CHAPTER XII

Erica had never been one for half measures. With the surprising revelation of Milly’s plucky and pathetic attempt to be at least partially self-supporting, her former opinion of the girl had been suddenly and dramatically revised, and she was honest enough to want to make a frank apology. Being Erica, none but a vehement, self-accusatory one seemed adequate, and when she burst out impulsively with that “I’m just about _sick_ at myself,” she meant every word of it. Milly’s black eyes glowed at the friendly warmth of the speech, but she shook her head shyly at its extravagance.

“I guess I was twice as horrid as you were, if it comes to that, Erica,” she admitted. “Maybe none of you can quite understand how I feel about—about being dependent on anyone not my own mother or father, even when they make me welcome as generously as Cousin Callie did. Mother was the same way, too—I guess she gave me my love of independence. After my father died—Barbee was only a wee baby then—mother wouldn’t accept help from anyone, except a little bit from her brother—the one who brought Barbee and me here last Christmas, you know. She took in sewing; first for neighbors and friends, and later for quite a number of outside customers. That’s how I learned to sew. She taught me to help her, as I grew older, but she never would let it interfere with my going to school. In the afternoons and evenings, though, we sat and worked together—” Milly turned her head away abruptly, but not before Erica had seen the glitter of tears on her long lashes.

Mrs. Folger’s eyes were wet, too, as she gazed down at the gold piece Milly had pressed into her hand.

“Dear child, I understand and honor the feeling that prompted you,” she said, softly. “However, this is too much for you to give me. If you insist on paying something—if you will really feel happier that way—let us divide this. Half for me, and half for you to put away. If you can make some extra money now and then, and feel you want to do it, I have nothing to say against it. But part of all you earn must be saved for the future. You may need money for something important one day, my dear.”

“Some day,” Milly flashed, eagerly, “I want to have a big, very select dressmaking establishment in Boston or—or maybe even _New_ _York_. With lots of girls under me, and fine ladies coming to me to have beautiful silks and velvets and satins made up. If you really won’t take all I can earn, Cousin Callie, I’ll put the rest away for that. Oh, it won’t be for years and _years_, of course,” she wound up, faltering a little in confusion at having so impulsively revealed her daring ambition. “But—well, wonderful things do happen if you stick at working and hoping,” she said, half defiantly. “And then I could take care of Barbee myself, and make a home for her.”

Eighty years ago, ten dollars had a purchasing power several times that of its present value, so it was no wonder that both Lis and Erica looked with respect at the glittering gold piece in Mrs. Folger’s hand. Particularly on Nantucket, where life was simple and wants few, did it represent a quite amazing achievement on the part of a fifteen-year-old girl.

“I don’t see how you ever thought of it, or stuck at it so patiently afterward,” Erica said in quite an awed voice.

Both Mrs. Folger and Lis laughed at that, for Erica’s clumsiness with her needle, and her rebellious dislike of all kinds of sewing and knitting, were a family joke—besides being a real trial to both her aunts.

“I’m afraid Erica will have to go lacking gold pieces and independence,” observed Mrs. Folger, sagely, “if her winning them depends on a needle and thimble.”

“I wish you’d let me teach you,” Milly offered. “I’m just sure I could make anybody love sewing. It’s—why, it’s such _fun_ to see the thing you’re working on grow under your fingers!”

But Erica, rather alarmed, shook her red curls hastily. “You never could, Milly, but thank you just the same,” she refused. “It always seems such a wicked waste of time to me,” she confessed, “to sit indoors and stick a silly little piece of steel in and out of cloth, when you could be outdoors, walking over the commons, and along the beach. There’s so much that’s interesting to keep watching wherever you go, outdoors. You know, I really _was_ meant to be a boy, Aunt Callie. There was some dreadful mistake made, somehow, about me.”

She joined, rather ruefully, in the laugh that went up, but continued to nod her head in emphatic insistence.

Yet the fact that Milly had thought far enough ahead to plan an independent future, improbable though its early realization might be, made a deep impression on Erica. She was far from being in sympathy with that particular ambition itself—”fancy planning to _sew on dresses_ all the rest of your born days, and _liking_ it!” she gasped in frank dismay to Lister. But she was slightly depressed that it had never occurred to her, also, to think of plans, of any kind, regarding that vague, far-off time when she herself should be “grown up.”

She supposed, when she considered the subject, that she expected things to go on indefinitely, more or less as they did now. Of course she was hoping desperately, since Lis had brought back the jade-and-silver key, that her father would consent to take her to China on one of his voyages, at a not-too-distant date. But that, she realized now in a new discouragement of spirit, was not a real plan for the future, in the sense that Milly’s was.

If she had been a boy, there’d have been no question at all. She would have followed the sea, as her father, and _his_ father, and any number of uncles and great-uncles had done. But when you were only a stay-at-home girl, who, unfortunately, hated the quiet, stay-at-home duties that were the only ones open to you—

She sighed a deep, gusty little sigh, and decided that she would put the further consideration of the future off for a day when the early June sunshine was not so bright and beckoning, and the crisp sea wind did not sing so alluring an invitation beachward.

Milly was up in the attic, sewing as usual, and keeping an eye on Barbee and her dolls, but Lis was always ready for a beach walk.

So presently the two set out together along Orange Street to Main, and turned down the latter to the harbor.

It was a warm late-afternoon toward the end of the first week in June. The water was a still green, with patches of deep purple farther out, and the Monomoy shore across the harbor was green also, with purple shadow-patches sloping up to a pale blue sky line.

“I always think I like October best,” Erica murmured, thoughtfully, staring raptly at the panorama of color spread out before her, “but sometimes June—— Mercy me, Lis! _Look out there!_”

The boy turned sharply at the change in her tone, his eyes following her pointing finger seaward. And there, less than an eighth of a mile offshore, lay a great sailing-ship at anchor, her white canvas wings just being furled in a mighty bustle of activity on her decks that could be made out plainly by the excited boy and girl.

“Lis, it’s a tea clipper!” Erica gasped, breathlessly. “What’s she doing out there? They never put in here, that I’ve heard tell of.”

“Nor me,” Lis returned, ungrammatical in his own astonishment. “She’s lying out there, of course, ‘cause she can’t cross the bar at this tide. But why she’s here at all— Say, Rick”—he caught at her arm with suddenly tense fingers—”now I’ve got a real look at her—I was so excited I didn’t before—she’s—she’s not just _a_ tea clipper. That’s the _Sea Gull_, as sure as we’re standing here!”

Erica uttered a little cry. “Lis—why—why, of course she was due in Salem some time ago, and we’ve all been wondering why father didn’t come. But—you actually think that’s _father’s ship_ come to Nantucket?”

“I know it is,” Lis declared, confidently. “Remember, Uncle Eric took Tom and me to Salem two years ago and we stayed on board three days while she lay in port. That was the time you had chicken pox, and were quarantined.” He grinned reminiscently at the memory of her frantic rebellion over being done out of that trip.

But Erica’s attention was not to be diverted by even such tragic memories, from the thrilling present.

“Now they’re lowering a boat away,” she whispered. “In just a little minute we’ll know. Lis, don’t let’s stand here like two ninnies. They’ll land over at this nearest wharf. Hurry, so we can be out at the end, waiting to meet father. For if that’s truly the _Sea Gull_ he’ll come ashore in the first boat.”

“Sure he will,” Lis conceded, breaking into a jog-trot at Erica’s flying heels. “But there’s no need of racing and getting all het up,” he added in remonstrance as he saw her quicken her pace. “We’ll be at the wharf long before that boat can get there.”

“All right, walk if you want to, slow-poke,” Erica flung over one slim, brown-plaid shoulder. “I’m going to be there waving as soon as father’s near enough to see. Likely he’s got his glasses with him, so he’ll recognize me while they’re still away out. ‘By, tortoise!”

Dignity forbade Lis to hurry at all after that final taunt, so he slowed his steps to a leisurely walk, suppressing a grin, however, at the girl’s sauciness. Lis never lost his temper at being teased, as Tommy sometimes did.

When he arrived, cool and unruffled, at the far end of the wharf, a few minutes later, the clipper’s boat was well in toward shore, and Erica, balanced precariously on a pile of lumber at the wharf’s side, was waving both arms like the big windmill on the hill behind the little gray town at her back.

“It is father,” she shouted to Lis in triumph. “Climb up here so he can see you, too!”

Five minutes later a tall, blue-coated figure with a shock of unruly red hair like Erica’s own came up the ladder-like steps of the wharf, and Erica had hurled herself into a pair of strong, welcoming arms that lifted her high off her tiptoes in a breath-taking sweep.

“Fa-ather!” she said in a voice that was half a sob. “Oh, what a _glorious_ surprise! And is that honestly the _Sea Gull_ out there? And did you—”

“Belay there, young woman, and let us both get our breath back,” Captain Eric chuckled, his sea-blue eyes—of which his daughter’s were an unmistakable copy, twinkle and all—beaming from the girl to his nephew. “Lis, my boy, I’m glad to see you. I’ve been hearing quite a lot about some Chinese adventures of yours.”

“Yes, sir,” Lis twinkled back. “But they turned out all right, as you see. I’m afraid I gave the family a bit of a scare, though.”

Instead of setting Erica down on her feet, her father turned with a quick move, and lifted her down the ladder-steps into the arms of a burly, middle-aged sailor standing in the little boat below.

“Come along, Lis,” he added, casually, as though this had been all part of a long-prepared plan. “I’ve got a surprise for the two of you on board that ship of mine out there. I had sort of a notion you’d both see her come in, and be down here, waiting.”

It did not take Lis long to accept the invitation, and scrambling down the steps in his uncle’s wake, he found a seat in the stern beside Erica. The boat was pushed off by one of the sailors, heading out toward the channel; and the even dip and pull of the dripping oar-blades began rhythmically.

But though Erica’s tongue wagged faster than the oars could move, as she begged her father excitedly for at least a hint regarding the kind of surprise that awaited them, not a word would the smiling captain say on the subject. Instead he demanded news of the family, and expressed much surprise at hearing of the unexpected plan which had brought both Folger households under the same roof. However, he agreed that it was an excellent arrangement, under the existing circumstances; though he added, rather mysteriously, that he had an idea he could suggest something that might be even a better rest for Aunt Charity.

However, before Erica could ask what he meant by that, they had come alongside the _Sea Gull_, and she forgot everything else in the thrill of climbing aboard.

[Illustration: “BELAY THERE, YOUNG WOMAN, AND LET US BOTH GET OUR BREATH BACK”]

“To think I was right here fifteen years ago, and can’t remember it,” she said, wistfully, when she stood on the spick-and-span deck, looking about her with eager eyes. “To think I actually sailed all the way from China in her!”

Several of the crew were on deck, grinning in respectful curiosity at the captain’s daughter, and Erica, her hand proudly through her father’s arm, smiled back at them in her friendliest fashion.

At the head of the companion stairs leading down to the saloon she stopped a moment, wrinkling her nose inquiringly.

“Father—do all tea ships smell of Chinese incense?” she asked. “Smell it, Lis! It’s as strong as if the _Sea Gull_ had a hold full of joss sticks instead of tea.”

“Oh, don’t stand there blocking the gangway, Rick,” Lis said, good-naturedly. “Go on down.”

There was no doubt that the smell of incense grew stronger as they hurried down the steps. But before she reached the bottom the girl stopped short once more, staring about her with eyes whose pupils seemed to dilate visibly in the dimness.

Swiftly she stooped and felt the step on which she stood. It _was_. Incredible, unheard-of on even the most luxurious clipper, the companion stairs were covered with a carpet of such long and velvety pile that the feet sank into its silken depths as softly as if they had been treading on the ancient Iceland moss that grows on the Nantucket commons. And in the half-light, the warmth and brilliance of the carpet’s coloring glowed like sunset shining through old, stained-glass windows in church.

Erica’s startled gaze went to her father’s amused face, and then was instinctively drawn higher still, to the source of the dim half-light that illuminated the companionway. She saw that this came from a lantern hanging on a heavy, dull-green cord from some unseen hook above—a Chinese lantern of translucent, figured silk that repeated the old, stained-glass coloring of the carpet underfoot, and cast strange, swaying shadows on the stairs, and on her father’s and Lister’s faces, as it moved a little, regularly, back and forth with the almost imperceptible motion of the ship lifting to some incoming swell.

Slowly Erica straightened up, and—her eyes still on the lantern overhead—took an impetuous step backward. Either she had completely forgotten the fact that she was on a stairway, or she turned her ankle slightly, just enough to throw her off her balance. Both Captain Eric and Lis reached for her with exclamations of warning at the same moment, and both missed her by an infinitesimal fraction of an inch.

Erica, to her subsequent and intense mortification at such a clumsy marring of a dramatic moment, rolled headlong, bumpity-_bump_, down the softly carpeted steps, and landed in a small undignified heap at the bottom, striking the back of her head smartly on something that was neither velvety nor soft, but wooden and sharp-cornered. There was a flashing of myriads of colored stars before her eyes, and a violent ringing of bells in her ears for a brief second, before both were blotted out in a dizzy wave of blackness that rolled over her.