A LUNCHEON WITH UNBIDDEN GUESTS

The young ship builder by Sophie Swett is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. CHAPTER XII

A LUNCHEON WITH UNBIDDEN GUESTS

“Now this is what I call delightful,” said Cyrus, as he set the disreputable looking coffee-pot down upon the pile of boards, which was serving us both as a table and seats. He wiped his heated brow wearily. Impossible as it seemed, Cyrus had been roasting himself making Dave’s coffee. The river flowed at our feet, blue, and softly singing, the April sun was caressingly soft and warm and the greening earth a fragrant joy.

“Can sorrow live with April days?” I murmured. But the lines of carking care had come back to Cyrus’ face, as he seated himself on the pile near the projecting board which was serving Alice Yorke as a tilt—we all called them “tilters” in Palmyra.

“I think I won’t go up to the house to dinner,” he said. “I’m not hungry, and since you are here, Bathsheba, there is no need. I was going only to give you this.” And he calmly drew a telegram from his pocket. “They seemed to think at the office that a telegram meant business and must be sent to the counting-room.”

Now telegrams addressed to Miss Bathsheba Dill might have been as thick as leaves in Vallambrosa for all the agitation Cyrus showed; but as for me, the blood rushed to my head and for an instant Alice Yorke, on her tilter seemed to be leading a race into the river.

I heard, as in a dream, Dave say, “Will you have some coffee, Miss Yorke?” and noted vaguely that he was just as gallant and graceful as if the cup were not old and cracked. And then, although my hands shook like a leaf, I was face to face with the first telegram of my life.

“The best design. I think a great thing. Salter will write your brother.

“E. Carruthers.”

My heart leaped for joy. The best design! A great thing! I wanted to shout it out to the four winds of heaven, but that provoking Dave had sat down beside Alice Yorke and they were making merry over their lunch. He had left the basket with another cracked cup and a tin can at our end of the pile, and the coffee-pot was set down midway, but so shakily that it seemed likely to tip off.

“Bathsheba, if you want some coffee you shall have my cup in a minute,” he called to me. “I’ll wash it in the river.”

Cyrus made a feint of eating a little; it was easy to see that it was hard work. I wished that Dave would not monopolize Alice Yorke, in that boyish, ridiculous way, for I thought her brightness might make Cyrus forget his care.

Dear old Cyrus! The softness he had shown in making Dave’s coffee had drawn me to him with a new tenderness; after all Cyrus was my own brother. He looked so forlorn, too, with his long, lank figure huddled awkwardly upon the pile of boards and making a pitiful attempt to assume the light-minded air appropriate to the occasion.

“Gay youth loves gay youth,” I said to myself, but nevertheless I was irritated by Dave and Alice Yorke.

Cyrus had rather held aloof from Alice than otherwise since Dave had come home, and yet I thought his interest in her was different from that which he had ever shown in any other girl.

My feelings were rather queerly mingled. I had not been in the least successful in conveying to Dave my discovery of his innocence—or rather my belief, for it was not yet quite so much a discovery as I was forced to acknowledge to myself, and it did not seem an opportune time for imparting the good news of the telegram.

But I decided to share my delight with Cyrus; it might be cheering, in the midst of the business troubles, to know that Dave had had some success.

“A design?” repeated Cyrus dubiously, after I had explained all the circumstances of my discovery. “O dear, has he gone to drawing again? I hoped that was all over!” I don’t think that Cyrus really understood so clearly as he might have done if Alice Yorke’s soft voice, mingled with Dave’s manly tones, had not come floating constantly to our ears.

“But it is a real triumph to have his design chosen from among so many!” I insisted. “And he will be paid for it—perhaps a great deal.”

“I hope he will,” said Cyrus, with a doubtful accent. “I hoped he might develop some business talent, but I’m afraid there is no chance of that. Probably he has been doing that sort of thing and giving his mind to it all the time. But he has behaved well!”

There was no grudging in Cyrus’ tone; it was said heartily. He looked at his watch.

“I have some letters to write. I really ought to go back to the counting-room,” he said, and gathered his long length up decidedly from the pile of boards. I was vexed with what I thought his stupidity and yet I longed to offer him a little comfort.

“Cyrus, he didn’t do it! Dave didn’t do that dreadful thing!” I whispered hoarsely. “I almost know the whole mystery.”

Cyrus looked at me in an absent, bewildered way. “If he did do it, he is in a fair way to live it down,” he replied. “Everything must be done to help him, everything!” There was an accent that seemed as if the man’s whole soul were in it and his voice actually trembled. “But I wish he would give up that drawing.”

Cyrus, despairing of his own business capacity, had been indulging in a stronger hope than he would own, or perhaps had even been conscious of, that Dave would develop something of the kind. Perhaps it was not to be expected that he should be elated as I was over the success of the design.

And, poor Cyrus! It was quite evident that he was struggling with jealousy whether he were aware of it or not. For a moment I was so angry with both these young chits that I could scarcely bring myself to speak to them. And yet Cyrus ought to have known that one must woo one’s sweetheart if he hopes to win her. But it seemed to me doubtful whether Cyrus would know how, while it was as natural to Dave to be gallant as to be stroke-oar in the college crew.

“That boy will always be pretty-spoken, whatever else he ain’t,” had been Loveday’s dictum before he had reached a decade.

“Why, has Mr. Dill gone already!” exclaimed Alice Yorke with a pretty little start and a widening of her bright eyes.

“He hasn’t time to spend in idleness and nonsense,” I said so harshly that they both colored. I was ashamed of myself but I was not going to have Alice Yorke fancy that he had been vexed by her foolish trifling.

I caught sight of a glimmer of Estelle’s light blue dress, among the orchard trees and I went to meet her. There had been Dave’s favorite pudding for dessert and she was bringing him some of it.

“Well, was Dave delighted to know that you had discovered that he wasn’t a sneak after all?” she said sarcastically. These things had worn on Estelle; that was undeniable.

“He—he wouldn’t listen to me,” I faltered, meekly. “And, Estelle, I don’t dare to show him this! I’m afraid he will think I was meddling.” And I poured into her ears all the little tale of the design.

“Ned Carruthers! It wouldn’t be strange if Dave thought you were meddling,” she exclaimed, even while her eyes shone with pride and delight. “I don’t know how you could talk to him about it, Bathsheba! It’s the hardest of anything to forgive people for having been mean.”

“He thought Dave was a hypocrite; he had his provocations,” I retorted. “And it was well that I could forgive him sufficiently to talk to him about the design since he is really repentant and anxious to do all that he can for Dave, and he is in a position to have influence with Mr. Salter.”

“Dave doesn’t need influence; his drawings can stand on their own merits,” she answered obstinately. But I felt sure that she was trying to maintain a righteous indignation against young Carruthers and that she really knew that sufficient outside influence to secure the prompt examination of one’s work is not a bad thing. And then she suddenly drew a long, deep breath.

“O, I’m so glad, so glad!” she cried. “You don’t know what it has been to me to have Dave in the shipyard!”

“It has been a good thing,” I said stoutly. “It has been good discipline for Dave, and it has opened Cyrus’ eyes to what was fine in him. He said to me to-day that Dave had done well, that there was good stuff in him.”

Estelle was pleased, although she was too proud to show it.

“Opened your eyes, too!” she said crisply. “You were almost as hard upon him as Cyrus.” As I have remarked before, we are a plain-spoken family.

Dave seized upon his pudding like a boy, insisting upon dividing it with Alice Yorke and giving her the lion’s share of the frosting. No one would have thought, seeing how light-hearted he was, that he was living down a deep disgrace and that the shipyard was to be sold at auction for the benefit of creditors the next month. Alice Yorke was so gay that I thought my hasty whisper to her of “Dave didn’t do it” had taken a load from her heart.

I will never think I know anything about a girl’s heart again!

Estelle was merry, as I had not seen her for a long time, and that was not strange since her heart was so bound up in Dave. I knew she was eager to ask me what I knew about Dave’s trouble and how I had discovered it but her pride would not let her.

In the midst of the hilarity Estelle uttered a cry of dismay and I, following her gaze, saw a startling white face appearing above the edge of the wood-pile behind us. It vanished so suddenly that if it had not been for Estelle’s cry I should almost have thought myself the victim of a disordered imagination.

“Rob?” I cried. “It can’t be Rob!”

“It was Rob’s face,” said Estelle, with white lips—for not since his return from school had Rob been able to leave his room.

Dave strode around the wood-pile and drew forth a shrinking figure, so white-faced and at the same time so grotesque that we scarcely knew whether to laugh or to cry at sight of it.

Rob had thrown over his flannel dressing-gown the silk crazy-quilt, Marcella’s pride, from his bed. It was drawn partly over his head and the gay colors made his pallor ghastly.

Dave tore off the quilt and tossed it up on the wood-pile, and in a moment had thrust his own rough jacket upon Rob. It was scarcely less grotesque a garment for him than the quilt, it was so much too large, but was certainly warmer—and the wind from the river was cool although the sun was warm. Dave took off his own cap, also, and put it upon Rob’s head and we all laughed a little in spite of our fright, when it came down nearly to his ears.

“I came to find Bathsheba,” he said as Dave scolded him, as gently as his mother might have done. “She—she knows, Dave!” His voice was a husky whisper and he trembled in every limb. “I didn’t think how dangerous it was, at first. She’ll think it her duty to tell, girls always think it’s their duty to do disagreeable things! And if father should find out——! You make her promise not to tell a soul, Dave!”

Dave had drawn him down into a sheltered nook in the great pile of boards and spread the quilt over him. He supplemented it by a sheltering arm, regardless of his coatless and hatless condition.

“You must rest a little while and then we’ll get you home,” he said anxiously. “Never mind Bathsheba! I’ll fix Bathsheba!” he added lightly.

But the boy was too thoroughly alarmed to be put off in that way.

“Make her promise solemnly!—you know I couldn’t stand father. It would kill me! And they’ll be after me in just a minute. I got away while the nurse was at dinner. I climbed down the woodbine trellis. It didn’t make me breathe half so badly as she did”—indicating me by a resentful little jerk of the head. “She came and talked and talked. I thought at first that she was only bothering, like a girl; then I thought she was trying to find out things; at last she let out that she knew!”

Dave looked at me steadily. I had not known until that moment how hurt he had been.

“At first I thought only of the horse,” Rob continued in his weak, querulous voice. “You haven’t done as you ought about old Lucifer, Dave!”

Old Lucifer! That was the horse that Uncle Horace had sold, four or five years before because, as he said, Rob was making a sentimental fuss over him. Rob had grieved so that he had brought on a fit of illness.

“That fellow will get him on to the race-course again! There are such brutes in the world! You wouldn’t believe ’twas old Lucifer when I showed you the picture on the fence. You wouldn’t have gone to the race if I hadn’t run away when I was so ill that you had to follow me. You see if Bathsheba should tell father of all that I did then—writing his name on the check and all——”

“That’s all right you know, Rob, she won’t tell!” interrupted Dave hastily. “No one shall know.”

I looked at Alice Yorke; she stood a little aside, near the river bank. Rob did not seem to observe that she was within hearing; there seemed to me a danger that what with his terror of his father and his anxiety about his old horse his mind would become permanently weakened.

As for me I felt as if the very boards had ears, instead of feeling exultant at the revelation that was proving Dave’s innocence of all the evil of which he had been accused. I had that strange sense that comes to us all sometimes that there is some one near, although invisible. I looked about me. There were many piles of boards behind which a listener might lurk; there was a clump of alders near us tall enough and thick enough to conceal an eavesdropper.

But of course it was only a nervous fancy that any one was near, so I said to myself impatiently, the next moment. I feared that my mind was growing weak like Rob’s—which would never do for a practical business woman.

“We paid Alf Reeder too much for the horse, anyway; he showed he was a cheat and then it was dangerous to let him board him, if he did say he knew just how to take care of him. Do you remember how he stumbled and fell? And how they spurred him till there was blood on his flanks? If they had made him try it once more it would have killed him! They thought so, too, or they wouldn’t have sold him. But how they made you pay! Now that you don’t hear from him I expect they’re racing him again. When my breathing gets easier so that I drop asleep I start up again thinking I see Lucifer straining his muscles and bleeding from the spur, as he was that day, and with that human agonized look that there was in his eyes when he turned them toward us!”

“You mustn’t think of it,” said Dave earnestly. “You’ll never get well while you keep brooding over it. And the horse isn’t racing now; he is taken good care of. The money has been paid regularly for his board—you couldn’t think that I would neglect that?”

I pricked up my ears. How had he paid it? I could not think how he could have come by even so small an amount of money as a horse’s board would cost.

Suddenly I met Estelle’s eyes and I knew. The old berry savings in the tin bank that were to have sent Cyrus to college had grown undisturbed; they had been added to by grandma, from time to time, as an encouragement to the childish thrift and industry. I remembered when they had been transferred from the red tin apple to the Palmyra bank, and remembered Estelle’s proud boast that there were more than forty dollars. The interest would have added a little to it in the years that had passed since then.

I was unconscious that there was a sudden questioning in my eyes until Estelle answered it.

“No, I never was told how things were until to-day,” she said. “I would have scorned to be. I know Dave!”

Now of course reason was not altogether upon her side, and yet as she looked straight at me with those clear uncompromising blue eyes of hers, I hung my head.

“Now, you bear up, Rob, old fellow!” Dave counseled with an affectation of lightness—I knew that it was an affectation by the anxious little frown between his eyes. “We must get you home or we shall have your father down upon us.”

Rob looked about him uneasily. “No, he has gone out to the back pastures and from there he was going to ride up to Penfield. He won’t be home until night. And that fat nurse eats a lot and gossips with Marcella. It makes me feel better to be here. I wish I could get well enough to go with you, Dave, when you go after Lucifer. If it would only be safe to bring him home. But it won’t, you know; ten years wouldn’t change Lucifer so father wouldn’t know him. But you will get him boarded in a good place, won’t you, Dave? and so near that we can go to see him!”

Dave’s teeth were set tightly together, his face was turned away from Rob.

“I’ll do just the best I can, Rob, and soon now, I hope!” he said in a cheerful tone. “But if you are going to pick up so you can go with me, it won’t do for you to take such excursions as this!”

“You put me off about the horse; there’s something you don’t tell me!” cried Rob querulously. “People think it’s all right to cheat me; and then they spy upon me and try to make me tell them things, as Bathsheba did. Why did she want to make me tell her, when she knew already? I suppose she wanted to tell father that I had owned up. If he should know, Dave, that you had borne all the blame for me—why I think it would kill him! He is so proud; he is ashamed of my being a weakling, as he calls it! And just the way he would look at me would kill me! That girl that’s listening won’t tell, will she?”

He seemed suddenly aware of Alice Yorke’s presence and to realize that he was revealing more than was prudent.

“No, she won’t tell; I am sure I can answer for that,” said Dave gravely. “No one will tell.” And looking over Rob’s head Dave made a solemn, mournful sign to Estelle and me. It meant that Rob would not live long; we must humor him at whatever cost. Now inwardly I rebelled. I thought there had been too much yielding to Rob’s whims already; that Dave’s had been a foolish martyrdom. It was natural that a strong and healthy young man like Dave should think Rob was upon the verge of the grave; I knew that puny people sometimes live long. And I thought it quite time that Dave’s costly sacrifice should come to an end.

Was the only difference to be that Estelle should have added sight to her faith, and that I, whereas I had been blind, should see? I wished to tell as well as know.

My heart burned within me. In spite of Rob’s weakness I should have blazed forth my opinion of his selfishness, if Dave had not laid a restraining hand upon me. He drew me a little aside.

“It’s no use now, Bathsheba, don’t you see?” he said. “I shouldn’t have promised to keep silent about it, if Uncle Horace had not been just what he is and Rob in such terror of him. It’s constitutional with Rob, you know. Uncle Horace’s wife was afraid of him in the year before she died. No one can help pitying the poor boy.”

There was a noise behind the boards that startled me.

“You are afraid of your shadow! Those loose boards are light and the wind rattles them,” said Dave carelessly. “As I was saying I had to do just what I did—pay the money and get the check back on which Rob had forged his father’s name, and let the college authorities think that I had lost the money in betting. I couldn’t say, could I, that I had only followed Rob to Newmarket when he got off a sick-bed and made his way there somehow, because a picture of one of the race-horses which he saw by accident had made him sure that it was his old Lucifer;—the boy’s love for animals is almost morbid. Yes, perhaps I ought to have said so, Bathsheba; there were others to be thought of besides Rob or myself. But I gave him my promise hastily. I didn’t foresee the expulsion from college and all the consequences. When Rob found what a serious matter it was, he became wild with terror lest his father should find out.”

“We that are strong should bear the burdens of the weak, but we shouldn’t help them to be selfish,” I said sententiously.

“But Rob is so very weak! He’s different from other people. If his father had only realized that and made allowances for it.”

“But, now,” I said, “surely there’s no need of keeping on with the stupid deceit.” For I was too angry to give any fine names to the foolish business.

“But, now, do you know, I’ve come to rather like the martyrdom?” said Dave, with actually a twinkle in his eye. “I’ve learned in it more than I could have learned in college! ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,’ you know!”

“God’s providence is mine inheritance,” flashed into my mind, but I would not say it lest I should encourage the boy in folly.

“I have been practising at something besides ship-carpentering, although that isn’t such a bad thing for a fellow with muscle to earn his living by! And I have some chance, perhaps only a slight one, of making a success of it.”

How that telegram burned in my pocket when I saw the wistful eagerness, mingled with doubt, in his eyes!

But I kept it in my pocket and held my peace. Being a sister to a boy is a matter that requires diplomacy!

“And I’m living it down,” continued Dave, not without a touch of pride in his voice. “Cyrus has confidence in me already. Even Uncle Horace has asked my opinion of several matters connected with these business troubles. Promise me, Bathsheba, that you’ll keep quiet and let me live it down.”

“I can’t bear that they shouldn’t know it. Uncle Horace and Cyrus, especially Uncle Horace; he was so perfectly sardonic that Thanksgiving day!”

The wind seemed to be rising; those boards rattled so.

“Wait, for my sake, if not for poor Rob’s,” he insisted. “‘The mills of the gods grind slowly,’” he added lightly.

“‘The mills of God,’” I amended.

“‘Though the mills of God grind slowly

Yet they grind exceeding small,

Though with patience He stands waiting

With exactness grinds He all.’”

I murmured the words, as Dave hurried back to Rob, fearing that he would take cold in the fresh wind. They were beautifully true words, I know, and yet I felt wicked enough at that moment to long to help a little in the grinding of Uncle Horace!

I loitered, reflecting, on the way back to the others. With a vague recollection of the feeling I had had that some one was near I turned around. The great unfinished vessel, some of its ribs still bare, so slowly had the work progressed of late, loomed large between the blue of the river and the blue of the sky.

Stepping from the shadow of a great heap of sawdust a tall, gaunt figure was visible for a moment, then was lost to sight behind the vessel’s stern. To the back pastures his father had gone, Rob said, and he was going thence to Penfield; but was there another figure in the world that could be mistaken for Uncle Horace’s?

I stepped back to the rattling boards. There were huge tracks behind them, that went zigzagging away as if their maker had moved stealthily behind one pile of boards and then another. From the ground I picked up a dog-skin driving-glove—a very large one. Had I, all unwittingly, assisted vigorously at the grinding of Uncle Horace?

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