Part 8

This afternoon Thomas was out taking his “constitutional” walk,--to Fresh Pond and back in the company of an improving companion; and James was trying to prepare his Horace for the morrow’s recitation. He had just received a letter from his father full of improving advice, and inspired by the words of the kindly old man, he had betaken himself to his books. The Horatian ode was half translated and he had arisen to look out of the window in the vague hope that something would happen in the yard which would justify his leaving the genial poet, who seemed to him so dull, though his verses were crisp with the condensed wit of the great Roman world. But there was nothing stirring outside save a few brown leaves which the wind whirled along the brown sward. The Dictionary and the Horace were upon the window-seat, inviting him to work; there was no reason why he should not set about it. But it seemed so distasteful to him. He began to think about Oldbury, of Alice, whom the old Deacon, her grandfather, had forbidden to speak to him since the night of his uncle’s escape from tardy justice; of his father, solitary in his grand new house; of his aunt, with her shrewd tongue and set ways; and of the wicked uncle, speeding down the bay in the _Scud_. What had become of the boat and its freight? His father had never spoken to him of them again; but he was sure that he had heard from him; for, three days after the exciting day of the foiled arrest, the Captain had received a letter and had taken the stage to Boston the next morning. On his return to Oldbury he had said nothing to any one about his journey.

What had become of Uncle Tom?

Was he on one of the privateersmen of which there was so much talk, now that there was war? What joy it must be to tread the deck of one of those adventurous craft, to sight a rich merchantman flying the Union Jack, and to haul up on her weather-gauge, and fire a gun across her bow!

That was life! but this round of distasteful studies; these hours spent in chapel and the recitation-room while his country was beset by enemies; was this an existence which a proud-spirited lad would lead?

These reveries were interrupted by a knock at the door. James hastily picked up his Horace and called to the visitor to enter. And in came the lost uncle, with a queer smile on his grim face.

“Uncle Tom,” cried out James, dropping again his task-book. “Uncle Tom! I was just wondering where you were.”

“The _Scud_’s lying in Marblehead harbor,” remarked Cheever, as he slung himself into a chair. “Studying, James?”

“Trying to,” replied James, who was burning with curiosity to find out about this uncle’s doings.

“Do you like your school?” asked the other, looking around at the apartment. “It seems a quiet spot, to me; a good shelter--I suppose that you are straining at your cable, though? That’s the way--boys will be boys, and that means, bad boys. They never know what’s good for them. My father meant me to come here. But, Lord love you, James, I couldn’t any more have stuck to my books when I was your age than a sailor can stick to a ship where he is well treated.”

“What have you been doing? What happened to you that night?” questioned James.

“I told you that the _Scud_ was at Marblehead. I made that port in the morning after our parting. ’Twas the day that war was declared, and before night fell I had shipped as first mate on the privateer _Lion_, of Marblehead.”

“What, uncle, are you on a privateer?” asked James.

“I am not only first mate but part owner of the schooner _Lion_, my boy, and we were one of the first to get afloat. Why, they had begun to caulk the old tub for service before the messenger who announced the declaration of war to the Marblehead people had time to wet his whistle. I knew that I could count on your father’s word, and I engaged with Captain Vickery to supply the armament. We put into Boston after our first cruise a day or two ago, and I pushed my way out here to Cambridge to see you. It’s the first time I have ever been in the old town, though my father was a Harvard graduate and meant me to go through the college. It’s many a start parents would get if they could look up from the red-cheeked baby in the cradle, spewing up curdled milk, and see its future; but I am moralizing again. You can’t get this old Puritan taint out of the blood. I take to sermons as naturally as I do to mischief.”

The privateersman, after this unusually long speech, swung himself into a chair by the fire, and was silent. After a few minutes he looked up and asked: “Was the old Deacon mad when I gave him the slip? It was a close shave, and if he had caught me it would have gone hard with me. I owe you a debt of gratitude, my boy, and it’s a debt of honor, the only kind of debt I like to pay.”

Just then the college-bell rang out, and James looked regretfully at his Horace.

“It’s recitation time, Uncle Tom,” he said.

“And you ain’t learned your lesson? What will the master do to you? You can tell him that an extinguished divine turned up to call on you.”

“I do not suppose that I shall suffer very severely, though I cannot say that it is my first offence. I shall be back in an hour. Will you be here when I return?”

“Yes; I will sit here by your fire and see how it feels to be at college. My early opportunities I neglected, and it would not have been possible to keep me four years in the same place. There’s quicksilver in my blood and in my pocket, too, for that matter. Quick to burn a hole there, anyway. But run along to your recitation. I shall enjoy myself here if I am allowed to smoke. Is it against the rules?”

“You will enjoy smoking the more, if it is,” answered James, as he ran away to his recitation.

Cheever heaped some logs on the fire, filled his pipe with tobacco, and lighted it from an ember. Like most men who have knocked about the world and have seen “all sorts and conditions of men,” he was a solitary; happy enough to be left alone with a good pipe of tobacco, and yet ready for a carousal or a fight at a moment’s notice.

There was a charm to the world-weary man in the stillness of this college chamber. It seemed to him, as he had said to his nephew, a good shelter, grateful to a storm-tossed waif.

He picked up a Latin dictionary and turned the leaves at random. It had been years since he had looked into so serious a volume, and yet it was not a sealed book to him; for he had been well grounded in the classics during the futile attempt to make a parson out of a ne’er-do-well.

He smiled when he saw the irregular verbs, and the nouns, puzzling as to gender, which had been his tormentors when a boy, and he mumbled to himself over a list of prepositions and a rule from a grammar.

These useful bits of knowledge cannot be dislodged from the mind which received them when it was young and plastic. They remain forever embedded like the pebbles in a conglomerate stone. The beautiful lines of Shakespeare, learned with enthusiasm, are forgotten; the music of the exquisite lyrics of Shelley dies away, but the rules of the Latin Grammar are too firmly rooted to be lost.

Cheever was repeating to himself rapidly “Hic, hæc, hoc, hujus--” when the door opened and another young man entered,--Thomas Devereux, James’ ill-matched “chum,” a lank, pale lad, with a high forehead and small features. He paused at the threshold when he saw the stranger taking his ease before the fire.

“Come in,” said Cheever. “James has gone to recite, and has left me on watch.”

Devereux entered, eying the stranger with suspicion. The tobacco smoke which filled the room from Cheever’s pipe was not a pleasing perfume to the nostrils of the prim young scholar. He stood at the threshold a moment.

“I am an old friend of James’ father,” explained Cheever.

“I am Woodbury’s chum, Thomas Devereux.”

“Devereux? That’s an Oldbury name.”

“Yes; and I am an Oldbury boy,” replied Devereux, as he took off his overcoat, keeping a watchful eye all the time on the suspicious-looking stranger.

“So you are an Oldbury boy, and James’ chum! I am glad to make your acquaintance. My name is Marks, and I am first mate of the _Lion_, privateer, of Marblehead; and as I take an interest in James through long knowledge of his father, Captain Woodbury, I have come out here to Cambridge to see him. I chartered a chaise, and worked my course out. I suppose that you boys have a devil of a time here, don’t you?”

Devereux’s pale, girlish face flushed, and he shifted uneasily in his chair; but Cheever did not notice the effect of his remark upon the young Puritan. The college presented itself to his lawless mind as a conglomeration of young men, and therefore as a place for roystering and deviltry. He could not for a moment imagine that a boy in whose veins ran young blood could think and act as did young Thomas Devereux, who could be guilty of a meanness, perhaps, but could never let slip an oath. “Of course you do,” he continued. “Boys will be boys! With such a lot of you together, away from home, things must be lively here.”

“I regret to say that there are many who are heedless enough to neglect their opportunities and indulge in wickedness,” said Devereux, with a solemnity beyond his years.

Cheever looked at him sharply, and smiled. A glance at the bloodless cheek, beardless as a woman’s, the thin-lipped, solemn mouth, made him remember that there were some boys who never were boys.

[Illustration: “SOME BOYS WHO NEVER WERE BOYS.”]

“You never neglect _your_ opportunities, I hope,” said Cheever, in a graver tone. “There is no one so much to be blamed as a young man who is careless of his advantages. I hope that James is studious and well-behaved.” There was a twinkle in the old reprobate’s eye as he spoke.

“I fear that James is neglectful of his studies, and truly too ready to seek wild company,” replied Devereux. “I have tried by precept and example to lead him to better ways, but it has been of no avail. But if you will excuse me, sir, I must be settling to my task. I have a recitation the next hour, and I have not fully prepared myself for it.”

“If that’s the case,” said Cheever, “I shall not stay here to disturb you; but I shall take a turn over the grounds until James is through his recitation.”

As soon as the elder man had shut the door, Devereux opened the windows to rid the atmosphere of the room from the dreadful odor of his pipe-smoke and of iniquity.

James, coming out from Harvard Hall, saw his uncle sitting on the fence by the Massachusetts Hall.

“Young Squaretoes was too much for me, James, and I came out here by preference. It’s a little cold, though; but it’s nothing to the young ice-berg you bunk with. We had better go to the tavern, James.”

Over across the square they went.

“We must go into the back room, uncle,” said James. “The rules of the College are very strict against the frequenting of taverns.”

“Rules, my boy, were made to be broken,” observed Cheever.

They soon found themselves in a bare room, where a wood fire smouldered in a Franklin stove. Cheever ordered his glass of “flip,” a blend of hot iron and alcohol, and then lighted his pipe with due deliberation.

“I was looking over your Latin Grammar while you were away, James,” he said, while the landlord was absent to get the “flip.” “It’s many a day since I have seen one, though Mr. Livermore’s switch beat some of the rules into me so that I have never forgotten them. I was to have been a parson, you know.”

“I’m to be one, too,” said James, smiling.

“Yes? Well, if they hadn’t tried to make a saint out of _me_, perhaps I’d have been less of a sinner. ’Twas only last month, when we sighted a British brig, that I was thinking about the old gentleman--whose life I shortened, James, my boy--and I said to myself: ‘Now, Tom Cheever, you have a good deal on your soul, but the old man used to say:

“While the lamp holds out to burn, The vilest sinner may return.”

You’ve got to capture that brig, Tom, and your share of the prize-money, added to the sum you’ve tucked away in the bank, will make you independent. You’ve acted on the square for two years, and you may be a decent man yet. You can leave all your old self buried in that empty grave at Oldbury and start with a clean bill of health, just as if you had received absolution from the Pope of Rome.’ That’s a handy belief, James, that Roman Catholic. We haven’t any method of casting off old sins. Why, they stick around our necks all our lives like a dead hen tied around the setter dog who killed it--”

“How many vessels has the _Lion_ taken?” asked James, who did not fancy his uncle’s moralizing so much as the imperfectly repentant sinner liked the sound of his own voice.

“The brig _Dreadnaught_ I was speaking of, was the biggest one, three hundred tons, but besides her we carried into port three other brigs and four schooners, in the last year. We found the _Dreadnaught_ a hard nut to crack, and if it hadn’t turned out that we could out-weather her and were better gunners, she would have taken us. As it was, we lost three of our crew before we boarded her, and we had the toughest kind of a hand-to-hand fight before we got them under hatches. Those Marblehead men can fight, James! They’re true grit. The Englishmen were as good, but we outnumbered them, and they had to give in; that is, all that were left of them.”

“When was this fight?”

“Last month, in the Old Bahama channel, off Cuba. We left the prize at Baltimore on our way to Boston.”

“Oh, I wish I had gone on the _Scud_ with you, Uncle Tom,” cried James, “and I should have been one of the crew of the _Lion_.”

“I would rather cut off my right hand, my boy, than take you away from the course of life which your father has laid out for you. I’ve finished my seafaring, James, and I’ll settle down in Boston and lead a decent life, if that old rascal in Oldbury will let me alone. The silver’s under the lilac-bush, James, in his back yard. That’s what I have come out here to tell you about.”

“What silver?”

“What! don’t you know?” groaned Cheever. “Haven’t they told you? The silver I took from Deacon Fairbanks the night before I left Oldbury. You know now why I had to run from the office. I’ve got a map here of the place where I buried it, and that’s why I’ve come out to see you. I want you to dig it up when you go to Oldbury and put it back into the old man’s sideboard without his knowing it.”

He took out a worn leather pocket-book and extracted from its heterogeneous contents a piece of paper, dirty from much handling and broken in the creases. James watched him intently, much shocked at this avowal of crime; he had never imagined that his uncle had added house-breaking to his other youthful follies.

“There, James,” explained Cheever, as he smoothed out the ragged plan, “that represents the Deacon’s house, the side next your father’s new house, you know, and the X is the dining-room window. Ten paces straight out from the window stands the lilac-bush. It’s there still. I looked for it when I came to the house that night, and two feet to the south of it, if you dig down a foot, you’ll come to the silver. It was in a basket when I buried it, but I guess that there’s little left of the wickerwork by this time. You go there some night and dig the stuff up, then polish it up, and see that it’s conveyed into the Deacon’s sideboard--but don’t you let him know that you did it. It will be a weight off my mind if you do it, James. Let’s see, you should find, if I remember right, two dozen spoons, big and little, a silver tea-service, and two tankards. It wasn’t much to lose your life for, James, but you’ll find that men swap off their honor and their reputation for very little, very little, my boy. You’ll do this for me? That’s right. Now, here comes the ‘flip,’ and we’ll drink to the old Captain’s health. He wouldn’t drink mine, I will bet; but then he’s no kin of mine and you are, my boy. Your mother was my only sister, James, and even a blackguard loves his sister.”

IX

James was called home to Oldbury by the news that his father was ill. The fickle New England spring had succeeded the rigorous winter, and the Captain had been wooed out of doors without his great-coat on a fine May morning. A sudden change of the wind to the eastward had chilled him through before he could get back to his house. As a result of this exposure, he was taken down with a severe attack of congestion of the lungs, and Miss Woodbury, being much alarmed at his condition, sent at once for his son. It was a journey of fear and sickening anticipation for the poor lad, but before he reached Oldbury his father’s condition had changed for the better, and when James came to the old man’s bedside the disease was spent. The boy was allowed to see his father for a moment, and then hurried from the room by the doctor. He was not to see that kind old face for many a day.

Aunt Elizabeth accepted her brother’s illness as a special mark of Divine displeasure at the manifold shortcomings of the family, the State, and the Nation, but she bore up wonderfully under the affliction. Now that the danger was over, she was secretly delighted in the chance given her to wear herself out in nursing and watching.

Our New England women are always at their best when Fate has pulled the man of the house down by the heels and he lies propped up in bed, a meek receptacle for gruels and doses.

“Your father was very ill indeed, James,” she said to her nephew when he came out of the sick-room; “I thought that he was going off in the same way his great-uncle Abraham did. He was very feverish, and he complained of a weight upon his chest. Before the doctor came I gave him some whiskey and water and put him to bed. I saved his life, I think.”

“I’ve no doubt you did, Aunt Elizabeth. You are a wonderful nurse!”

“The nurses save more lives than the doctors destroy, James,” rejoined his aunt, in a triumphant tone. “Now come to tea; I have some Sally Lund cake. But now that you are a man at college I suppose that you despise such things.”

James’ anxiety about his father had driven from his mind the promise which he had made to his uncle to restore the buried silver; but now that he was relieved from the weight of apprehension, the responsibility of his foolish promise began to weigh upon him.

All through tea he was laying out his plan of campaign. Under cover of the night he could dig up the silver, and then take it to his room and polish it up. The next night he could return it to the Deacon’s sideboard.

After the evening meal was over he went into the sitting-room which commanded a view of the Deacon’s lilac-bush and dining-room window. He took out the dirty plan which his uncle had given him and looked up on it the probable burial-place of the silver.

There was a dash of romance in the adventure which stirred his blood mightily. The digging up of buried treasure suggested tales of Captain Kidd and Blackbeard, and a dirty map, indicating the burial-place, was always bequeathed by dying pirates to their favorites.

It was not at all unlikely that his uncle had seen as stirring things as had ever Captain Kidd. Was he not a licensed corsair? At that moment he might be capturing some rich argosy on the high seas.

But after the treasure was dug up, the romance seemed to evaporate from the prospective adventure.

It was no easy matter to restore the tankards and spoons to their old places on the sideboard--and they must be cleaned too.

After sixteen years’ burial, much elbow-grease and white powder would be needed.

Oldbury people went to bed early--modern life has taken all the witchery out of midnight, and the ghosts of to-day have no unmolested hours for exercise; but our grandfathers believed in Poor Richard’s maxims, and were all snugly in bed by nine o’clock.

James, at that hour, was stealing from the woodshed back of his house, with a pickaxe and spade. There was no light in the Deacon’s house, and the night was dark enough for any evil deed.

He began digging at a short distance from the lilac-bush, keeping a shrewd watch all the time. The soft loam yielded readily to the spade, and it soon struck against a hard substance. It proved to be a solid tankard encrusted with soil. He dug rapidly, unearthing at nearly every spadeful some piece of the stolen plate, until he had completed his uncle’s list given him with the map. And sorry enough looking was the treasure after its long hiding.

The boy whipped off his coat and tied the silver up in it. Then he shovelled back the dirt, placing the turf over the gash in the lawn.

His uncle’s secret had descended to him, and he had the weight of this old sin upon him.

He sped over to the woodshed with it, put away his tools, then up to his room with the silver. He threw this bundle upon the bed and lit his candle. It was quick work to scrape the dirt from the silver and wash it. The tankards were heavy and fine, one with a cipher and the other with some coat-of-arms, and the silver service and spoons bore the crest of the same heraldic device. The silver was tarnished, of course, but the white powder, abstracted from his aunt’s pantry, soon made it look respectable enough. Then he wrapped each article up in a piece of paper and stored the whole away in a carpet-bag, which he put upon a shelf in his closet.