CHAPTER III

Tommy was carried home from the wharf, a decidedly white-faced and subdued Tommy, and laid on the big four-poster in the room Lis and he shared at the back of the house, while his mother was summoned from Miss Charity’s party and the doctor routed out of a peaceful, before-bedtime nap in his study farther up Orange Street.

Captain Bartlet escorted Mrs. Folger across the garden, and went upstairs with her to see his cabin boy. He was full of a bluff, kindly sympathy, and sat on the edge of the bed, letting poor Tommy grip hard at his big, muscular arm, while Dr. Spencer set the broken leg.

The first thing Tommy said, when that operation was over and he was lying back on the stiff white bolster, with his right leg swollen to an unrecognizable size by splints and bandages, was: “I guess this discharges me from sea duty, sir—for this voyage, anyhow. Will you take Lis in my place, please? He was just as anxious to ship as I was, you know.”

The captain looked keenly at the boy, and then at Lis, who had flushed suddenly scarlet.

“Want to take thy brother’s place, son?” he asked the latter. “I’m sorry about Tom’s accident, but I do need a cabin boy.” He added, smiling, “And, after all, I don’t know as I could tell thee from him in any case, so I won’t realize there’s been an exchange.”

Lis gulped, stared rather piteously at Tommy, and then at his mother. His heart had leaped at the unlooked-for opportunity that had come to him, but he plainly hated to accept it at the price of Tommy’s disappointment.

“You’ll be able to ship with Uncle Eric, Tom, when the _Sea Gull_ comes in,” he suggested.

But Tommy shook his fair head decidedly. “Too far off. We don’t know just when the _Sea Gull_ will return. No, this is your chance, Lis; better take it. And we can’t disappoint Captain Bartlet, either. He needs a boy, and this won’t be giving him fair notice to find another. He’ll go, sir,” he told the captain. “And he’s a lot steadier than I am, sir, so you’re getting a better man.”

“Tommy is right—you had better go, dear,” Mrs. Folger said, unexpectedly. “I know you have wanted to, all the time, and I was pleased by the way you kept your disappointment to yourself and did not spoil your brother’s pleasure by grumbling.”

So Captain Bartlet signed on another cabin boy, and arrangements were made for Lis to join the ship in Boston, the night before her sailing. He was to leave Nantucket on a fishing-boat belonging to a neighbor of theirs, another Captain Joy—brother to the _Narwhal’s_ master—which was bound for Boston at the end of the week, with a cargo of fish for the city markets. Captain Bartlet himself, was going on the morrow, but Lis would need a few days to get his sea-going outfit together, before starting out in his new life.

The next four days before his departure were busy ones in the two Folger households. Miss Charity brought her sewing basket over to her sister-in-law’s, and helped in the work of altering such things as had been already purchased for Tommy, to Lister’s use. Though the two boys were so alike that strangers were constantly taking one for the other, Tommy was slightly broader in the shoulders than his twin—just enough difference to make certain takings-in necessary in fitting the clothes of one to the other.

Erica would have been pressed into service also, but her clumsiness with her needle was too well known to both aunts to make her help desirable. As Miss Charity phrased it in exasperation, she only “made double work when she put on a thimble. It took one person to rip out her stitches, and a second to replace them properly.”

Miss Charity had labored long and hard with this hoydenish young niece who was so mortifyingly unlike the other girls of her age and community. She even felt dimly that in some way it reflected unfavorably upon herself, that she could not, no matter how diligently she tried, teach her charge to be a “little lady” like the daughters of her island neighbors.

But in another way Erica managed to be of very real help, by constituting herself nurse and general entertainer for Tommy, and thus setting his mother free for more immediate duties. Tommy was finding it pretty hard to lie there in bed, day after day, unable to move his trussed-up leg or even to turn over without assistance. He had never been fond of reading, and now books seemed a rather contemptible substitute to offer an energetic, lively boy, for the glorious adventure of that lost voyage to China, in the _Spray_. Still, he graciously allowed Erica to read aloud to him on occasions, when her inventive faculty at devising other amusements ran temporarily dry. But the books of that period intended for boys, which could be found in either of the Folger houses, were such very mild, unexciting narratives, that the readings usually ended in both Erica’s and Tommy’s yawning desperately together and flinging the disappointing volume aside.

The only subjects that really interested the latter at this period dealt with nautical matters, and when Erica realized this she ransacked the libraries of all Miss Charity’s friends, to find old ships’ logs and journals of exploration which she could borrow. As Nantucketers have always been great travelers, almost every house in town proved to have some tale or other to offer, often containing the adventures of a seafaring ancestor, and the quaint language they were told in sent the young Folgers into peals of hilarious laughter.

Lis joined these reading sessions whenever he could, but his mother and aunt kept him busy undergoing tedious fittings, aiding them in checking and rechecking lists of his various needs for the voyage, and performing the usual household duties such as wood-chopping, fire-making, and the carrying of heavy pails, which formerly Tommy and he had divided between them. Mrs. Folger had arranged with young Martin Joy, two doors away, to do these chores until Tommy’s broken bones had mended, but he was not to enter on his duties until Lis had departed.

Instinctively, Erica tried to keep herself so busy that she should have no time left for remembering the change that was to break up the familiar threefold companionship shortly. But hard as it was on her, she guessed that it was going to be harder still for Tommy. The twins had never been separated for more than a few hours at a time, and Lis had always been the steady, self-reliant one on whom both Tommy and Erica herself unconsciously leaned. The latter two were more alike, bubbling over with high spirits, impetuous, apt to act on the moment’s enthusiasm, and they had come to feel it was Lister’s natural province to extricate them from the scrapes their own heedlessness led them into, and to provide a sort of moral balance wheel generally.

It was going to be queer, Erica reflected, sadly, going on with the old, everyday life, in the old, everyday surroundings, with no Lis. In fact, it was going to be worse than queer—it was going to be a pretty heart-breaking business.

The night before Lister’s sailing, Tommy took the jade seal ring from where it still hung about his own neck on the knotted Chinese cord and put it around his brother’s. “Be sure you look old Sun Li up for Rick and me,” he said. “Then remember every last thing about him—who he is, where he lives (better see the inside of his house if you can, so you’ll be able to describe it), and tell us all about it when the _Spray_ comes home.”

Erica and both her aunts went down to the wharf the next afternoon, and saw Lis aboard Captain Joy’s sloop, which was to take him to Boston. They all kissed him good-by, and Aunt Callie cried a little because, just at the end, she simply couldn’t help it, and Lis’s own voice was more than a bit husky in the final exchange of last words, and promises to write if there should be a chance to send a letter back by another ship.

His mother and Miss Charity stayed on the wharf, continuing to wave their handkerchiefs until the sloop was so far out that she looked like a toy ship on the smooth, blue water. But Erica slipped away from them as soon as she was sure Lis could not see them any longer, and walked very fast up the beach to a point where she would be out of sight of houses and people, and there she sat herself disconsolately down on the warm, yellow sand, and told herself she _wasn’t_ going to cry, not for anything in the world—and promptly contradicted her brave assertion by doing it.

However, being Erica, the tears didn’t last long, and at the end of the little fit of crying she sat up and wiped them away briskly, feeling better for the outburst, yet rather ashamed of herself, too.

“Now I’ll go back to Tommy,” she said aloud, addressing an inquisitive tern which had hovered a second or two overhead, on quickly-beating slim white wings, cocking its bright eyes down at this strange human in a brown plaid dress who sat huddled on the sand, and made funny, choking sounds that, even to a tern’s ears seemed to hold a note of distress. “Tommy’ll be feeling pretty bad, too,” Erica continued to address the tern, and then, as it darted away with a farewell flirt of its wings, she added with a little burst of admiration: “Oh, you beautiful, beautiful thing! If I can’t be a boy and go to sea, the next choice would be a tern or a great gray gull, so I could swoop about over the water all day long, fishing and enjoying myself, just as you do.”

She walked home slowly, close to the water’s edge, where the sand was wet and firm. There was usually a surf on the island’s south shore, but here on the north beach there were scarcely ever more than ripples coming in, and on that day the clear green water beat in softly against the dark sand like the pattering of fairy hand-clapping. Looking down into it, Erica could make out scores of small hermit crabs moving clumsily about in search of their midday dinners, dragging their big shell houses on their backs; and the more agile spider crabs crawling along the bottom among them, likewise intent on the serious question of food.

Erica loved all the quaint little sea creatures she had come to know on her beach walks, as well as the terns and the big gray herring gulls which arrived about this time each year, after the smaller, laughing-gulls of the summer had migrated farther south. The autumn was a wonderful season for seeing strange birds, that stopped a day or two on Nantucket to break their long, migratory flights to warmer climes.

The wild ducks had been passing over the island for more than ten days, now, and sometimes, in their tramps over the sweet-scented commons, the twins and Erica would come upon a small, jewel-like pond set down in a rosy sedge of reeds, and on its blue surface there would be stragglers from one of the big flocks, swimming up and down placidly, and perhaps wondering, in whatever thoughts a duck knows, whether this pleasant, fertile island might not be as happy hunting-grounds as any they would be likely to find farther south.

A little later, the long V-shaped wedges of the wild geese’s flight would be seen, usually late at night or very early in the morning, high up against the blue Nantucket sky. Erica, when she saw them, always waved to them enviously, and wished she were a wild goose, too—just as she often wished she were a boy, or a gull, or anything that was untrammeled and free, and the opposite of what proper little girls of her day and generation were supposed to be.

It was almost dark when she reached home and slipped through the side garden to Tommy’s house and up the broad, white-painted front stairs. Aunt Callie called to her, in a rather woe-begone voice, and bade her go in and talk to her cousin, who had had a lonely day and had been suffering a good deal, besides, with his leg.

The door to the back room which was Lis’s and Tommy’s stood ajar, but the lamp inside had not been lighted yet. Standing on the sill, Erica spoke Tommy’s name, but softly, in case he were asleep.

“Come in,” a muffled voice answered her, not too graciously.

Erica went in, and crossed the dim room to the big mahogany four-poster. Tommy had slid down uncomfortably in bed, the pillows bunched askew under his yellow head, which looked more wildly disheveled and moplike than usual. The covers were drawn up so that they half covered his face, and even in the dusk Erica could see that his cheeks were hot and flushed and that his forehead was puckered with a forlorn, childlike scowl of utter misery.

“Here, let me plump your pillows up nice and comfy,” she said, capably, and proceeded to lift his head with one strong, gentle arm and turn the hot and crumpled pillows with her free hand. For Erica had at least one womanly accomplishment—she was a good nurse in a sick-room, and was never more contented than when one of her family or neighbors borrowed her services.

Tommy neither demurred nor accepted her help, but as she turned the top pillow Erica’s fingers encountered a big, round wet spot just where the boy’s flushed face had been pressed when she entered. She made no comment, but she was suddenly conscious of that uncomfortable lump in her own throat once more. Tommy never knew she had discovered that he had been shedding a few bitter tears alone in the dark. It was probably partly homesickness for his twin, rebellion against lying there like a log, helpless and in pain, and a sudden break-down of the barriers he had built so pluckily about his disappointment.

Remembering her own crying-spell down on the beach that afternoon, Erica shrewdly suspected that Tommy would feel the better for giving way—as long as he never discovered that anyone knew of it. She finished beating his pillows, pulled up more smoothly the soft, hand-woven woolen blankets on the bed, and, going over to the table, lighted the lamp.

Aunt Callie appeared in the doorway just as she finished the last of her tasks. Mrs. Folger’s thin face was paler than usual, and her eyes, blinking a little in the yellow lamplight, had pink rims about them as if she too, had been crying; but her lips were smiling.

“I told Aunt Charity that I meant to keep you for supper, Erica,” she observed. “Tommy and I need you tonight. And I thought,” she went on, still determinedly cheerful, “that if you’d help me, my dear, we might all have our suppers up here on this table by Tommy’s bed. I’ve got fresh gingerbread, and I’m going to fry a chicken. I had Mart Joy kill one of the young roosters this morning. Will you children have chocolate to drink, instead of milk? It’s no trouble at all to make a pot.”

At fifteen the prospect of a good supper has a magically cheering effect. Both the girl’s and boy’s faces brightened perceptibly.

“Chocolate, please, ma’am,” Tommy elected.