LOVEDAY GROWS MYSTERIOUS

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 VI

LOVEDAY GROWS MYSTERIOUS

Estelle was gone so long that I thought she must have stayed to the one o’clock dinner; twelve or one o’clock dinners were universal in Palmyra. But before we reached our apple dumpling dessert she came in, with a glow that was more than that caused by the frosty air.

Dave didn’t come home to dinner. The distance from the shipyard was too short to be any hindrance, and Cyrus always came, as a matter of course, but Dave said that a workman could not make his toilet in the middle of the day. He said it without the least bitterness; from first to last there never was any bitterness about Dave. Sometimes I thought Cyrus would have a higher opinion of him if he would take his punishment—or his penance—less cheerfully. I suppose we should not have liked Dave to sit at the table in his workman’s clothes, not because he was a workman, but because he was Dave. I always thought, while I ate, of Dave with the cold luncheon which he carried. Cyrus had arranged a way for the workmen to heat their coffee—that was after Estelle insisted upon carrying something hot to Dave. But I think it was Dave himself who stopped her. While he was far from posing as a martyr he was determined to do the real thing, as a workman should.

“No, I didn’t stay to dinner,” Estelle said in answer to Octavia’s question. “There was turnip in the soup; it smelled all over the house.” Estelle was fastidious to a degree, and so, indeed, was Dave, far more so than the rest of us. “But I had some of Rob’s broth, which he wouldn’t touch, and a bit of toast. I don’t want any dinner.”

She spoke absent-mindedly, and she didn’t reply to grandma and Octavia who gently remonstrated, or to Loveday, who first scolded, and then immediately had a piece of yesterday’s plum-pudding warmed for her. Estelle was fond of plum-pudding and Loveday always saved a piece for her, as she had done from the time she was a child.

But when I went to her room, an hour later, the plum-pudding was untouched on the tray where Viola had set it, and Estelle was fiercely setting a patch upon the knee of Dave’s blue overalls. Fiercely may be a trifle too strong an adjective, but I know of no other that so well describes the grim energy of her action. I think Dave’s unaccustomed work must have been as fiercely done, for both pairs that he wore were already worn out at the knees.

“Estelle, if you had found out anything—anything in Dave’s favor from Rob—of course you would tell me,” I said.

“I don’t know but I should tell you, Bathsheba,” she said slowly. “But there is nothing to tell. Rob is very elusive, you know; he is not in the least like his father.”

“Certainly Uncle Horace is about as elusive as a sledge hammer,” said I.

“But I had my suspicions confirmed. He knows all about it, and he had more to do with it than he will tell,” she declared positively.

“I don’t see how he could have had anything to do with it,” I retorted, in my stupidly argumentative way, although I knew argument was useless, even if all argument had not been exhausted on that subject. “He was ill in bed at the time, and if he hadn’t been no one could ever suspect him of having anything to do with horse-races. He never could bear to see horses trained. The only time he and Dave ever quarreled was when Dave broke in the colts. He didn’t send Dave to the races. Rob never was the least bit coarse. I didn’t think Dave was, either——”

“But you lost all faith in him at the first trial!” interrupted Estelle, not reproachfully, but in a matter-of-fact tone.

“Did—did Rob say that he thought that there was any excuse for Dave?” I said. How could I say that he thought Dave didn’t do it, when Dave had virtually owned that he did?

Estelle congealed at once. “I didn’t ask him,” she answered and took such a great snip in the overalls that she was forced to cut out a larger patch. But as new light shone in her eyes, there was no doubt about it that her suspicions, whatever they were, had been confirmed.

But I, who did not, as she demanded, believe in Dave, was not accounted worthy to be told what she had discovered. I thought, myself, it was fancy. She admitted that there was nothing to tell and yet the look in her eyes told me that there was something from which she shut me out.

I left her to her patching, and went across the bridge to Uncle Horace’s myself. I had not thought of it until grandma said she wished she had known that Estelle was going over, because she wanted to send some calves-foot jelly to Rob. I said, at once, that I would go and carry it.

Rob would be no more elusive to me than to Estelle. I remembered now that she had never been one of his favorites. I had even fancied sometimes that he was a little jealous of her influence over Dave.

“Loveday will take the jelly out of the mould for you,” grandma had said. And I sought for Loveday, knowing that she was so dainty and particular about her jelly that she disliked to have any one touch it. But Loveday was not to be found, and Viola had retired to don the plaid dress that was her afternoon toilet, adorned with cherry ribbons for the beguiling of Leander Green, a persistent bachelor. So I emptied the mould myself, taking care that the jelly rose should not be shorn of a petal, and that it should be as daintily arranged as possible to tempt the invalid’s appetite. And across the bridge I went, hearing the workmen’s hammers from the shipyard on the way, with my heart sore for Dave, and determined that if I thought from his actions that Rob really knew anything about the matter he should not be elusive with me. I was not one of the clever ones of the family, and I knew it, but I had the persistency that always accompanied the Partridge nose.

I found Rob lying on a lounge in his own room. It was a chintz-covered lounge and against its gay colors his face looked woefully wan and wasted.

“Rob, you ought to have come home before,” I exclaimed, too frank in my dismay at his changed looks. “Palmyra air and home nursing are the things to make you pick up!” I added hastily and as cheerfully as I could.

“I knew he didn’t want me to come—father, you know. He thinks I haven’t any pluck.” There was a deep, anxious line between the boy’s delicately-penciled brows. “Dave, now, ought to have been his son.”

“Dave!” I echoed wonderingly. “He can’t bear Dave!”

“That’s because he doesn’t know him. I do.” Rob had a kind of triumphant air as of a great discoverer. “Whatever fathers and mothers and teachers may think, it takes one fellow to know another. When it comes to pluck, now, Dave is all there. He’s simply great!”

“But pluck isn’t everything,” I said seriously, “that is what you boys call pluck. To be good is always the very hardest and bravest thing.”

I expected that my trite copy-book sentiment would elicit scorn. One had to learn the art of putting things to our boys. But instead of being scornful Rob became reflective.

“Perhaps that’s true. I rather think it is,” he said. “But sometimes it isn’t so easy for a fellow to say what is goodness. And things put you into such a fix that you can’t get out—unless you have brains and pluck, like Dave.”

This was somewhat enigmatical; if it signified anything it was that there had been some boyish “scrape” out of which Dave had extricated one or both of them. Rob certainly seemed to have no sense whatever of Dave’s moral lapse.

“Nothing—nothing could possibly place any one in such a position that it would be necessary for such wrong-doing as Dave’s,” I said severely. “Although Dave is my brother, and I am quite as fond of him as if he were my own brother, yet I can’t help saying, Rob, that I think it is very dangerous for you to make a hero of him.”

He started up from the couch, his face flushed and his blue eyes blazing. He looked like the portrait of his beautiful young mother who had died when he was a baby. There was something fine and lofty in his expression; it was almost the look of an accusing angel.

“You—you don’t——” he began and faltered, it was, or I fancied that it was, as Uncle Horace’s heavy steps sounded in the room below.

“Girls are such fools!” he growled, as he fell back upon his pillows. “As much—as much as fifty of you wouldn’t be worth Dave’s little finger!” The footstep had ceased to reach our ears now and his voice arose high-keyed and shrill.

I bent over him, obeying a sudden

impulse.

“Rob, if you know that Dave didn’t go to the races and—and lose his money, if there was any strange mistake, of course it would be your duty to tell—you would want to tell to clear Dave at any cost to yourself.”

He started up again and scowled at me angrily.

“What cost could it be to me? I am not much of a fellow to go to races, am I?—a fellow who has no more strength than a girl because every once in a while he is choked to death for days and days and nights and nights, and is a disgrace and a disappointment to his father!”

“Oh, not a disgrace, Rob, not a disgrace!” I interrupted. “I think it would kill Uncle Horace if you were that. I hope you don’t think that illness like yours could ever be a disgrace!”

“Kill him? kill father? I guess it would make him kill me, more likely!” he said, with a queer, grim, little chuckle. “He thinks it’s a disgrace to be weak and girly. It makes a fellow like that, Bathsheba, to be the way I’ve been!” He spoke with sudden earnestness, his voice growing husky. “No one understands all about it but Dave; it’s queer when he’s so strong and plucky himself. Usually a plucky fellow thinks you ought to be so, too. He thinks it’s just as easy! But Dave can put himself in another fellow’s place; and we’ve been together such a lot. He liked to go with me just as well as with the boys that were stronger and different. He said so, anyway.” The boy suddenly raised himself again and looked up wistfully into my face. “You don’t think he was making believe because he pitied me, do you, Bathsheba? I’ve been thinking of a good many things since I’ve been sick this time.”

He looked so pitiful, his angular figure quite devoid of boyish grace, with narrow, stooping shoulders and sunken chest and his eyes so big and dark with the great hollows around them, that tears suddenly filled my eyes.

“I don’t think Dave ever made believe in his life,” I said heartily. “At least he isn’t deceitful.”

“But you pity me,” he said, looking suspiciously at my tears. “I’ve been thinking it would be better if I should die. That’s the way it would turn out in a story-book, and then everything would be all right.”

“The way what would turn out? What would be all right?” I demanded sharply.

“Why—why—Dave wouldn’t have to bother with me, and father would never be ashamed of me any more.”

Of course I scolded him, calling him weak and foolish, and trying to rouse him to the courage and the trust in God’s Providence that alone could help him. I pitied him so that I almost forgot Dave and that my errand had been to try to find evidence that he was innocent—or at least less guilty than he seemed. I could not feel that I had found anything at all satisfactory in that line. It did seem likely that Rob knew more about the matter than he meant to tell, but it was scarcely possible that it was anything that could clear Dave. When a fellow’s inheritance was such a puny body as his, and an incurable disease, it was better that he should die, persisted Rob. And I knew it was no time for preaching, but I remembered the strong helpful text that was engraved upon the tiles of the Deemster’s mantel:

“God’s Providence is Mine Inheritance.”

And I at once set out for home determined to get Estelle to print it, in beautiful old English script, and paint a flower border and then I would hang it in his room. Rob loved pretty things, like a girl. I knew Estelle would be a little scornful at my idea of helping Rob with a motto, I who was the practical one; but a small thing will sometimes have a strong effect upon a morbid mind.

That was the idea that was uppermost in my mind as I hurried out of the yard, by the long stables, to make a short cut to the river bank and cross on the ice, when I ran into Loveday coming out of the old, unused carriage-house. Now there was nothing astonishing in that, for Marcella, Uncle Horace’s housekeeper, was Loveday’s second-cousin and they often visited each other, but the astonishing thing was that Loveday should start guiltily at sight of me, flush scarlet over to the crisp black waves of her hair and thrust something that she held in her hand hastily under her shawl—Loveday, whose greatest horror was of “under-handedness” and who boasted that she never had had a secret in her life.

I glanced back, involuntarily, at the old carriage-house. I remembered suddenly that Hiram Nute’s photograph wagon was stored there for the winter. A traveling photograph gallery had been one of Hiram’s “combernations” of the last summer. It had suited his taste admirably.

“There wasn’t nowhere that you saw so much human nater, without it was top of a tin-peddler’s wagon, as you did a takin’ folks’ photographs,” he said.

Loveday withdrew her objection that it was “kind of flighty,” in view of its paying qualities, and Hiram gave it up reluctantly and late, for the winter. I remembered hearing that Uncle Horace had given him the use of the old building as a storage house. I also remembered having seen Hiram running the wagon in there just before Thanksgiving.

It seemed quite natural that Loveday should have gone into it, to see that all was safe, Hiram having gone on one of his essence-peddling tours into another State. But why—why should Loveday look guilty about it? She stammered that she was going in a minute to see Marcella; she hadn’t time to be gallivantin’ ’round, but seein’ there was sickness in the house she expected ’twas folks’ duty to come and inquire. It struck me that this was probably the first time in her life that Loveday had prevaricated. The stress of the moment turned her pale and afterwards she looked angry—either at herself or me. She had had some errand to Hiram’s photograph wagon and it was a secret one; so much was easy to gather from Loveday’s manner. But when even Loveday became mysterious I felt that life was too involved a matter for my simple brains.

I left her with relief, and slid out upon the river; the strong west wind blew me toward the shipyard, and I stopped to see Dave. I had not been there since he had gone to work, partly because it was not an attractive place in the winter, partly because I shrank from seeing him at work there.

Dave evidently did not shrink from being seen. When I came near he was swinging himself down from the stocks of the ship whose inside work he was helping to finish. At first I could not discover to whom he was talking, but I saw that he looked like a young Viking with his fine, athletic shape and his blond coloring, even in his blue overalls, that pair had one of Estelle’s patches upon the knee, and his rough working jacket.

Alice Yorke and her father had been skating; they were such lovers of the sport that they were not deterred, like the rest of us, by the roughness of the ice which had frozen in little ridges after a thaw. The doctor had broken one of his skates and had stopped at the shipyard to repair it. It was to them that Dave was talking, when I came up, with as graceful and nonchalant an air as if he were in the most correct of evening dress at a reception. He had a hammer in his hand and he unloaded his overalls’ pockets of nails and screws to find something with which to mend Dr. Yorke’s skate.

If it had been one of the Palmyra girls, with whom he had been acquainted from childhood, I should not have thought it strange; but Alice Yorke had come from the city, and there was about her an air of elegance and high-breeding that seemed to set her worlds apart from a workman in overalls. But she evidently thought no more about that little matter than did Dave, for they were having a most merry and sociable time.

The skate mending took a long time; none of the party seemed in a hurry. Dave’s capacious overalls’ pockets failed to yield a piece of string that was needed and I went into the little counting-house in search of it. I had seen a shadow across the window that I knew was Cyrus’ tall angular form, and I wondered why he did not come out and join the party. We fancied, although it was an astonishing thing to fancy of Cyrus, that he went wherever he was likely to meet Alice Yorke. He groped near-sightedly for the string in a drawer of his desk. He did not say a word and his lips were tightly compressed.

My feelings were queerly divided. I was conscious that I had been having a pride in Dave’s manliness that had made me almost forget his moral failings. I read in Cyrus’ dark face that he was both ashamed of Dave and a little jealous of him; we all think we can read the faces of our own, and are often as blind as moles.

No, Cyrus would not come out; he was busy. But I knew that he continued to pace the office floor after I had gone, as he had done before I came.

Alice Yorke and Dave were still keeping up their gay trifling, but Alice turned her head eagerly toward the counting-house door as it closed upon me, and she looked a little disappointed—at least a little crest-fallen, when she saw that I was alone. Perhaps she was not content, like the Palmyra girls, with one string to her bow, I thought a little bitterly, for I didn’t want either of my boys played with, mouse-fashion, by a mischief of a girl.

“Good gracious, you don’t think you have to take care of Cyrus, do you?” Octavia had said to me scornfully.

But I still thought that Cyrus might have his weaknesses, like any one else. It seemed to me that when one was enduring a long strain of painful duty and self-sacrifice, it might be just the time when a little consoling sweetness would easily reach his heart.

Dave walked home with me. I had waited for him after Alice and her father had gone skating off over the rough surface of the river. His working hours were soon over in these short winter days.

“There are so few men now, Dave,” I said wonderingly, as I watched the dark shapes that plodded off in the wintry dusk.

“Another cut-down,” Dave answered shortly.

“But it never was done before in the winter; grandpa wouldn’t have allowed it!” I cried.

“Can’t be helped,” said Dave concisely. “See here, don’t you talk to Cyrus about it, nor to any one so that he’ll hear of it, but there’s been a heavy loss. That brig that went down in the great storm off Seguin was nearly all owned here. It was about all we had left, any of us. And through some loose screw in the underwriters there won’t be a cent of insurance. Haven’t you noticed how glum Cyrus has been looking for a few days?”

“I noticed that he was looking glum when I went into the office for the string,” I said. And Dave gave me a quick, quizzical glance.

Then, after a moment, he whistled sharply. “W-h-e-w! what dunces girls are!” he said.

But this was a remark that had somewhat lost its force from long use. As I have said before we are a candid family.

“Poor old Cyrus has a lot on his hands,” he continued seriously. “I don’t think he has much of a head for business, and, if he had, I doubt whether he could keep things from going all wrong as times are now. He ought to have been a minister as he planned.”

“Dave, haven’t you a head for business? Couldn’t you take some of the responsibility?” I said eagerly. In the first moment of dismay I didn’t think of the poverty that menanced us but only of the family honor, which seemed to me to be centred in the shipbuilding business.

“If I had a head for business I am hardly in a position, just now, to offer my services as a responsible head of the firm!” said Dave dryly. And he left me to go to his own room, humming a light air that Alice Yorke sang.

The sense of misfortune deepened upon me suddenly. I heard the wolf at the door and felt as if his gaunt length were slinking up the stairs behind me, as I went to my room.

I sat down upon the edge of my bed with coat and hat still on and my practical mind slipped away from the mystery of Dave’s wickedness and from Rob’s pitiful condition, and even from the family honor as involved in the shipbuilding business, to the possibility of adding gilt-edged butter to the already famous sage cheese and preserves from Groundnut Hill Farm.

I fear that my mind is scarcely large enough to contain more than one idea at a time and that fact accounts for my being rather stupid when Loveday came into my room, in the small hours of that night, with a bee in her bonnet—or nightcap, rather, to be exact.

She had a large photograph in her hand; I recognized it at once as the object that she had hastily hidden under her shawl as she came out of Hiram Nute’s photograph wagon. She held her candle between the picture and my sleepy eyes.

“What does it ’pear to you to be?” she demanded.

“A horse,” I said drowsily. It was a very poor photograph. It had been taken when Hiram first started out with his new “combernation,” and it was blurred and badly finished. Beneath the photograph was printed “Prince Charley, Alf Reeder’s Great Racer.”

Had Loveday become suddenly insane, that she should arise from her bed in the dead of the night to show me with trembling eagerness, this most uninteresting photograph?

“Does it ’pear to you to be any horse you ever saw?” demanded Loveday breathlessly.

I raised myself upon my elbow and looked at her in blinking bewilderment. I had heard that it was the proper thing to humor insane people.

“I’ve seen so few race-horses, and I don’t notice them much,” I stammered. “It—it looks like a very fine horse.”

“Oh it does, does it? That’s the way it ’pears to you then.” Loveday heaved a long sigh. “Now it looks to me like one of them poor old creturs that are patched up and curry-combed and have plenty of oats give ’em, and have the whip cracked over ’em, and another horse set to runnin’ by ’em to see if they can’t get up a little spurt o’ life, with their last breath, just to put money into somebody’s pocket. I used to see such things up to the Newmarket mile-ground when I was a girl. But there! I’m an old idiot, awakin’ you up like this in the middle of the night. An idee ketched a holt of me, and when an idee ketches a holt of me between midnight and sun-up I can’t get rid of it without I tell somebody. I was kind of glad I woke up, too, for the lantern was hung out acrost the river.”

I sprang up. The lantern was the signal hung out at Uncle Horace’s when Rob was very ill and wanted Dave.

“You waked him? He’s gone over?” I gasped.

“La, yes; I watched him clear acrost the river in the moonlight, half an hour ago,” said Loveday. “I expect nothin’ but what that boy is real sick, but it never took that old horse out of my mind. Beats all what an old idiot I be when an idee ketches a holt of me between midnight and sun-up!”

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