Tommy was carried home from the wharf, a decidedly white-faced and
subdued Tommy, and laid on the big four-poster in the room Lis and he
shared at the back of the house, while his mother was summoned from Miss
Charity’s party and the doctor routed out of a peaceful, before-bedtime
nap in his study farther up Orange Street.
Captain Bartlet escorted Mrs. Folger across the garden, and went
upstairs with her to see his cabin boy. He was full of a bluff, kindly
sympathy, and sat on the edge of the bed, letting poor Tommy grip hard
at his big, muscular arm, while Dr. Spencer set the broken leg.
The first thing Tommy said, when that operation was over and he was
lying back on the stiff white bolster, with his right leg swollen to an
unrecognizable size by splints and bandages, was: “I guess this
discharges me from sea duty, sir—for this voyage, anyhow. Will you take
Lis in my place, please? He was just as anxious to ship as I was, you
know.”
The captain looked keenly at the boy, and then at Lis, who had flushed
suddenly scarlet.
“Want to take thy brother’s place, son?” he asked the latter. “I’m sorry
about Tom’s accident, but I do need a cabin boy.” He added, smiling,
“And, after all, I don’t know as I could tell thee from him in any case,
so I won’t realize there’s been an exchange.”
Lis gulped, stared rather piteously at Tommy, and then at his mother.
His heart had leaped at the unlooked-for opportunity that had come to
him, but he plainly hated to accept it at the price of Tommy’s
disappointment.
“You’ll be able to ship with Uncle Eric, Tom, when the _Sea Gull_ comes
in,” he suggested.
But Tommy shook his fair head decidedly. “Too far off. We don’t know
just when the _Sea Gull_ will return. No, this is your chance, Lis;
better take it. And we can’t disappoint Captain Bartlet, either. He
needs a boy, and this won’t be giving him fair notice to find another.
He’ll go, sir,” he told the captain. “And he’s a lot steadier than I am,
sir, so you’re getting a better man.”
“Tommy is right—you had better go, dear,” Mrs. Folger said,
unexpectedly. “I know you have wanted to, all the time, and I was
pleased by the way you kept your disappointment to yourself and did not
spoil your brother’s pleasure by grumbling.”
So Captain Bartlet signed on another cabin boy, and arrangements were
made for Lis to join the ship in Boston, the night before her sailing.
He was to leave Nantucket on a fishing-boat belonging to a neighbor of
theirs, another Captain Joy—brother to the _Narwhal’s_ master—which was
bound for Boston at the end of the week, with a cargo of fish for the
city markets. Captain Bartlet himself, was going on the morrow, but Lis
would need a few days to get his sea-going outfit together, before
starting out in his new life.
The next four days before his departure were busy ones in the two Folger
households. Miss Charity brought her sewing basket over to her
sister-in-law’s, and helped in the work of altering such things as had
been already purchased for Tommy, to Lister’s use. Though the two boys
were so alike that strangers were constantly taking one for the other,
Tommy was slightly broader in the shoulders than his twin—just enough
difference to make certain takings-in necessary in fitting the clothes
of one to the other.
Erica would have been pressed into service also, but her clumsiness with
her needle was too well known to both aunts to make her help desirable.
As Miss Charity phrased it in exasperation, she only “made double work
when she put on a thimble. It took one person to rip out her stitches,
and a second to replace them properly.”
Miss Charity had labored long and hard with this hoydenish young niece
who was so mortifyingly unlike the other girls of her age and community.
She even felt dimly that in some way it reflected unfavorably upon
herself, that she could not, no matter how diligently she tried, teach
her charge to be a “little lady” like the daughters of her island
neighbors.
But in another way Erica managed to be of very real help, by
constituting herself nurse and general entertainer for Tommy, and thus
setting his mother free for more immediate duties. Tommy was finding it
pretty hard to lie there in bed, day after day, unable to move his
trussed-up leg or even to turn over without assistance. He had never
been fond of reading, and now books seemed a rather contemptible
substitute to offer an energetic, lively boy, for the glorious adventure
of that lost voyage to China, in the _Spray_. Still, he graciously
allowed Erica to read aloud to him on occasions, when her inventive
faculty at devising other amusements ran temporarily dry. But the books
of that period intended for boys, which could be found in either of the
Folger houses, were such very mild, unexciting narratives, that the
readings usually ended in both Erica’s and Tommy’s yawning desperately
together and flinging the disappointing volume aside.
The only subjects that really interested the latter at this period dealt
with nautical matters, and when Erica realized this she ransacked the
libraries of all Miss Charity’s friends, to find old ships’ logs and
journals of exploration which she could borrow. As Nantucketers have
always been great travelers, almost every house in town proved to have
some tale or other to offer, often containing the adventures of a
seafaring ancestor, and the quaint language they were told in sent the
young Folgers into peals of hilarious laughter.
Lis joined these reading sessions whenever he could, but his mother and
aunt kept him busy undergoing tedious fittings, aiding them in checking
and rechecking lists of his various needs for the voyage, and performing
the usual household duties such as wood-chopping, fire-making, and the
carrying of heavy pails, which formerly Tommy and he had divided between
them. Mrs. Folger had arranged with young Martin Joy, two doors away, to
do these chores until Tommy’s broken bones had mended, but he was not to
enter on his duties until Lis had departed.
Instinctively, Erica tried to keep herself so busy that she should have
no time left for remembering the change that was to break up the
familiar threefold companionship shortly. But hard as it was on her, she
guessed that it was going to be harder still for Tommy. The twins had
never been separated for more than a few hours at a time, and Lis had
always been the steady, self-reliant one on whom both Tommy and Erica
herself unconsciously leaned. The latter two were more alike, bubbling
over with high spirits, impetuous, apt to act on the moment’s
enthusiasm, and they had come to feel it was Lister’s natural province
to extricate them from the scrapes their own heedlessness led them into,
and to provide a sort of moral balance wheel generally.
It was going to be queer, Erica reflected, sadly, going on with the old,
everyday life, in the old, everyday surroundings, with no Lis. In fact,
it was going to be worse than queer—it was going to be a pretty
heart-breaking business.
The night before Lister’s sailing, Tommy took the jade seal ring from
where it still hung about his own neck on the knotted Chinese cord and
put it around his brother’s. “Be sure you look old Sun Li up for Rick
and me,” he said. “Then remember every last thing about him—who he is,
where he lives (better see the inside of his house if you can, so you’ll
be able to describe it), and tell us all about it when the _Spray_ comes
home.”
Erica and both her aunts went down to the wharf the next afternoon, and
saw Lis aboard Captain Joy’s sloop, which was to take him to Boston.
They all kissed him good-by, and Aunt Callie cried a little because,
just at the end, she simply couldn’t help it, and Lis’s own voice was
more than a bit husky in the final exchange of last words, and promises
to write if there should be a chance to send a letter back by another
ship.
His mother and Miss Charity stayed on the wharf, continuing to wave
their handkerchiefs until the sloop was so far out that she looked like
a toy ship on the smooth, blue water. But Erica slipped away from them
as soon as she was sure Lis could not see them any longer, and walked
very fast up the beach to a point where she would be out of sight of
houses and people, and there she sat herself disconsolately down on the
warm, yellow sand, and told herself she _wasn’t_ going to cry, not for
anything in the world—and promptly contradicted her brave assertion by
doing it.
However, being Erica, the tears didn’t last long, and at the end of the
little fit of crying she sat up and wiped them away briskly, feeling
better for the outburst, yet rather ashamed of herself, too.
“Now I’ll go back to Tommy,” she said aloud, addressing an inquisitive
tern which had hovered a second or two overhead, on quickly-beating slim
white wings, cocking its bright eyes down at this strange human in a
brown plaid dress who sat huddled on the sand, and made funny, choking
sounds that, even to a tern’s ears seemed to hold a note of distress.
“Tommy’ll be feeling pretty bad, too,” Erica continued to address the
tern, and then, as it darted away with a farewell flirt of its wings,
she added with a little burst of admiration: “Oh, you beautiful,
beautiful thing! If I can’t be a boy and go to sea, the next choice
would be a tern or a great gray gull, so I could swoop about over the
water all day long, fishing and enjoying myself, just as you do.”
She walked home slowly, close to the water’s edge, where the sand was
wet and firm. There was usually a surf on the island’s south shore, but
here on the north beach there were scarcely ever more than ripples
coming in, and on that day the clear green water beat in softly against
the dark sand like the pattering of fairy hand-clapping. Looking down
into it, Erica could make out scores of small hermit crabs moving
clumsily about in search of their midday dinners, dragging their big
shell houses on their backs; and the more agile spider crabs crawling
along the bottom among them, likewise intent on the serious question of
food.
Erica loved all the quaint little sea creatures she had come to know on
her beach walks, as well as the terns and the big gray herring gulls
which arrived about this time each year, after the smaller,
laughing-gulls of the summer had migrated farther south. The autumn was
a wonderful season for seeing strange birds, that stopped a day or two
on Nantucket to break their long, migratory flights to warmer climes.
The wild ducks had been passing over the island for more than ten days,
now, and sometimes, in their tramps over the sweet-scented commons, the
twins and Erica would come upon a small, jewel-like pond set down in a
rosy sedge of reeds, and on its blue surface there would be stragglers
from one of the big flocks, swimming up and down placidly, and perhaps
wondering, in whatever thoughts a duck knows, whether this pleasant,
fertile island might not be as happy hunting-grounds as any they would
be likely to find farther south.
A little later, the long V-shaped wedges of the wild geese’s flight
would be seen, usually late at night or very early in the morning, high
up against the blue Nantucket sky. Erica, when she saw them, always
waved to them enviously, and wished she were a wild goose, too—just as
she often wished she were a boy, or a gull, or anything that was
untrammeled and free, and the opposite of what proper little girls of
her day and generation were supposed to be.
It was almost dark when she reached home and slipped through the side
garden to Tommy’s house and up the broad, white-painted front stairs.
Aunt Callie called to her, in a rather woe-begone voice, and bade her go
in and talk to her cousin, who had had a lonely day and had been
suffering a good deal, besides, with his leg.
The door to the back room which was Lis’s and Tommy’s stood ajar, but
the lamp inside had not been lighted yet. Standing on the sill, Erica
spoke Tommy’s name, but softly, in case he were asleep.
“Come in,” a muffled voice answered her, not too graciously.
Erica went in, and crossed the dim room to the big mahogany four-poster.
Tommy had slid down uncomfortably in bed, the pillows bunched askew
under his yellow head, which looked more wildly disheveled and moplike
than usual. The covers were drawn up so that they half covered his face,
and even in the dusk Erica could see that his cheeks were hot and
flushed and that his forehead was puckered with a forlorn, childlike
scowl of utter misery.
“Here, let me plump your pillows up nice and comfy,” she said, capably,
and proceeded to lift his head with one strong, gentle arm and turn the
hot and crumpled pillows with her free hand. For Erica had at least one
womanly accomplishment—she was a good nurse in a sick-room, and was
never more contented than when one of her family or neighbors borrowed
her services.
Tommy neither demurred nor accepted her help, but as she turned the top
pillow Erica’s fingers encountered a big, round wet spot just where the
boy’s flushed face had been pressed when she entered. She made no
comment, but she was suddenly conscious of that uncomfortable lump in
her own throat once more. Tommy never knew she had discovered that he
had been shedding a few bitter tears alone in the dark. It was probably
partly homesickness for his twin, rebellion against lying there like a
log, helpless and in pain, and a sudden break-down of the barriers he
had built so pluckily about his disappointment.
Remembering her own crying-spell down on the beach that afternoon, Erica
shrewdly suspected that Tommy would feel the better for giving way—as
long as he never discovered that anyone knew of it. She finished
beating his pillows, pulled up more smoothly the soft, hand-woven woolen
blankets on the bed, and, going over to the table, lighted the lamp.
Aunt Callie appeared in the doorway just as she finished the last of her
tasks. Mrs. Folger’s thin face was paler than usual, and her eyes,
blinking a little in the yellow lamplight, had pink rims about them as
if she too, had been crying; but her lips were smiling.
“I told Aunt Charity that I meant to keep you for supper, Erica,” she
observed. “Tommy and I need you tonight. And I thought,” she went on,
still determinedly cheerful, “that if you’d help me, my dear, we might
all have our suppers up here on this table by Tommy’s bed. I’ve got
fresh gingerbread, and I’m going to fry a chicken. I had Mart Joy kill
one of the young roosters this morning. Will you children have chocolate
to drink, instead of milk? It’s no trouble at all to make a pot.”
At fifteen the prospect of a good supper has a magically cheering
effect. Both the girl’s and boy’s faces brightened perceptibly.
“Chocolate, please, ma’am,” Tommy elected.