“Sometimes, you know,” he said, when they had scrambled down hill for a
furlong, “sometimes, at sea, a man makes enemies.”
[Illustration]