AN OLD, OLD STORY
It was spring when we came back to Topham. The sun was warm upon the
pleasant fields and gardens, and the blossoms on the fruit trees
were thick and fragrant. The loveliest days of all the year were
enfolding the pleasant countryside of New England in the glory and
peace of their bright skies and soft colors; and as the hired coach
that brought us down from Boston, with black Paul, at once proud and
uncomfortable in a new suit of white man's clothes, seated stiffly
high beside the driver, rolled along the familiar roads, I pointed
out to my bride the fair scenes among which my boyhood had been
spent.
From Montevideo, which we reached on the evening following the
wreck,--there an old English clergyman married us,--we had sailed to
New York as passengers in a merchant ship; but first we had taken
leave of those two good friends, Arnold Lamont, whom we were never
to see again, and Abe Guptil, who had bravely insisted on setting
out to build anew his fortunes by shipping as second mate of an
American bark then in port. From New York a second ship had given us
passage to Boston, whence we came over the same road to Topham that
I had traveled so long before with Arnold and Sim and Abe and Neil
Gleazen and my uncle.
We ought, I suppose, to have been a properly anxious young couple,
for of the great sum in gold that Arnold had so generously advanced
us only a small part remained, and what I should do in Topham, now
that Uncle Seth's store was in other hands, I had not the slightest
notion. The tower of golden dreams that poor Seth Upham had built
in idle moments had fallen into dust; Neil Gleazen's unscrupulous
quest had brought only ashes and bitterness; it was from the shadow
of a great tragedy that we came into that golden morning in spring.
But great as had been those things that Faith and I had lost, we had
gained something so deep and so great that even then, when in
discovering it we were so happy that the world seemed too good to be
real, we had not more than begun to appreciate the wonder and
magnitude of it.
Thus I came back to Topham after such a year and a half as few men
have known, even though they have lived a full century--back to
Topham, with all my golden prospects shattered by Gleazen's mad
adventure, but with a treasure such that, if all the gold in the
world had been mine, I would eagerly have given every coin to win
it.
With my bride beside me, her hand upon my arm, I rode into sleepy
little Topham, past my uncle's house where I had lived for many
happy years, past the store where Arnold and poor Sim Muzzy and I
had worked together, past the smithy where even now that old
prophet, the blacksmith, was peering out to see who went by in the
strange coach, and after all was failing to recognize me at the
distance, so changed was I by all that had befallen me, up to the
door of the very tavern where I had first seen Cornelius Gleazen.
There I handed my dear wife down from her seat in the coach, dressed
in a simple gown and bonnet that became her charmingly, and turned
and saw, waiting to greet me, the very landlord whom last I had seen
reeling back from Gleazen's drunken thrust.
At first, when he looked at me, he showed that he was puzzled; then
he recognized me and his face changed.
My fears lest the good man bear me a grudge for my share, small
though it was, in that villainous night's work, vanished there and
then. "You!" he cried, with both hands outstretched; "why, Joe! why,
Joe! We thought you were long since lost at sea or killed by
buccaneers--such a story as Sim Muzzy told us!"
"Sim Muzzy?" I cried. "Not Sim!"
"Yes, Sim!"
Then I heard far down the road someone calling, and turned and
saw--it was so good that I rubbed my eyes like a child waking from a
dream!--actually saw Sim Muzzy come puffing and sweating along, with
a cloud of dust trailing for a hundred yards behind him.
"Joe, Joe," he cried, "welcome home! Welcome home, Joe Woods!"
And as I am an honest man, he fell to blubbering on the spot.
"Things are not what they used to be," he managed at last to say.
"The new man in the store don't like the town and the townspeople
don't like him, and I've been living in hopes Seth Upham would come
home and take it off his hands. But who is this has come back with
you, Joe, and what's come of Seth Upham?"
At that I presented him to my wife, who received him with a sweet
dignity that won his deepest regard on the spot; and then I told him
the whole sad story of our adventures, or as much of it, at least,
as I could cram into the few minutes that we stood by the road.
"And so," I concluded, "I have come back to Topham with not a penny
to my name, save such few as are left from Arnold's bounty."
Sim heard me out in silence, for evidently his own trials had done
much to cure him of his garrulity, and with a very sad face indeed
he stood looking back over the village where we had lived and
worked so long together.
"Poor Seth Upham!" he said at last. "Well, there's nothing we can do
for him now. And as for Neil Gleazen, he's better dead than back in
Topham, for here he'd hang as sure as preaching. Jed Matthews, they
say, never moved a muscle after Neil hit him on the head. But as for
you, Joe, you're no penniless wanderer."
"What do you mean by that?" I asked.
"There was all of fifteen thousand dollars on board the brig."
"What makes you think that?"
"Didn't I help Seth store it in his trunk? 'You're simple, Sim, and
honest,' he says to me. 'I'll not have another soul besides you know
this, but you're as honest as you are simple,' Them's the words he
said, and I was that proud of 'em that I've treasured 'em ever
since."
I thought of the papers and bags we had stored in the wagon that
night when we fled from Topham.
"He hid it well," I replied. "But even if he had not hidden it so
well, I fear that it would nevertheless be at the bottom of the La
Plata River, just as it now is, with the brig, and all the goods
that were on board her, and many men that sailed in her, good and
bad alike."
"But that is not all."
"Not all? What do you mean?"
"Seth Upham left money in the bank, and I've seen his will with my
own eyes. 'Twas found in the safe after we left town, and turned
over to Judge Fuller."
"But surely, what with buying the brig and taking all his papers,
which I looked over myself in the cabin of the Adventure and which
were lost, every one, when she broke up, he had nothing left. Why,
the brig must have cost a pretty penny."
"That may well be, Joe, but there's money in the bank, for all that.
Seth Upham had more money tucked away than most people would have
believed."
I thought this over with growing wonder. "I do believe, my love," I
said, "that we shall be able to make a fair start in the world after
all, and, which is more, repay certain debts at once."
Faith smiled as she looked up at me; then she turned and looked at
the quaint old town, which was spread before us in the sun.