Part 2

The blue china plates were heaped with pleasant burdens of cold chicken, strawberries, preserves, cakes, and hot rolls. A great glass pitcher of milk and a plate of butter from the Captain’s farm stood in the middle of the table. The room was hung with family portraits and conspicuous among them Copley’s portrait of Rev. James Cheever, in a black gown and white bands, surprisingly good in texture; his waxen but well-shaped hands holding the election sermon preached once by him before the Massachusetts legislature, a discourse which had not been filled with loyalty to King George. Two female Woodbury ancestors simpered in faded pastel on either side of the reverend gentleman, and the Captain himself, in continental uniform, stood amid the rage and turmoil of battle, defying the scarlet-coated British. The good old gentleman, as he sat at his supper-table, looked almost as stern as his warlike picture; for the obstinacy of his son in struggling against the plans which had been made for him, sadly troubled the old man.

“Elizabeth,” he said, breaking for the first time the silence which had followed the grace before meat, “I have just told the boy that he must go to college next month.”

Miss Elizabeth gave a severe sniff, and looked at the portrait of the Puritan divine, as if to show her idea of the gulf which lay between him and his degenerate descendant.

“I hope that it will be all for the best, Brother John; that is all I have to say about it,” she replied, after her withering glance at the picture. “There is little of the saint about _that_ boy!”

“He is a fine, high-spirited fellow, without a mean streak in him,” replied her brother, rather hotly. “A boy must be a boy, after all.”

Miss Elizabeth shook her head sadly, as if to express a doubt as to whether boys ought to be boys after all, when the culprit under discussion slouched into the room with red eyes, and hair which a hasty application of brush and comb had made smooth only on the surface, the locks below still being in delightful confusion.

He took his seat at the table, after having inclined his head slightly towards his father and aunt, and proceeded to attack his supper with an appetite undiminished by the thought that he was not in the good books of the rest of the family.

Finally, not liking the gloomy silence which hung over the table, he looked up from his plate and said:

“A schooner came in to-day from Havana. I saw her lying at anchor in the harbor when I came in from sailing. She doesn’t belong here.”

“How did you find out she sailed from Havana?” asked the Captain.

“I hailed her as I sailed by,” replied James. “There was a tall man leaning over the starboard rail, and he told me that she was the _Tempest_ from Havana, laden with sugar. There was a monkey running up the rigging, a funny fellow with no tail, and a yellow parrot in a cage swinging from the main-boom. What do you suppose the man asked me? Whether Captain John Woodbury was alive, and if he still lived in Oldbury.”

“What kind of a looking man was he?” exclaimed the Captain.

“Oh, he was about six feet tall, I should say. He was smooth shaven and had a hooked nose. He stuttered a good deal, and waved his arm in the air when he stuck at a word as if he was trying to pull it out.”

The Captain and his sister looked at each other for a moment. “Did he say anything more?”

“No, sir; but the parrot cried out something in Spanish, and he covered up the cage with a sail cover and swore at the bird. I sailed up to the wharf, and he came to the port side of the schooner and watched me as I picked up the moorings. Do you know who he is from my description, father?”

“I knew a man once who had the trick of stuttering and raising his arm as you describe,” answered the Captain, in a sad voice, as if an unpleasant remembrance had been recalled to his mind. “But he has been dead these many years.”

Miss Elizabeth seemed much interested in the conversation of the last few minutes, and kept turning her eyes towards the portrait of the Rev. James Cheever.

At this moment there was a sharp triple knock at the front door, a knock which echoed through the big hall and made the three people at the supper-table start in their chairs. The maid-servant ran to open the door, the Captain and James involuntarily following her. As they stood in the hall room James heard the stuttering voice which had spoken to him from the schooner and saw the arm waving against the glowing sunset light which slanted in through the front door.

The Captain walked forward mechanically, and the stranger, brushing past the girl, who shrank back, approached him and held out his hand.

“John, you don’t k-now m-me?” he stammered, as the Captain looked at him with dazed face.

“By George! Thomas Cheever! I heard of your death at La Guayra ten years ago.”

“And you were g-glad to hear it, I suppose,” answered the stranger, rather grimly; then, pointing to James, he asked, “Is this your boy? Why, he is the very chap I saw out sailing in the harbor this afternoon.”

“It’s your uncle, Thomas Cheever,” said the Captain in a low voice.

“Why, Uncle Tom is dead,” said James, sidling away from the stranger, not knowing what to make of the apparition.

The strange man deposited a valise on the floor, and the Captain motioned him towards the dining-room, the three maintaining a strange constrained silence.

The Captain did not seem to fully grasp the whole bearings of this resurrection. Thomas Cheever had disappeared from Oldbury at the end of the last century, leaving behind him a name stained with low dissipation and with suspicions of worse things. He had written to his father but once from the West India Islands, where the vessel upon which he had embarked had touched. This letter had been a demand for money, without a word of affection for the broken-down old parson. There was a long interval during which nothing had been heard of him, and finally the news came from a merchant at La Guayra that Cheever had been one of the crew of a vessel, more than suspected of piracy, and that he had met his death from a knife-stab in a street fight. His father had never mentioned his name after his disgraceful actions, and his tender-hearted sister, while she shed a few tears for the brother, who had been a pretty boy once, could not but feel relieved that the scapegrace should trouble the family no more.

In the dining-room Miss Elizabeth sat pale and trembling. She had, with a woman’s instinctive perception, felt that Tom Cheever had come back to life and mischief again, as soon as James had described the stutter and the waving arm. As the three came into the dining-room, lighted with candles dimly twinkling in the twilight, she looked sharply and sternly at the returned prodigal. He seemed a little backward in coming forward, and he shuffled his feet uneasily; for in all these years he had not forgotten the tang of Miss Woodbury’s tongue.

“Indeed, Thomas Cheever!” said that organ in a clear, shrill treble, “having died, much to every one’s satisfaction, it is a great pity that you could not stay dead.”

Cheever smiled, a half-humorous, half-cunning smile, though his eyes turned a deeper green, and shot a gleam of hatred at the old lady.

“Well, Miss Woodbury, in waking to a new life, it is agreeable to be welcomed by an angel!”

“I do not wish any impertinence, Thomas Cheever,” replied the frank spinster, returning his malevolent gleam with a scornful look, the value of which her spectacles enhanced. “For twelve years you let your family believe you dead. What have you been doing all this time? Nothing good, I’ll warrant.”

The Captain waved his hand as if to enjoin silence upon his sister, and motioned Cheever to draw up a chair to the table. The latter did as he was bid, and helping himself in sailor-fashion from the dishes before him, proceeded to eat his supper. The others watched him intently, with somewhat of the feeling that one would have in entertaining a burglar, who had ill-concealed designs upon the spoons.

His rough black hair was short-cropped and tinged with gray; his skin bronzed and weather-beaten; the lines on his face were deeply drawn; his green eyes flitted from side to side and did not meet the gaze of his inspectors; his thin and long frame was clad in a rough blue suit of nautical cut. “Vagabond” was written on every feature of the man. James watched him with open eyes, as he cut off junks of bread with his knife and covered them with butter before eating them. The Captain, at the head of the table, twisted the fob of his watch around, and glanced uneasily at his brother-in-law, while Miss Woodbury, in her stony glare, seemed to protest against the very existence of any person so shameless and wicked.

The hungry man’s first keen appetite was soon appeased by his rapid method of shovelling his food into his mouth, and dropping his knife and fork for a moment, he looked uneasily at the others.

“I wasn’t killed in that fight, you see--I was attacked in the dark, along by the wharves as I was going to my ship, and stabbed in the back. I grappled with the fellow, a cursed ‘Yellow-belly’--I beg your pardon, Miss Woodbury, that’s what they call them.”

The Captain still seemed dazed at the events of the evening, and sat listening to his relation’s stammering speech without changing expression. James was fascinated with the curious gestures of the waving hand, which seemed to pull out the obstinate words over which the speaker stuck, as if they were corks in a bottle. At this juncture the muscles of Cheever’s neck stood out in the physical strain of the attempts to master the obstinate consonants. His mouth gaped open, the corners curving to form the word, which finally came out with a pop as if it had been a material thing sticking in his throat.

“I took his knife away and cut his throat with it, and we were found in the morning lying in a pool of blood. Mine was an awful wound; my ship sailed away, leaving me for dying in the prison hospital. I recovered, though God knows how I did so in that fearful place. The man who attacked me had influential relations in Venezuela, and they swore that I had tried to rob him, and that he had stabbed me in self-defence. I was kept in the prison there for five years, without a trial. You’ve seen a Spanish-American prison, Captain Woodbury, haven’t you?” The vagabond’s face was contorted with disgust as he spoke, and the Captain nodded assent to his question.

“Five years in that hell, with the vilest of mankind, with no covering but an old blanket, fed with stuff poked through the bars at me as if I were a wild beast. It was an awful time.” He shuddered as he spoke, and looked around the group for sympathy.

“Think of it,” he kept on, “five years in such a place as that; I think it was punishment enough for all the evil I have ever done. I was finally set free, through the aid of an American sea-captain, with whom I managed to communicate. He gave me a berth on his ship, and I went to Liverpool with him. I didn’t write home. I knew they thought me dead, and, as Miss Woodbury has kindly suggested, I thought I’d better stay dead. Since then I have knocked about the world on ships; the Lord knows where I haven’t been, and am now mate on the Baltimore schooner, _Tempest_, at anchor in this harbor. When I found myself at Oldbury, I came to life again. It is simple enough. When did he die?” he suddenly asked, nodding his head at his father’s portrait.

“In January, 1806,” answered the Captain, solemnly.

“And my sister, your wife?”

“She died seven years before her father.”

“Did he take it hard, when I ran away?”

“He never mentioned your name from that day to the day of his death,” answered Miss Woodbury in sharp metallic tones.

“Well, I wasn’t exactly a model son,” replied Cheever, after a moment’s silence, during which he stuck his knife rather savagely into a piece of bread. “And Sally Fairbanks, is she alive?” Something of a blush came over the man’s face as he asked the question.

“She married Joshua Pickering, who died and left her a widow,” answered Miss Woodbury--as if Joshua could have died and left her in any other status.

“So Sally married, did she?” Cheever inquired, “and she didn’t care when she heard of my death either, I suppose; she would be about as glad to see me as you folks are, if I should go to see her. Have they stopped talking about me in town?”

“Years ago; your tombstone is in the burying-ground on the hill, set there by your father,” answered the spinster. “I guess, if you don’t want to find yourself in a fix, you’d better not--”

“James,” said the Captain, suddenly remembering that the boy was listening with all his ears, “leave the room.”

Reluctantly, from the presence of this great mystery, the boy withdrew, gazing with open eyes at his uncanny uncle as he left. When the door had been closed by his reluctant and slow-moving hands, Miss Woodbury continued her interrupted speech.

“You’d better not let it be known that you’ve come back to life. The Law does not forget, though other people do.”

Cheever winced for a moment under this home-thrust, but soon rallied to ask with a droll stutter:

“Do they say anything flattering about me on my tombstone?”

“Only this, ‘Thomas Cheever, son of James Cheever, D.D. Born in Oldbury, April 1778; died in La Guayra, Venezuela, Feb. 23, 1799.’”

“I thought that a tombstone, like Hope, always told some ‘flattering tale,’” murmured Cheever, his lips twisting into a humorous curve. “I think the old gentleman might at least have put something flattering on the stone, if only to wish me to rest in peace. I must look up my burial-place before I leave town. If it’s still such a gossiping old place as it used to be, I suppose they have by this time got hold of the fact that a stranger carrying a gripsack has called upon Captain Woodbury. Who shall I be? A man from Cuba on business? As you say, Miss Woodbury, I guess I’d better not come back to life again, publicly--though I think it hard that they can’t forgive a fellow after all these years.”

“The way of the transgressor _is_ hard, Tom Cheever,” said the old lady, “and I don’t believe that you’ve done a straight thing since you were born. What’s brought you back to Oldbury?”

“The schooner _Tempest_.”

“What motive brought you here?”

“Love of my native land and my kinsfolk, of course,” answered Cheever, with his peculiar smile. “To be sure, I have not had a very hearty welcome, you’ve treated me as if I was a cross between a ghost and a burglar, but I didn’t expect anything better.”

“How long will your ship be in port?” asked the Captain, feeling that the female head of the house should not do all the questioning.

“Blessed if I know,” replied Cheever, pushing his chair back from the table and putting one leg over the other. “I worked my passage in the schooner to get back here. I tell you, when a man has been banged round from pillar to post, the way I’ve been, it knocks the stuffing out of him. I’ve brought everything I have in the world with me in that bag out in the hall. Everything, that is, but my parrot, which I left aboard ship. Did you build this house, Woodbury? It’s a pretty comfortable one. You must have coined money while I’ve been a-rolling around the world, gathering no moss, except what’s in the bag.”

“What do you propose doing?” asked the Captain, his forehead contracting into an anxious frown.

“Perhaps I’d better go up to that empty grave yonder and put myself into it, Woodbury,” remarked Cheever, tipping his chair back and looking about the room. “The best of us before long will use only six foot of ground, but it’s hard work killing time until that blessed period of equality between prince and pauper comes round.”

“Do you wish any assistance from me?” asked Woodbury.

“I don’t wish any assistance; I only wish what is due me. I wish half my father’s estate; it’s my right. How much did he leave?”

“Not enough to quarrel about, Thomas, if we were disposed to do so,” answered the Captain. “A few thousand dollars.”

“A few thousand dollars! Hear the man talk. Why, that’s a fortune to a man of brains.”

“Do not trouble your mind about that, Thomas,” said the Captain, “you shall have your fair share of that.”

“How long do you suppose it will last you?” queried Miss Woodbury, not pleased at having been shut out from the conversation.

“I haven’t entered into any calculations as to that,” answered Cheever, “and I don’t know as it would be any business of yours if I had. What’s mine’s mine, even if I have got a tombstone over me.”

“Your father left a will,” continued the Captain, “leaving all his property to my boy, but as he supposed you dead when he did so, I think that you should have your share by fair rights.”

“Of course I should. I ask only what’s right. And when you give me the cash, I won’t trouble you here much in this town. It’s a stupid old place at best, and I’m afraid that somebody will recognize me. I can disguise my face, but this cursed stutter of mine would show who I am, I’m afraid. I guess they’d have mighty hard work though in proving I was Tom Cheever, even if they could prove that Tom Cheever ever did anything he hadn’t ought to. This stutter would be a strong fact against me, but that tombstone up there is a poser on t’other, ain’t it? Guess I’ll keep rather shady! Is the Deacon alive?”

“The Deacon is very much alive,” answered Miss Woodbury, who wished to make Oldbury as uncomfortable a residence as possible for the man; “and it’s my opinion that he would know you the minute he saw you, and have you taken up the next. I wonder you dared to come back here.”

Cheever looked at her with his flitting, hunted eyes, and thinking that the conversation was growing unpleasant, changed the subject.

“You will not mind my smoking a cigar?” he asked, drawing from his pocket a black Regalia.

“I certainly do object to your smoking in the house,” said Miss Woodbury. “You may go out doors and poison the air if you choose.”

“All right,” answered Tom, drawing up his tall body from the chair; “the Captain and I will talk over our business matters.”

The poor Captain had been very quiet during all this time, but he had been doing a deal of thinking. He saw that the disgrace which had been brought upon his wife’s family by the man, now forgotten, would again settle upon his household, should the fact of Cheever’s reappearance be known to the neighbors. He felt that he would make any sacrifice to get the man away from Oldbury. He could not help wishing that the record of his death upon the tombstone were true. While he felt sure that any sum he might give the man, as his share of his father’s estate, would be soon spent by him, and that he would be demanding more, he made up his mind that he would settle accounts with him and get him away as quickly as he could.

Cheever’s return, besides its natural depressing effect, also awakened the fear, which had more than once arisen in the Captain’s mind, that some of his wicked blood might be in his son’s veins. He could not bear to think that his boy should be exposed, even for a moment, to the man’s contaminating influence. If he could get Cheever out of the house at once, he would be satisfied, but how was it to be done? It would take some time to get the ready money necessary to pay him the half of his father’s estate to which he was entitled, since the building of the new house had reduced the Captain’s cash on hand, and the Cheever estate, which he held for his son, was invested in real property. He might have to sell some part of one of his ships to get the money necessary to pay Cheever, and this would take time.

The two men were standing upon the back veranda of the house, Cheever calmly lighting his cigar with a flint and steel. The last glow of the sun in the west had died away, and the stars were beginning to twinkle in their soft summer radiance.

“I tell you what, it seems good to smell the garden again,” remarked Cheever, “after having tossed around in the Atlantic for the last month. What was the exact sum the old gentleman left?” he inquired, turning sharply on his heel after this slight tribute to the beauties of nature.

“His house and furniture and library. The whole was appraised at about four thousand dollars. I still hold it for the boy; he is to be educated for the ministry.”

“The hell you say,” ejaculated Cheever. “He looks much as I did when I was a boy, and the old gentleman was going to make _me_ a parson.” He laughed a loud, discordant laugh, and the point of his cigar described wild curves in the darkness as his hand vibrated in the air.

The Captain’s heart gave a convulsive throb. Did this man read his fears? He clenched his fist, and raised his arm as if to strike him; he looked upon him as a serpent, whom he would like to grind under his heel.

“We will not discuss the boy, Cheever,” said the Captain, sternly, when he had regained that mastery over self which is so much more difficult to gain than taking a city. “Five thousand dollars is more than the whole estate is worth. I think you can trust my word.”

“You’re right, Captain,” answered Cheever, good-humoredly. “You’ve always been so devilish honest that I didn’t expect much to see you worth a penny when I returned to Oldbury. I never knew you to tell a lie.”

The Captain did not think it necessary to explain to Cheever that honest endeavor only brings lasting wealth, an opportunity, which under other circumstances he would never have let escape, for he was fond of hearing himself talk, and of dropping little conversational tracts, as he met his fellow-men; but he looked at Cheever as a mere reptile upon whom all moral truths would be wasted.