Part 3

“I will give you three thousand dollars as soon as I can get the money,” continued Woodbury, “and I shall expect you on receiving this to give me, as executor of your father’s estate, a receipt in full and to leave town immediately; and you will pardon me if I say that I hope we shall never lay eyes upon you again.”

“You’re not polite, brother-in-law,” said Cheever after a pause, when it may be presumed that even his scarred and withered heart ached, for a man must get very low before he loses desire to be liked by his fellow-man. “I will agree to your proposition--but, my God, Woodbury, can’t you say a kind word to me--I’ve been pretty bad, I grant, but I’ve not had a decent word from a decent person since I left this town thirteen years ago.”

If the thought of his boy had not filled the Captain’s mind, he might have relented and have spoken some words of comfort to the wretched fellow; but the bare idea that the sins which had poisoned this man’s life might be in his lad’s blood, made him as hard as flint.

“I am not your judge, Tom Cheever; it is well I am not, for it would fare hard with you. Such men as you should be blotted from the earth. Even to the third and fourth generation you cause evil to be in the world instead of good.”

“I ought to be up there on the hill, I know,” said Cheever, pathetically. “What was it in me that made me bad from boyhood? God knows I was trained carefully enough, I was watched and prayed for as you watch and pray for your son.”

The Captain started back, and his hand sought his heart and pulled convulsively at the ruffle of his shirt. “I had brains enough,” continued Cheever, bitterly; “I could stand at the head of my class at school when I was a mind to,--Mr. Dillaway said I was the best and worst scholar he ever had,--but I had to run away to keep out of State Prison before I was twenty-one years old. It has seemed to me that I couldn’t help it; that the wickedness was born in me. It’s no excuse, I know, but, Woodbury, I have had an awful life. You remember Crœsus couldn’t touch anything without its turning to gold.”

The Captain had never heard of Crœsus, and was listening to Cheever with dull ears.

“I can’t touch gold without its turning to dross. My life never met another’s without bringing misfortune. I’ll get out of the way, Woodbury. I’ll go back to the schooner to-night. You can send any part of the money you wish to Mr. Marks--that’s me. I’ll never trouble you again.”

Saying this, Cheever held out his hand to the Captain, who did not refuse to take it.

“Good-by, Woodbury, your sister won’t have her lavendered sheets disturbed by me; say good-by to the boy for me, and have an eye on him. Remember, send the money to Mr. Marks, Schooner _Tempest_. I’ll not trouble you again.”

He shook the Captain’s hand, threw his cigar into the grass, where the Captain still saw it shining, as he heard the front door slam.

Miss Woodbury put her head out of the dining-room window and asked in a hoarse whisper, “Who went out then?”

“He did,” answered the Captain, “and he says he will not trouble us again.”

“Pray God he may not, but bad pennies always return,” replied the sceptical spinster.

The Captain walked slowly up to his den, and opening one of the lockers, took from a faded velvet case a miniature. He saw the face of a handsome boy, it might have been the portrait of his son. The curling hair, the eyes, the pleasant but irresolute mouth, were all his, and on the brown paper back, in the Rev. Mr. Cheever’s quaintly formed handwriting, were the words, “Thomas Cheever, 1789, ætatis suæ XIV.”

The old man groaned as he looked at the “counterfeit presentment” of the boy, who would better never been born.

III

James, after having been told to leave the dining-room by his father, waited anxiously around the front doorsteps of the house, plucking the long tassels of grass, and biting off the sweet green ends. He had heard during his boyhood but little of his mother’s only brother, and when he had asked about him, had been told that he had died many years before, and that he had been very unfortunate. He was perhaps the only boy in the town who had not heard the whole story of Parson Cheever’s scapegrace son: of his idle youth and his suspected complicity in a robbery, of his escape, his adventures in the Caribbean Sea, and his murder in La Guayra.

Of such a picturesque character, especially when the son of the minister of the church, many a story was handed down, but his nephew knew only that his dead uncle was wicked, and that the least said about him the better it would be. His return to life was as exciting to James as would be the apparition of William Tell to a Swiss peasant.

As James sat wondering what his elders were saying in the dining-room, his uncle, bolting from the front hall with his gripsack, stumbled over him and fell down the granite steps, alighting in a heap upon the smooth gravel path below. James looked at the front door rather apprehensively, as if he expected to see his father’s stalwart leg reaching over the threshold as the motive power which had driven the man from the door; but he saw only blackness, and heard his father answering his aunt at the other side of the house.

Cheever picked himself up from the gravel path and tried to pull himself together after his fall.

“What in the name of all that is unholy did I fall over?” he asked, rubbing his shin, which the sharp edge of the granite step had barked.

“Over me,” replied James, he too rubbing his shoulder, where his uncle had hit him. “Where were you going so fast?”

“Down to the schooner. I’m off.”

“Your schooner isn’t to sail right away, is she?”

“No, but I’m going back on board. I am mate and have to look after her.”

“Shan’t you stay here with us?” asked the boy, who felt it to be most inhospitable that a long-lost uncle should thus be almost driven from his father’s gates.

“No, James, no. I’m not coming back here again. I don’t like to be where I am not wanted, you know.”

He smiled, as he thought that he was rather more urgently wanted at Oldbury than he could desire. Looking down the road, he saw the well-remembered elm-trees in front of Deacon Fairbank’s house, beneath which he used to meet Sally Fairbanks years ago. So Sally was a widow,--Joshua Pickering’s widow. He wondered how she could have married stupid Josh Pickering, who was the butt of all the brighter boys and girls at school.

“Do you ever see the Widow Pickering, James?” he asked, as he stood looking at the dark masses of the elm-trees.

James blushed. Was not the Widow Pickering’s daughter, Alice, the girl of his heart? The widow too, had she not always marked him out from all the other boys as her favorite? He did not think it necessary to tell his uncle of his consuming passion for Alice, and simply answered that he often saw the widow.

“Well--tell her--” stuttered Cheever. “Well, no, never mind--Don’t you tell her I’ve come back. It wouldn’t do--there mustn’t anybody know it, do you understand, or I shall get into trouble. Promise you won’t tell any one.”

“I shall not tell, sir,” promised James.

Cheever hesitated for a minute, and then, taking a small packet from an inner pocket of his waistcoat, said, “When you see the widow, boy, you might give her this box and tell her that a sailor, a rough sort of a fellow you saw on a ship in the harbor when you was knocking wind in your boat, asked you to give it to her. You can say that he said that Tom Cheever gave it to him down in La Guayra years ago when he was dying, to be given to Miss Sarah Fairbanks of Oldbury, Massachusetts, if he ever should get there. Tell her, too, that the ship has sailed and that you don’t know anything more about it than this. You’ll do this, will you, James?”

“I will if you wish me to, but it won’t be true; you’re not dead.”

“Yes, I am dead; Tom Cheever is dead. My name’s Marks,--Tom Marks. It would be hard to say which was the most worthless of the two. The thing in the box rightly belongs to the widow. And you might say to her, James, that the sailor said that Cheever wished him to ask her to forgive him and to pray for him. I guess that’s all, James. Good-by, boy. Now, I’ve got a word to say to you. You do what your father tells you to; don’t think you know it all. Be a credit to your family. You don’t want to grow up and have folks thank God when you die, and wish you dead when you are alive--and feel yourself that they are right.”

James reached out for the packet which Cheever handed to him and placed his hand upon his shoulder for a minute.

“Good-by, James, good-by,” he said, and plunged off into the darkness, and the boy saw him no more.

James stood holding the packet in his hand, confused by the remarkable events of the evening. He felt strangely drawn to the man who had just left, and at the same time an undefined instinct told him that he should shun him. What bond of any kind could there be between the Widow Pickering, with her calm face and dignified bearing, and his uncle? Could he have loved her years ago as his nephew now loved Alice? Not that it was really possible, he thought, that any one could love another as he loved Alice. To be sure, he was only fifteen years old, and of course could not marry for some years, but he felt that the world would be a cheerless place if his Alice were not in it.

We all laugh at calf-love, and smile when we see a youngster a willing slave at the beck and call of a maiden in her teens; but do you suppose that your battered old heart, under your expanding waistcoat, can leap with the fervor of a boy’s? It is pure gold, with no alloy of passion or worldliness, which a youth offers to his mistress; no depreciated currency tattered and frayed by handling.

An artist, painting Love’s Young Dream, does not show as his model a worldly pair, with thoughts of domestic economy and of marriage portions clouding their brows; nor would the poets sing the love of a middle-aged Corydon with a Phyllis who had gathered scalps in countless ballrooms and watering-places.

A young philosopher of my acquaintance of the age of nine, on being reproved by his mother for his excessive devotion to a little girl, hit upon the weak point in youthful love-affairs, when he replied, “Dear mamma, do not be at all alarmed about this; I cannot be married until I am twenty-four, and no man ever loved the same woman for fifteen years.” But when this distressful and unromantic century was in its infancy, children were not cynical philosophers, and marriages were made early. Young men boldly took the risks of life and gave hostages to fortune, and happy homes were conducted on incomes which would at the present day barely suffice for the wife’s dressmaker’s or the husband’s cigar bills. But even in that primitive state of society, I suppose that few married their first loves. James, not being versed in the fickleness of the human heart and the many obstacles which proverbially roughen the course of true love, never doubted that his love was genuine and would be lasting. Had he not for years walked home from school with Alice, carrying her books; had he not always buckled on her skates and steered her down the icy hills on his red sled, “The Flying Dutchman”? And with great pains had he not cut in two a silver six-pence, half of which each wore, tied upon a blue ribbon around the neck as near the heart as might be. It had been a great grief to him when they had been separated from each other at school; the boy, who was intended for college, going to the Latin School, while Alice had to be content with the small amount of learning which was thought necessary for our grandmothers. It is doubtful whether our modern girls really learn more from books than their ancestresses used to, and it is certain that of many other things they learn less. Yet it was clear that the girl could have done the boy’s tasks better than he. His mind was filled with thoughts of sailing down the reaches of the bay, or of playing ball with the boys on the Common, while his eyes received but a blurred impression of the page of the Latin Grammar before him; but her quick mind and retentive memory would have rapidly learned what was put before her. Indeed, she followed on in the study of Latin, unknown to him; for she did not like to think that a book which he could read should be sealed to her, and she had one day surprised James by suggesting a translation for a word in the Latin Primer, over which he had stuck for some time.

“How did you know that, Alice?” he had asked. “Pooh! you don’t know; you are making believe.”

“I _do_ know,” said Alice. “We girls could learn ever so much quicker than you stupid boys if they would only let us.”

“Nonsense! Alice,” replied James, looking at her with all the pride of the superior sex. “Girls can’t learn Latin, and they ought to thank their stars they cannot. It’s very tiresome.”

But this superior being found in due time that one girl could learn Latin a great deal better than he could, and his wandering mind was often kept to its task by the feeling that it would be very stupid in him to be outstripped by a girl who had no masters to help her in her study of the dead tongue.

As James stood looking down the street towards the dark foliage of the Deacon’s elm-trees on the other side of the street, he felt that it would have been well to tell his sweetheart of the wonderful event of the evening, before facing her step-mother with the packet which had just been given him. Alice’s superior intelligence, he thought, would help him in the difficult task of telling a straight story. He knew, however, that she would not be satisfied with the perversion of the truth involved in saying that Tom Cheever was dead; to him it did not seem so bad. Tom Cheever really was dead, so far as Oldbury was concerned, and it certainly was right that Mrs. Pickering should get her property back. But his uncle had made him promise not to tell any one that he had come back; of course, he could not even tell Alice. His unaided intelligence must steer him through the dangerous channels by which he should convey the message and the packet to the good lady; and he must suppress the truth in the doing it.

Stopping under the trees outside the Deacon’s house, he could see into the sitting-room lighted by lamp and candles. Alice and her mother were seated near the table in the middle of the room, the elder sewing at some white garment, while Alice was reading a heavy, leather-covered book which rested on the table, being too large to be held in her hands. Her light brown hair was drawn smoothly over her well-shaped head into a little roll behind, but a stray ringlet or two told that this Puritan simplicity was not natural. Her eyes were cast down over her book, and thus the great charm of her face was for the moment lost behind the modest, long-fringed eyelids, the bright blue, laughing eyes, which changed into serious deep ones as the gay thought was succeeded by the sad one in her mind. Her cheeks were rosy with the sweet bloom of a Northern girlhood, which, alas, too soon fades away. Her mouth, though large, had full, beautiful curves, which bespoke an even temperament. Her girlish form was clad in a plain brown dress. As she read the big book on the table, her face changed with the emotions which swept through her mind; her mouth dimpled into a smile or drew down as if she were grieved; her forehead contracted with lines and grew smooth again; her color came and went. One could see that she was of an emotional, imaginative nature, one to whom the characters in romance or history seemed actually living. Her mother had once been a beautiful woman, and even at forty she was comely. A common-place face hers would have been in expression, had it not been for a settled melancholy, which gave it a character of its own.

James walked to the front door and knocked; at the first metallic ring of the brass, Alice shut her book and ran to the door to greet him. Even in little things, the quick ear of a girl can distinguish the person she cares for.

“Oh, James!” she cried, “I’m so glad you have come over. Let’s sit on the steps here, it is so much cooler than in the sitting-room. What have you been doing all day?”

James sat beside her upon the jamb of the door, and looked at her for a moment with great satisfaction. “I am glad to see you again, Alice,” he answered; “I wanted to get here before, but I have been trying to induce my father to let me go to sea.”

“Oh, James!” exclaimed Alice.

“Of course he wouldn’t hear of it! He says that I must go to college and then be a minister. I will make a queer kind of a minister, I am thinking.”

“Yes, you would _now_, Jamie,” laughed Alice. “But you will not be fifteen all your life.”

“But I do not believe that a halo will begin to be apparent around my head as I get older. In fact, if a vote of the neighborhood were taken, I do not think that it would be voted that I had improved since I was a little boy. I was a very good baby, and have been getting worse ever since. Ask your grandfather, the Deacon, what he thinks of me.”

“It is too early in your life to think seriously of what you are going to do,” answered the girl, in her sweet, low voice. “If you get a good education, it will not do you any harm, no matter what you do in after life.”

“Will it help me to manage a ship, to be able to read Virgil and Homer, Alice? I tried to get the old gentleman to look at the irregular verbs in the Latin Grammar when we were arguing about it, but he was much too knowing for that and pointed at the reverend grandpa as an unanswerable argument. I tell you what, Alice, the Captain has a will of his own. I’d rather be like him than like a parson. Tom Devereux is the kind of a fellow to work into a parson. I’m not and I never shall be.”

There was a moment’s pause. Alice looked sadly at the boy’s eager, passionate face. Just then the little packet which his uncle had given him fell from his hand upon the stone step.

“But, by George, Alice,” exclaimed the boy, reminded by this of the errand upon which he had come, “something happened to-night which I cannot tell you about.”

“Cannot tell me about!”

“No, I want to, but I promised not to--but I have a message to give your mother and this little box. I wish I knew what was in it.”

“So do I,” said Alice, taking the packet in her hand and shaking it. “I think it too bad that you have a secret which you will not tell me.”

“_May_ not tell you, Alice. It is too bad, for I should like your advice about something which I must tell your mother--but I cannot. I think that I will go in to her now so to get it off my mind. Is she alone in there?”

“Grandfather is asleep in the next room.”

“Are you sure he is asleep, Alice?”

“He was when I came out. He had his red bandana over his face, and was snoring peacefully.”

James walked into the room where Mrs. Pickering was still sewing. She put her work upon the table when she saw him, and smiled at him pleasantly.

“Good evening, James,” she said, as the boy bowed to her, and shuffled his feet awkwardly. “You have something you wish to say to me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” answered James, rolling the packet around in the palm of his hand. “The fact is, it is something very odd and something I cannot understand. I was out sailing this afternoon in my boat and after I came up to the mooring and was walking up the wharf I met a sailor who spoke to me. After a little talk, he asked me if I knew a Miss Sally Fairbanks--”

“What did he look like?” asked Mrs. Pickering, turning pale.

“Just a sailor, that’s all. He had a long black beard, and he was brown, and had tar on his hands,” answered James, drawing on his imagination unsuccessfully for a vivid picture of a seaman. He felt that he was getting into deep water, and was impatient of questions.

“I said there was a widow lady living in town who had been a Miss Sally Fairbanks, but who now was Mrs. Pickering, and with that he took out this little box from his trousers’ p-p-pocket.”

The building of this picturesque circumstance was a little too much for the boy’s invention, and his stuttering was painful.

Mrs. Pickering took the box from the boy, who kept silence while she opened it. He was trying to form into an intelligent sentence the message Tom Cheever, dying in La Guayra, had sent to her; but he was so much interested to see what the box contained, that the words did not come easily to his tongue. Mrs. Pickering cut with her scissors the tarred string which bound the box, and slowly removed the cover. A small wad of cotton-wool was then removed and James saw a gold ring of an old filagree pattern. Mrs. Pickering turned pale when she saw it, and, quickly looking at the inner part, inquired in a tremulous voice of James:

“What did the man say when he gave this to you? Tell me all about it, James.”

James turned red under these questions and stammered out:

“He said that a man named Tom Cheever gave it to him years ago when he lay a-dying in a hospital in La Guayra, and told him to give it to Miss Sally Fairbanks of Oldbury, Massachusetts, if he ever should get there and see her--and the sailor said that the dying man said that he wished that she would forgive him.”