LOVEDAY MAKES A SURPRISING ANNOUNCEMENT

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 XIII

LOVEDAY MAKES A SURPRISING ANNOUNCEMENT

Dave had espied Dennis, Uncle Horace’s man, driving post-haste across the bridge and was whistling and waving frantically to attract his attention when I returned to the lunching place. He had found another coat to wrap Rob in, but the boy was shivering. Dennis drove into the yard and over piles of chips and heaps of sawdust, down to the river-brink where we were. His relief was plainly visible when he saw Rob.

“We’d be kilt intoirely, if the masther came home and found him gorn,” said Dennis with deep feeling. “Sure it’s on the bank o’ the river for miles I’m after seekin’ and it’s for thraggin’ it the women do be!”

“Dennis, where is Mr. Partridge?” I asked.

“Shure it’s till the back pastures he do be gorn, and Penfield afther,” said Dennis. And although I had too well-regulated a Yankee mind to believe in ghosts it gave me a queer feeling to think of that gaunt, stealthy figure that I had seen making its way out of the shipyard. It had not appeared afterward upon our orchard slope, the “short cut” to the highway, for I had watched to see.

Rob would not be satisfied unless Dave drove him home. He leaned out of the carriage to beg me, again, not to tell.

“That other girl won’t—if she heard anything?” he said. “You needn’t fear for Dave,” he added, shaking his head sagely. “He could live down anything; nobody but me knows Dave!”

And off they went, Dave drawing the wrappings around his charge, and driving very carefully over the rough road.

Alice Yorke went on her homeward way alone. Her face was flushed and her eyes showed traces of tears. She was very sympathetic and she had been deeply moved. Who would not be moved at Dave’s self-sacrifice—so noble even if unwise.

Cyrus was alone in the counting-room, wading through rows of figures that showed an ever more and more hopeless result. No one even remembered him, I thought, but me. Dave was becoming a hero in Alice Yorke’s eyes and my feelings were so queerly mixed about it, and my head so full of romantic ideas that I doubted whether I really was Bathsheba Dill of Palmyra, with only a talent for sage cheese and an aspiration toward sausages.

Estelle walked silently by my side, carelessly swinging the little basket, in which she had brought Dave’s pudding, and trying to look as if this were not one of the red-letter days of her life.

When we reached the vessel upon the stocks a sudden pang seized me. It was the last vessel that would ever be built in our yard! Ever since grandfather was a young man the finest ships in the state had been built and launched here; now so far as his descendants were concerned the business had all come to an end. Cyrus’ sacrifice had been made in vain.

“O, poor Cyrus!” I murmured from the fulness of my heart.

“Bathsheba! do you mean that you pity him because of Dave and Alice Yorke?” exclaimed Estelle. There was actually a little dancing fun in her eye. “Fancy dear old Cyrus having a heart!”

“One wouldn’t suppose that they were a common family possession,” I said with what I felt to be rather fine sarcasm.

“Now don’t be cross, Bathsheba,” she said coaxingly. “I know he has, in one way; he has become so softened, he is positively a dear lately—but Cyrus and a girl!—you know one can’t help laughing! And for Alice Yorke one would think of some one more—well, more polished, some one like Mr. Carruthers.” And she colored as she said it to the very roots of her hair—though why she should I couldn’t in the least understand.

“I wasn’t thinking of Cyrus in connection with any girl,” I said with dignity. “In fact I know of none worthy to be mentioned in the same day with him! I was thinking of the business troubles that are weighing so heavily upon him—of the pitiful thing it is that he should have given up the life-work to which he felt that he was called only to fail after all.”

“He can be a minister now; he was never so fit for it as he is now!” said Estelle. “But is it so bad about the business?”

We had reached the top of the orchard slope and she turned and looked back at the shipyard.

“There is a great deal of Dave,” she observed sadly.

“Not enough to do what Cyrus and Uncle Horace couldn’t do, even if there were time—if he had any chance,” I answered.

“Poor Dave!” murmured Estelle, “if he only had a chance! Or even if Rob wouldn’t hang on to him so!”

“Your apple-bank money paid the horse’s board!” I said.

“I didn’t know what Dave was going to do with it. I found out that he wanted money, so I gave it to him,” she said simply.

As we reached the house I saw an empty coffee-cup, with a spoon in it, set upon the outer sill of a window that opened upon the porch.

“Has a tramp been here, Loveday?” I asked; for she was tender-hearted toward the highway fraternity.

“There was a man here that I gave a cup of coffee to,” said Loveday with evidently no mind for details.

“Did he come up the road from the shipyard?” I asked eagerly and with a sinking of the heart—for of course there were men who looked like Uncle Horace. “And was he very tall and angular?”

“Land, Miss Bathsheba, I don’t know which way he came nor which way he went, and I never got nobody to take his pictur!” said Loveday crisply. “I know he looked white and wore out and hadn’t no appreciation of good victuals. He shook his head at everything I offered him and swallered the coffee as if it wa’n’t no better’n spring bitters.”

It seemed unlikely that Loveday would take such liberties with Uncle Horace as to offer him a cup of coffee—he was not a person with whom any one took liberties. But the glare was reassuring; and it was just possible that there had been a tramp.

Dave received the letter from Ned Carruthers that night. I knew that he had by his face when he entered the house. The “aliens” both have telltale faces. We older ones have countenances of the grave New England type and far less mobile.

There had not been such a look as this on Dave’s face since that dreadful Thanksgiving day. My heart thrilled with the thought that I had had a little share, at least, in the hastening of his joy.

“I want Estelle!” was what he said. And besides being natural, since she was his very own, I said to myself that it was just. How did Mohammed explain his devotion to his old and ugly wife? “It was Chadidja who believed in me.”

But I walked the floor until Estelle called me to her studio at the top of the house where Dave had found her.

“Things come round so queerly in this world!” remarked Dave by way of preliminary to his news. “That fellow Carruthers—the one who gave me away to the college authorities—has turned up. It seems Estelle and—and Miss Yorke, know his sister and have met him at her studio. I suppose I am indebted to that fact for his interest in my affairs. At all events he shows a disposition to make amends. He doesn’t seem to be quite so much of a cad as I thought. And by a strange chance he seems to have some influence over an old Crœsus to whom I sent a design for a yacht. He had advertised for one. I happened to see the paper. Seeing what clumsy old-fashioned models we followed in building ships, had made me look into those things and I thought I knew just how a yacht ought to be built. I’ve had something to do with yachts on the river, you know, and I have been drawing that kind of thing all my life.

“It was a pretty good design—if I do say it.” He wagged his head with boyish satisfaction. “But of course Mr. Salter received a great many and I think Carruthers really did hurry him up on mine. Perhaps he may have shown him how good it was, too. Carruthers knows a thing or two about yachts, it seems. He is going to have one himself, now that he has come into a lot of money. I don’t believe he would have been such a sneak up there at the college if he hadn’t lost his temper thinking we were a lot of hypocrites.”

“I am so glad, Dave,” I said, “and yet I wish—I can’t help wishing that you had developed a capacity for business.” I did not mean to be a damper on his delight, but in a sudden reaction of feeling the trouble that was on its way seemed unendurable. “I can’t bear that the old shipyard and everything that was so dear to grandpa’s heart should be lost to us forever!”

Dave flushed in the sensitive way he had which seemed so incongruous with his giant-like physique.

“Perhaps—perhaps I shall be able to save the day,” he said.

But I will admit that I didn’t see how drawing successful designs for yachts was going to save the shipyard, although Estelle looked as if her faith were equal even to that strain.

Dave went to the city the next morning to see Mr. Salter and Ned Carruthers. He spoke of his whilom foe as if he had quite forgiven him; indeed if there had been no attempt to make amends Dave was incapable of cherishing resentment. Without any question of amiability or a Christian spirit, which I think the dear boy really had, he was easy as we of the Partridge nose were not—though one should “bray us in a mortar,” for it we could not help being hard.

He told Cyrus his business and confided to me, afterward, with real feeling, how kind and sympathetic Cyrus had been.

“Cyrus is no end of a good fellow when you really get at him,” he said. “He tried not to let me see that he didn’t think much of drawing, anyway.”

“Cyrus knows that life is not for play or for doing just what one wants to,” I said sharply.

Ah, well! it was not long before I repented me of that disagreeable speech.

Dave gave me a queer, quizzical look but said not a word.

Rob was very ill again after Dave had gone; his anxiety lest his father should discover Dave’s sacrifice was renewed and they had not yet been able to discover where the old horse, Lucifer, had been taken when Alf Reeder, who had been hired to board and care for it, had moved away from his stock farm. And Rob seemed never to have these two anxieties out of his mind. I wondered that they should have trusted the men from whom they had bought the old horse and who had cruelly tried to race him, to take care of him, but it seemed that the man had laid all the blame upon the horse’s trainer, declaring that he was unaware of the horse’s condition and promising to use the greatest care and skill to restore him to health and strength. And after all, as Octavia said, Dave and Rob were only boys—only Palmyra boys, at that, who could not be expected to know anything of the world.

Dave had gone off about his own business while they were still uncertain as to the horse’s whereabouts, Alf Reeder having left letters of inquiry unanswered. Rob thought it was altogether selfish of Dave to do this. He felt himself to be helpless and deserted and his nervous suffering increased his illness.

His nurse was worn out and Loveday, famously good in sickness, went often to her assistance.

“There’s more than Master Rob that needs nursing over there,” said Loveday. “In all my born days I never see Mr. Horace Pa’tridge, nor no other one of the Pa’tridges, so broke down.”

I met Uncle Horace in the road and he went by me without speaking and with bowed head.

I had the glove in my hand. I had seen him coming and had meant to return it to him, telling him just where I had found it. It was wicked and revengeful, but he had been perfectly sardonic about Dave. I felt almost certain that he knew the whole story now—although the others took it for granted that it was the business troubles that had so changed him.

I was brought to a better mind by the sight of him and hid the glove under my cape. When I reached home I asked Loveday if the tramp to whom she had given coffee on the day of our return from the city was Uncle Horace.

“Well, now, seein’ you’re so sharp, Miss Bathsheba, mebbe I might as well own up that it was,” said Loveday. “He looked so white and ’peared so kind of queer that I was scared and I felt as if ’twas best to say nothin’ about it.”

I told Loveday, then, all that had happened that day and how all Dave’s disgrace had been borne for Rob’s sake.

Loveday rocked furiously in the kitchen rocking-chair, saying only “suz-a-day! suz-a-day!” at intervals.

“I got an inklin’ of it, Miss Bathsheba,” she exclaimed when I had finished. “Long in the winter I got an inklin’ of it. Such doin’s as they accused our boy of I knew wa’n’t in him. Land! you can’t take care of a young man from the day he comes into the world without knowin’ whether there’s any mean kind of wickedness in him or not!

“When I come acrost that photograph, a-sweepin’ out Hiram’s wagon, one day, so’st’ everything shouldn’t get spiled with dust, I knew the minute I clapped my eyes on to it that ’twas old Lucifer that Mr. Pa’tridge sold jest because Master Rob was so foolish about him.

“The photograph was marked ‘Alf Reeder’s racer, Prince Charley,’ and I got an inklin’. I knew there wasn’t hardly anything in this livin’ world that our boy wouldn’t do for Master Rob, and I knew how terrible afraid Master Rob was of his father. And he never had a bit of patience, his father hadn’t, with his bein’ foolish over animals. He took it from his mother, Master Rob did, and Mr. Pa’tridge never could put up with it in her, for all he was so fond of her. Land! I remember when he carried off a little mite of a white kitten of hers and had it drowned jest because she thought so much of it! He wa’n’t never a cruel man to dumb creturs neither, Mr. Pa’tridge wa’n’t; he always treats his live-stock well; but he couldn’t put up with no foolishness over ’em. There’s no denyin’, Miss Bathsheba, but what he’s kind of a hard man, though he never took it from your sainted grandpa or your blessed grandma.

“And he’s knowin’ to it now! Mr. Pa’tridge is knowin’ to it! And I thinkin’ all the time that ’twas only the business troubles that had ketched a holt of him so!”

“The business troubles are bad enough, Loveday,” I said dejectedly.

“Bad enough, Miss Bathsheba,” repeated Loveday, “but nothin’, nothin’——” Loveday gave way to a burst of tears, the first I had ever seen her shed—“compared to the happiness of knowin’ that neither one of them blessed boys is startin’ in to be ruffin’s like them I see to that terrible place! Yes, forgin’ his father’s name was a terrible thing, but you and I know, Miss Bathsheba, that that blessed boy never realized what he was a-doin’, bein’ so crazy to get back his poor old horse. And Mr. Pa’tridge knows it, he knows it all, and comin’ jest now ’long with the business troubles I’m afraid he ain’t a-goin’ to stan’ it! It’s broke down his pride and pride always ’peared to be the strongest part of your Uncle Horace!

“And Master Rob is in a terrible bad way; he’s never been in so bad a way as he is now. He’s took it hard, Mr. Pa’tridge has, that he wa’n’t strong like other boys, but it ’pears to me it would kill him certain to lose him now.”

It did seem as if troubles were overwhelming us. Cyrus still played checkers with grandma and kept her in ignorance of the coming trouble, but he forgetfully played so well, now, as to beat her often, to her great humiliation.

Poor grandma! she wept, occasionally, childish tears, because Dave worked in the shipyard, but his disgrace remained only as a dim, dark cloud in the background of her memory. But we were afraid of the effect that it might have upon her to know that the shipyard was to be sold.

While things were in this state and Dave still lingered, unaccountably, in the city, sending no definite news of his reasons, Estelle had her modest little success which I fear we none of us thought much about. Her drawings were accepted and more were ordered for the same magazine. It was hard to see the child’s radiant delight overshadowed by the family troubles.

She said that the check seemed large because it made her a responsible member of society, but small because it would not save the shipyard!

But the order for more was the main thing, as I—a business woman!—assured her. Who could say what this opportunity might bring forth in time to come?

But there was no time—no time to wait! Estelle cried breathlessly. She seemed to feel more than any of us the loss of grandfather’s old business—more than any, except perhaps Cyrus.

“It is because I can’t help thinking that things might have been different—Cyrus might have followed the profession for which he was better fitted if there had not been Dave and me to be taken care of,—‘the aliens,’ as you used to——”

I stopped her mouth with my hand. “Aliens! did we ever?” I cried. “It is the best of us that we call you now—ask Octavia! And you said, yourself, that Cyrus was never so well fitted to be a minister as now!”

But grandpa’s shipyard—must it go?

Nothing would comfort Estelle. And she was out of patience with Dave, whom she pictured to herself—and even to me although she was so loyal—as being beguiled by pretty teas at Peggy Carruthers’ studio. She even asked him in one of her letters how Miss Bocock’s storks came on!—when he had never even mentioned Peggy Carruthers or her studio!

Loveday sang about her work the hymn which she always fell back upon in troublous times:

“The day is a-wastin’, wastin’, wastin’,

The day is a-wastin’, night draws nigh;

Lord in the twilight, Lord in the deep night,

Lord in the midnight be Thou nigh.”

I thought sometimes that the refrain, “The day is a-wasting, wasting, wasting,” would drive me mad. The day was wasting and would no one come to save grandpa’s shipyard?

Still Dave lingered and Uncle Horace had gone away suddenly; he had gone “up country,” Cyrus said; he did not know on what business; certainly not on any that was connected with the shipyard.

And then a very astonishing thing happened. Loveday had ceased her hymn-singing and had come as near to being cross as Loveday ever did. One day she summoned Octavia and me to a private interview in the kitchen. She locked all the doors and then stopped up the keyholes. Viola had, as we all knew, her weaknesses; but such precautions as these pointed to a revelation of unusual importance. As a general thing Loveday was serenely indifferent to Viola’s eaves-dropping.

“Loveday, Master Rob isn’t—isn’t worse?” I asked breathlessly—for she had just come from Uncle Horace’s.

“He ain’t no worse, nor yet he ain’t no better, nor he won’t be no better while things are as they be now. But that ain’t neither here nor there to what I’ve got to say,” said Loveday. She was in a state of great excitement and struggling hard for composure. I had seen the hand that filled the keyholes tremble; the ringlets dependent from her gray head were actually dancing.

My thoughts were a wild chaos of apprehension, which I dared not put into words. Had she heard that an accident had befallen Dave? Had she heard that grandma, who had gone to second-cousin Sarah Saunders’ to spend the day, had been smitten with paralysis? Had Uncle Horace become insane? Had some one stolen the contents of the blue yarn stocking which she kept between mattresses?—for Loveday would never trust her savings to a bank. Was she going to offer the contents of the blue stocking to aid in saving the shipyard?—that would be like Loveday, I thought, if she could possibly think that so small a sum would be of any avail.

Loveday sat down by the window and averted her face from us as she began to speak, a wholly unnatural thing for Loveday to do.

“Hiram’s a-comin’ home,” she said, and she imparted this altogether ordinary information in a voice that was strained and shaking. “He ain’t a-goin’ to have no tunin’ spell this spring. He’s a-goin’ to start right off agin with the photographin’ wagon.”

There was a pause in which Octavia and I looked at each other with, I am sure, the same fear in both our minds. Had the family troubles, to use Loveday’s own expression, “flew to her head”?

Why, otherwise, should she make this ado about Hiram Nute’s peregrinations, to which we had been so accustomed from childhood that we paid no more heed to them than to the periodical flights of the wild geese over our heads? Loveday turned her face toward us in a timid way, if such an adjective can possibly be applied to Loveday’s manner. Her eyes drooped and her color wavered—the apple-red which seemed sometimes to have settled upon her high cheek-bones.

“’Pears as if ’twould kind of come handy for me to go with him,” she said.

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