A LADY-LIKE RECREATION

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 V

A LADY-LIKE RECREATION

“It is one thing to be ashamed and another to be really repentant,” said Cyrus, judicially. “It is almost as if he lacked responsibility and moral sense. So far as I know he hasn’t expressed the least penitence for what he has done.”

“It is very hard for some boys to say in so many words that they are sorry; you know that yourself, Cyrus,” I said, with my usual lack of tact—for Cyrus had never been one to “own up” or show his penitence openly, when caught in a boyish prank. But one could say this for Cyrus, he was never guilty of many boyish pranks. “Dave always owned up, but, perhaps, he did take things rather lightly; it’s some people’s nature,” I added, lamely.

No one ever put me at such a disadvantage as my own brother Cyrus.

“It’s an unfortunate nature—to be able to do serious wrong and take it lightly,” said Cyrus. Which was an undeniable proposition. Estelle’s answer to such was the persistent denial that Dave was ever guilty of the wrong-doing with which he was charged. There was some dreadful mistake, Estelle repeated, and I will admit, that in the face of the very strong proofs, this seemed to me provokingly childish.

The letter from the President of the college to Uncle Horace, Dave’s guardian, had been a dreadful arraignment. Dave had not only gone off to the horse-races at Newmarket, twenty miles away from the college, but he had pretended to be absent because he was caring for his cousin who was ill at his boarding-place not far from the college. The boy had been very ill and Dave had neglected him and left him to the care of strangers, not even causing word to be sent home until his return from the races.

He had borrowed money to pay his debts, having first forged a check upon his uncle, and, becoming alarmed, secured its return by the payment of cash before it was presented for payment.

All this had come to the knowledge of the college authorities through another student, who had also been expelled from college for going to the races. He was a rich young New Yorker and from him Dave had borrowed money. In youthful rage and in defiance of all principles of college honor, he had denounced the “whited sepulchres” among the students, as bad as he and worse, except for the sin of being found out. For Dave had pretended to be nursing his cousin while he had in reality run away to the races leaving him to strangers. And while there he had forged a check to pay his lost debts, only repenting and borrowing money, instead, when a realizing sense of the consequences seized him.

For one of us this really seemed too bad to be true. That was one of the arguments in Dave’s favor with which I had tried Cyrus’ patience.

“He isn’t exactly one of us, you know,” Cy had answered. “I always thought it likely that the alien blood would show itself. And I was afraid of the liking that he had for horses even as a youngster. I never approved of his breaking-in of Uncle Horace’s colts bare-back.”

“He thought no more of the horses than Rob did,” I retorted. “For my part I like to see a boy fond of animals. It means healthy human nature and a kind heart.”

Cyrus shook his head doubtfully. “There are different ways of being fond of animals,” he said. “I always knew that Dave’s way was, more than Rob’s, the way of the sport-loving man. He had the pedigrees of all Uncle Horace’s horses at his tongue’s end, before he knew the multiplication table, while Rob never thought of such a thing. I used to be afraid that he would get a fancy for horse-racing. I have said to Uncle Horace, more than once, that the raising of blooded stock wasn’t an altogether safe business where there were boys.”

“I don’t see how you could think of such a thing,” I cried, indignantly. “I never did. There never was anything vulgar such as betting about our boys.” And then I remembered what Dave had done and hung my head.

“Uncle Horace used to like Dave’s way with the horses better than Rob’s,” I continued. “He said Rob had a sickly sentimentality about animals. You know he sold old Lucifer because Rob was so fond of him. I thought that was cruel.”

“I should prefer sentimentality to the racing instinct,” said Cyrus. “A boyish weakness that leans to the side of goodness is a very different thing from a lack of moral sense that leads to real wickedness.”

“You never did like Dave,” I cried, reproachfully. “When he and Rob got into boyish mischief you always laid all the blame upon Dave.”

“Was I not usually right?” asked Cyrus, quietly. “Rob has his faults, but he is one of ourselves, we know what to expect of him.”

“You talk as if Dave had not a drop of Partridge-blood in his veins!” I said, indignantly.

“I’m afraid he takes after the other side,” answered Cyrus, with a resigned air.

Cyrus never grew excited or impatient over the other children, now. He seemed to have adjusted the chains to his wrists. He walked out of the room as if to end the conversation. We were in his own den, a room he had fitted up in the great attic which had been open and unfinished before, and he seemed to prefer to leave it to me rather than to continue an argument. But after he had closed the door he opened it again to say, in his well-balanced tone, that always provoked me:

“I have rather more hopes of the girl.”

The girl! He always would take that tone of aloofness towards Dave and Estelle, and that while he was sacrificing himself for their welfare!

“Estelle believes in Dave,” I called after him, softly. “She thinks there is some mystery about it.”

“That is mere childishness,” said Cy, loftily.

At first I doubted whether Dave would adhere to his determination to go into the shipyard to work as a common laborer, and, if he did, whether Uncle Horace and Cy would allow it. But Uncle Horace grimly approved. Dave had the brawn and muscle for a ship’s carpenter, he said, and he could serve his apprenticeship like any other young man. And Cyrus agreed, although I thought he would have been better pleased if Dave had essayed his penance—or begun his life-work—as one was pleased to regard it—at a distance from Palmyra.

There was a ship at the time on the stocks whose inside work was to be done, although the weather was becoming wintry, and Dave went to his apprenticeship at once and looked, in blue overalls, a colored shirt and rough jacket, just as much like a Greek god as ever. Estelle made salves and cold cream for his hands—Dave always had very white and delicate hands—and said very little. The color that had been fitful was always bright in her cheeks, now, and she held her head high. I think she still believed, not in Dave’s penitence, as we were all—unless it were Uncle Horace—trying to do, but in Dave’s innocence, and had not given up the hope of proving it in spite of Dave’s persistent reticence—as persistent to her as to the rest of us; indeed, more so, for it was easy to see that he avoided her.

But he must have admitted to her that he was anxious about the money he had borrowed, for she began to show a feverish eagerness to earn money. Uncle Horace and Cyrus had proposed to pay Dave’s debt, for the sake of the family honor, but Dave stoutly claimed the right to shoulder it himself.

He could discharge it in time, he declared. The young man to whom it was due, repenting perhaps of his dishonorable betrayal of Dave to the college authorities, had agreed to wait for a certain length of time. And now the debt was galling Estelle more than it galled Dave. Even Estelle, who believed in him, could not doubt that Dave was not given to worry.

She had begun to draw again, having changed her mind about the value of art since she had sacrificed her Mother Goose drawings through fear that drawing would lead to “worser” things, such as smoking and like evils.

She had taken drawing lessons at the Academy, of Herr Barmfeld, who came once a week from the little city near by on the river, which was growing like a mushroom, and sending little sympathetic thrills of new life into stolid, steady-going, old Palmyra.

The lessons had disturbed her very much at first. There was so much to undo and unlearn of her own work and ways that she was bewildered. She confided in Octavia and me at last. I suspected that she had been drawing and drawing and never letting us know it, but Octavia was altogether surprised.

Octavia was still teaching, varying the monotonous routine by furtive little ambitions in the way of story-writing. The stories came back to her with curt notes, or kind notes, or no notes at all, from the editors who received them. The only unvarying part of the performance was that they came back. I had grown to hate the sight of the packages in our box at the post-office. I always espied them through the window before I went in, and they gave me a dreadful pang, for Octavia’s sensitive face changed so when she received them and I laid to them the cruel little crow’s feet that were pinching the corners of her eyes.

We had all been seized with the desire to help on the family fortunes, for with all the new activities that the little growing city neighbor had aroused in Palmyra, shipbuilding did not flourish as in the olden times. Some people doubted whether it ever would flourish in our State again.

It seemed to me, sometimes, that Cyrus was wasting his life in a dreary round of unproductive drudgery. And Octavia, who had remarked to me, wistfully, long before we sent Dave to college, that nowadays, women—bright women—could do so many things, poor Octavia’s stories had all been returned to her. Her courage had always mounted again after defeat, and a long story was now growing slowly, and laboriously, under her pen. I, alone, was in her confidence and knew that “Evelyn Marchmont” was expected to make the family fortunes.

When Estelle also confided in me and showed me her portfolio full of drawings, I straightway marched her into Octavia’s room with it. I was still the domestic one; sage cheese and home-made preserves were the weapons with which I defied fate and I knew that I was not a judge of drawings.

Octavia was, perhaps, not much more so, but it seemed to me appropriate that the author of “Evelyn Marchmont” should criticise them rather than the maker of sage cheese. For myself I found them different from the drawings of other Academy girls, vaguely different from anything I had ever seen. The people were more like real people, and all the scenes were homely ones. I felt that the people ought, maybe, to look more picturesque than ordinary, and certainly have more conventional settings. I was afraid they were pretty bad. And how to save my conscience and Estelle’s feelings at the same time was a perplexing problem. I solved it like a coward by saying nothing and drawing her, portfolio and all, into Octavia’s room.

It was Saturday, a school holiday, and Octavia was at work on “Evelyn,” which she thrust hastily out of sight. She looked dubiously at the drawings. I could see that she felt my misgivings, and more. She said they were very pretty, and that was a wonderful likeness of Deacon Snow when he fell asleep in the long prayer, and of Hiram Nute with his fiddle. But she was afraid that such work would never amount to much and she hoped that Estelle had not neglected her studies for it.

The color flamed over Estelle’s high, blue-veined forehead—it had burned hotly enough in her cheeks before—and I caught a little contemptuous quiver of her mobile lips. They seemed never likely to understand each other, those two! Octavia’s ideas and sympathies broadened slowly, slowly even with the discipline of teaching children, and of writing stories that were returned to her! And Estelle had, no doubt—how should it be otherwise—something of the “bumptiousness” of youth.

She got out of Octavia’s room rather quickly and I followed her. At the threshold of her own door she turned upon me, her bosom heaving in the old childish way and her eyes shining moistly.

“You don’t think anything of them, either of you!” she burst forth. “And I hoped to earn some money by them. I must earn some money! I can’t have Dave owe that dreadful boy who told of him—told lies of him, too!”

“He borrowed the money for something,” I said, stubbornly—disagreeably—I am afraid; “and, Estelle, you are only eighteen. You can’t hope to earn much yet. After you are graduated, perhaps you may get the Mile End school that Octavia used to teach”—for Octavia now had a kindergarten of her own—“or help her in her school.”

“No,” said Estelle, slowly, “I shall never help Octavia in her school. It isn’t that I don’t like the little children—although I would rather draw them than teach them—but I couldn’t get along with Octavia. She never liked me. If I were to help you——”

But I shook my head hastily. Estelle had no talent for cheese or preserves. I shuddered to think of the time when she put sweet marjoram into the cheese instead of sage! And Leander complained that all her turkeys and chickens died in debt, she and Dave would overfeed them so, being so tender-hearted that they were always afraid that something might go unfed. The hens were so fat that they couldn’t lay—and the number of superfluous roosters that belonged to her brood and that she wouldn’t have killed would have destroyed her profits if there had otherwise been any. No! clearly Estelle’s farming methods would never be money-making.

“You don’t think I can do anything!” she cried; and although it was half-jokingly I knew that the tears in her eyes were hot. “You will see! You will see!” and her eyes flashed through the tears.

Now by this time I was twenty-four and felt very old and wise, and although I had not been far from Palmyra in my life, yet that sort of association with the world which demands of it its money for the products of one’s hand and brains is a developing experience. If any one scoffingly refuses to regard sage cheese and preserves, that command the very best market, as brain products, why let them try to make them.

“I think you don’t quite know yet what it is to do things for money,” I said. And then my heart was suddenly wrung with pity for the poor young thing who was putting her whole heart and soul into work in which no one else would ever see what she saw, which the world would never regard as worth its consideration—much less its money! I could understand that it would be far worse to fail in this way than in cheese and preserves.

I had my own misgivings about “Evelyn Marchmont,” but it did not seem so pitiful and futile an undertaking as Estelle’s pictures. Some time I thought she would find out that our Octavia was worth listening to.

“I—we didn’t say that they were bad,” I stammered. “Only they don’t look quite like the other girls’ drawings and I don’t want you to think that you can get money for them and be disappointed. Money is the hardest thing in the world to get, you know.”

“I’ve got to have it for Dave,” she said, simply, and she hugged her portfolio of drawings as if therein lay all her hopes.

“I’ve been thinking, Estelle; there is my money in the bank,” I stammered. For even in the stress of hard times I had been able to save a little; my jellies, especially the quince, would always bring their price.

I had hesitated about offering it to pay such debts as Dave had incurred. I inherited the true New England thrift, along with the Partridge nose; moreover it seemed to me better for him to shoulder the burden himself. He had brought quite enough trouble upon others. But before Estelle’s troubled face I weakened.

“I will let Dave have that,” I said.

“He wouldn’t take it! I wouldn’t let him!” she said, almost defiantly; and then her mood softened suddenly. “Dear old Bashie! I know how good it is of you!” she said. “And you must think I’m horribly full of vanity if I can’t bear to be told that my drawings are not good. But it isn’t vanity—scarcely at all vanity. That is,” she added, “of course it hurts. I think it must be like having one’s own children ill-treated. But it is chiefly because I want to be independent, and just now I must help Dave. No, no, Bathsheba, we couldn’t take your money; that would be worse than the shipyard!” The little shiver of repugnance that shook her slender frame made me realize, as I had not done before, how keenly she felt Dave’s disgrace and hardships.

She looked at me meditatively for a moment. I understood afterward, that she had been weighing my critical capacities and, perhaps, trying to have a little faith in them.

“Come with me, Bathsheba,” she said, at length. And I followed her, wondering, up the attic stairs. It was cold; so cold that our breath went before us in little whiffs like smoke. Cyrus almost always had a fire in a little cylinder stove in his den, but the rest of the great attic was filled with the winter’s bitter cold, as with a tangible presence.

In one corner was a screen made of a clothes-horse hung with an old, moth-eaten shawl that our great-aunt, Abby Tewksbury, who was a missionary, had brought from India. It seemed that they had not realized, in Palmyra, the value of an India shawl, for moth and mildew had marked it for their own, and yet the dull, rich colors still showed in the sunlight that flooded the great room. Behind the screen I saw with surprise that Estelle had fitted up a rough little studio for herself and on a clumsy easel was a painting, nearly finished.

It was a landscape, a bit of river—it might be our river—with an old mud-scow and a group of children on the bank. In the background was a mountain, misty about its top; it might be old “Blue.” It was really a picture; it looked to me as if Herr Barmfeld himself might have painted it, and my heart thrilled.

“It’s really a river!” I cried. “And such a pretty blue, and the trees are so lovely on the bank! But instead of the mud-scow and the children I think I would have had a pretty boat and a lady with a parasol. Nothing looks so pretty on the water as a lady with a parasol! Then, I think you might really sell it.”

“I am afraid it is very hard to sell such pictures, for any but artists of the first rank,” she said. “But I am going to try,” she added, hopefully. “I must try.”

“The screen that Maria Oakes painted for the Village Improvement Society’s Fair brought five dollars,” I said, encouragingly.

Was there again a little contemptuous quiver of the finely-chiseled lips?

“I know I’m not a judge, Estelle,” I said, humbly. “I’ve had my mind so upon cheese and preserves. I’m only critical because I so much want you to succeed.”

She gave me one of her rare caresses—rare even when she was a child.

“I’m hateful about my work because I’m so anxious,” she said. “I only wish I had had a talent for cheese and preserves!”

“If you will take my money, just to tide you over this trouble,” I hazarded again. “You will be sure to pay it. Nothing is denied to patient and well-directed effort,” I quoted tritely from the copy-book.

“Not when it’s for Dave—and you don’t believe in him!” she said, firmly.

What would I not have given to be able to say that I did believe in Dave!

“I think it was noble of him to come home and work in the shipyard,” I said, a trifle haltingly, for in my heart was a lurking doubt whether it would not have been nobler in Dave to go away and carve out his future independently—although I surely did not wish that he had done that, for I feared the world for Dave.

Estelle promptly and decisively turned her back upon me. She had evidently determined that she would not talk with any of us about Dave.

“I wish it were not so cold here; there is no other place in the house where I can get a good light in the late afternoons, the only time I have,” she said. I heard Cyrus come out of his den and I called to him. She made a little startled objection, but thought better of it and even drew the shade higher to throw a better light on the picture for Cyrus’ near-sighted eyes.

“Why, it is really pretty, very pretty!” said Cyrus, indulgently. “I like to see you girls have lady-like recreations.” He glanced a little ruefully at my roughened hands. “The cheese and the preserves are not exactly recreations, Bathsheba, but they are womanly work. One of these days I hope the old, prosperous times will come back to the shipyard, and then you shall none of you do anything but make pictures—or ‘sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam.’”

Cyrus was in an amiable, light-minded mood as I had not seen him before since Dave’s return.

“But I am going to make pictures to earn money,” said Estelle, with a tilt of her yellow head.

Cyrus smiled carelessly, cast a backward glance at the picture as he turned away and said lightly:

“I’m afraid you’ll find the road to fame a long one, little sister. And they say that in art money only comes with fame.”

“He needn’t call me little sister when he—he’s so hard on Dave!” cried Estelle, angrily. “Letting him work in the shipyard, like a common laborer, and—and thinking my work is play!”

Cyrus’ returning step was heard upon the stairs.

“Estelle, I’ve been thinking that one of the carpenters at the yard might put up a partition—make a room for you there. It could take in the chimney so that you could have a stove. I should think there was a fine light there for a studio.”

“I should like it if you thought it would be worth the while,” said Estelle, and her face lighted.

“Why, of course. I’ll send Bilkins up at once,” said Cyrus, genially.

“That’s very kind of Cyrus,” Estelle remarked, with an air of candor, as we heard him go down the stairs. “But I would rather he would be fair to Dave than kind to me.”

“Have you heard that Rob has come home?” I asked, with a sudden recollection of the news that Leander had brought from the other side of the river. “He is too ill to finish his course at the Preparatory School. It will be a great blow to Uncle Horace.”

Estelle started and her face flushed.

“I’m going over this moment to see Rob!” she said. “I’ve always felt that he knew something about the mystery—if he would only tell!”

I looked after her with wondering pity for her delusion. What mystery could there be except that Dave had been bad enough to leave Rob alone and ill among strangers to go to the races?

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