Читать книгу The Curious Affair at Heron Shoals (Augusta Huiell Seaman) (Literary Thoughts Edition) - Augusta Huiell Seaman - Страница 6

MARTY and Ted sat together on a high, steep dune overlooking the sea. It was a warm, golden, perfect afternoon—the type of weather that often comes to the coast in the early fall. The sea before them was a vivid floor of green-blue, with only small wavelets lapping in at the water’s edge—an ideal day for surf-casting. Swooping gulls, silhouetted against the intensely blue sky, gleamed with an unbelievable whiteness. The air was pungent with the odor of salt and pine and cedar, wafted by the light west wind from across the Bay.

Marty had just strolled out to the beach after having finished helping Mrs. Greene with some preparations for supper. It being Sunday, Hetty Boscom had gone home directly after the dinner-dishes were disposed of. Marty found Ted sitting on the dune watching his father and Monsieur who were both down by the sea’s edge, intent on casting long fishing-lines far out beyond the overfall. Monsieur had been eager to learn the fine art of surf-casting, and Mr. Burnett was engaged in his instruction. Ted was idly watching the performance, his serious little face still bearing its usual, wistful expression. But Marty, as she slipped down beside him, noted that he had lost his pallid color, though he had only been there two days, and that his nose had a distinctly sunburned tinge. She had observed also that he was beginning to be slightly interested in his meals. Plainly the sun, the sea and the salt air were beginning their salutary work.

“But he isn’t any different in his mind yet!” thought Marty. “If only he could be more really cheerful—and not just politely pretend to be when he isn’t! I wish I could find the chance to get him interested in the mystery about Thusy. Maybe this is a good time. We’ve all been too busy since Friday when they first arrived.”

“The Professor is doing very well with his casting, isn’t he!” she remarked, as Ted looked up to greet her with a slight smile.

“He has strong arms and I s’pose that must help,” said Ted, as they watched Monsieur reel in a long cast and prepare to hurl it out again. But even as they watched—something went wrong! The Professor had just swung his rod back over his shoulder and then far forward to give the metal squid on the end of the line momentum enough to carry it far out into the sea, when a sudden tangling up of his line at the tip of the pole caught it—and held it fast. His reel, however, with hundreds of feet of line on it, went right on spinning out the line, which, having no outlet through the tip of the pole, came billowing around him in yards and yards of hopeless tangle. And in an instant he stood there with a mess of line like a great wuzzey ball in his astonished hands.

Something about the little Frenchman’s predicament seemed to strike Ted’s sense of humor. For the second time since Marty had known him, he burst into a spontaneous peal of laughter, in which she had to join.

“He’s always getting into some trouble like that!” chuckled Ted. “And he’s always so funny about it. Look at him now!” Monsieur had hurled his pole to the ground in deep chagrin, and was running his hands wildly through his hair. And while Mr. Burnett was sympathizing with him, he shouted,

“I weel feesh no more zis day! I take heem to zee Station and untangle heem zere!” And he grabbed up his pole, with its great wad of matted line, and trotted up the beach toward the Station, not even looking at the children on the dune, as he went. Mr. Burnett resumed his fishing alone.

“He takes these things so hard!” commented Ted. “Like the other night when Thusy acted so badly with him.” Marty murmured that it was too bad if such little things hurt his feelings, but her thoughts were on the opening Ted had just given her in the mention of the parrot. Here was her chance! She could commence talking about him without effort, and she began:

“Speaking of Thusy—has Monsieur made any progress with him in trying to get him to talk French?”

“He’s been trying,” said Ted. “I heard him yesterday when he thought no one else was around, working hard to get Thusy to say something. I was passing outside the window, coming over to the beach. But I haven’t heard how he got on. Thusy’s a queer bird, isn’t he!”

“He’s queerer than you think!” agreed Marty eagerly. “Do you know, I’ve always thought there was some strange mystery about that parrot. He says the oddest things sometimes. I can’t imagine where he learned them. And Nana always acts so peculiar about him—as if she knew some secret she wouldn’t tell!” Ted’s serious little face lit up and his eyes began to sparkle.

“Oh, tell me what you know—please Marty! I do so love a mystery!” This was an even more enthusiastic response than she had expected. Now was the time to plunge into it.

“Well,” she said, “I hardly know anything at all about the thing, but I’ll tell you what I do know—and some of the things I suspect. Thusy’s always been here, as long as I can remember—and long before I was here myself. You see, my father and mother are both dead. I lost them when I was a baby. Father was Nana’s oldest son. After he died, my mother didn’t live very long, and then Nana took me to live with her. Thusy was here when I came, so I’ve sort of grown up with him. Mostly I never think much about him but sometimes, when he says something odd, he makes me wonder about him. I remember asking Nana, when I was quite young, where she got him. All she’d say was that some one who stayed here long ago had him and gave him to her and she’s kept him ever since. And when I asked who it was, she said I asked too many questions and not to bother her about it. And that’s all I ever did get out of her. I don’t know why she doesn’t want to talk about it, but she acts like that about a lot of things. It’s her way, I guess!” Ted had been listening to all this with breathless interest.

“But doesn’t any one else know?” he demanded. “How about Captain Cy? He’s one of her sons, too, isn’t he? He was telling Dad this morning quite a lot about this place. Said he’d been Skipper at this Station for fifteen years before he retired this last year. Surely he ought to know!”

“I asked him once about it, too,” said Marty, “but he said Nana’d had Thusy so long he couldn’t remember about when she did get him—thought some sailor or coast-guard or some one like that had left him with her. You see, he left home when he was quite a young boy and went to sea for a long while. When he left the sea, he came back and became a coast-guard himself and was sent to a station way down the coast, so he didn’t know much about what went on home here. I guess he doesn’t know any more about Thusy than the rest of us do.” Ted mulled over this in silence for a few minutes. Then he asked,

“But you said Thusy says some queer things once in a while. What are they? I haven’t heard him say that kind of thing yet.”

“Well,” replied Marty thoughtfully, “once in a while, without any reason, he suddenly says, ‘I’ll never tell!’ Keeps repeating it over and over. And just once, when Nana wasn’t around and I was alone with him in the kitchen, he woke up from a nap and began to shriek—‘Hide it, Jack!—Hide it!—I’ll never tell!’ That was queer, wasn’t it? I never dared ask Nana about it.”

“My, but that was strange!” commented Ted. “I wonder who Jack was—and what was going to be hidden?”

“If we knew that,” said Marty sagely, “we’d know a lot more than we do about the mystery. Maybe ‘Jack’ was the person who owned him first.”

“Do you always keep Thusy chained to his perch?” demanded Ted, veering to another angle of the subject. “Don’t you ever let him fly around loose?”

“Nana used to let him fly around the kitchen when she cleaned his perch,” said Marty. “She’d close all the windows and doors while he was free, and he liked it a lot. But she won’t do it any more. She makes him get into an old parrot-cage she has while she cleans up, now.”

“Why’s that?” questioned Ted.

“Well, about three years ago, a queer thing happened one day,” Marty went on. “I was away at school and Nana locked up the house—shut everything tight, and walked up to town to do some marketing. When she got back, Thusy was gone! He wasn’t on his perch and part of the chain was lying on the bottom of it. She saw at once what had happened. The chain was very old and rusty, and Thusy had somehow managed to gnaw through one of the links and get away. She thought, of course, she’d find him around the house somewhere. She was sure he couldn’t have got out because every door and window was shut. But, though she searched in every nook and corner, and called and called him—there wasn’t a sign of him to be found. She thought she’d lost him for good, and felt so bad about it that I found her crying when I got back from school.

“I said he simply must be in the house and let’s hunt for him again. So we went over the house from top to bottom. We even hunted way up in that look-out tower on the roof, and then we went down to the cellar. But no Thusy! But you’ll never guess what we found when we got back to the kitchen at last—there was Thusy sitting on his perch, with a piece of chain dangling from his leg, just as if he’d never been away! And when he saw us he began to chuckle, just as if he was laughing at us! And we’ve never discovered to this day where he could have hid himself!”

“Well, that was the queerest thing!” commented Ted. “He couldn’t have been out of the house at all.”

“He must have been!” cried Marty. “There wasn’t a corner we didn’t search—under the beds and other furniture—everywhere! There just wasn’t any place he could have hidden. And yet, if he got out of the house, I can’t imagine how he did it, for there wasn’t a window or door open so much as a crack.” They pondered in silence for a few moments over the mystery. Presently Ted changed the subject again.

“It’s strange about that old house you live in,” he commented, glancing back at the upper floors and cupola that were visible from where they sat, rising above the clustering cedars well back of the Station. “It’s such a big house—almost the only one on this long stretch of beach, except Captain Cy’s opposite the Station. How did it come to be here?”

“Why, Grandfather Greene—Nana’s husband—built it when he was in the Coast-Guard Station here. They used to live over across the Bay, as most coast-guardsmen do, but he didn’t like the long trip to get back home, so he built this house for them to live in the rest of their lives. He died a long time ago, but Nana has always kept on living here. She likes it and won’t ever live anywhere else. I’d much rather live across the Bay in town where you could have a nice house and electricity and all that sort of thing, and I’d be near school. But she wouldn’t move—and we couldn’t afford it anyway—so here we stay!”

“I think it’s a lovely place,” said Ted. “I’d like to live here all the time. It’s so quiet and peaceful—and right by the ocean. Somehow even the music sounds different here from what it does anywhere else!”

As if to verify his last remark, there was wafted through the open windows of the Station the sound of some resonant chords and then the opening bars of a Chopin Polonaise. Evidently the Professor had wearied of the task of untangling his fishing-line and was consoling himself with music. The two on the dunes sat silent, listening to the rich chords and rippling runs. They seemed to fit in with the mood of the perfect day, carrying the spirit to heights of ecstasy.

“He plays beautifully!” said Marty softly, when the echo of the last chords had died away. She herself loved music, though she had no talents to produce any.

“Yes, he’s a master,” acknowledged Ted, and ended wistfully, “I hope some day I’ll be able to play like that!”

“I haven’t heard you play yet,” remarked Marty, “and you’ve been here nearly three days.”

“I’m just having a little holiday,” said the boy. “Dad didn’t want me to begin real practice till Monday, so that I could get a little used to the place first. I did try the pianos out with Monsieur on Friday but—”

He got no further, for Marty, who had been looking down the beach as they were talking, suddenly gripped his arm and exclaimed:

“Oh, my goodness—look who’s coming! Why on earth did they have to land over here just now—and spoil our lovely afternoon?”

“Why, who is it?” demanded Ted, looking in the direction she indicated but seeing only in the distance, two people, evidently a woman and a young lad of sixteen or seventeen, plodding along through the sand.

“Never mind, I can’t explain right now!” muttered Marty. “I don’t think they’ve seen us yet. We’ll have a chance to get into the Station by that little back door. Hurry, and keep as much out of their sight as possible!”

She sprang up, with Ted following her and wondering very much what it was all about and the reason for this hasty retreat. Skirting around the side of a dune, they managed to slip into the rear door of the Station that led into its former kitchen without, so Marty wildly hoped, being seen by the advancing pair. As they stood panting for breath in the dismantled kitchen, Ted demanded:

“Who are they? Why don’t you want to see them?”

“Because they’re troublemakers!” cried Marty impatiently. “They always have been! They’re enemies of Nana’s. That’s another thing I don’t know what it’s all about, for Nana won’t tell me. But I think it goes back to some quarrel or other way back in Grandpa’s time. This Mrs. Kilroy’s father and Grandpa were both coast-guards in this Station at the same time. And something happened and they had a falling-out. It’s all very silly, seems to me, so long ago and both of them dead now! But Mrs. Kilroy has never forgotten it and comes over here and tries to fight it all out with Nana every once in so often. Nana always sends me away so I shan’t hear it. But it generally makes her pretty sick afterward. They must have rowed across the Bay this afternoon and walked up the beach. Queer thing, too! Thusy seems to be mixed up in that quarrel. I once was out in the garden picking peas, when Mrs. Kilroy was here and was just leaving. And she called back to Nana, just as she opened the door, ‘And that parrot ought to be ours, by rights, and you know it!’ Of course, as I wasn’t supposed to hear what they were saying, I couldn’t ask Nana about it. It’s all very curious!”

Just at this point they glanced out of the little window and saw the pair in question trudging through the sand past the Coast-Guard Station, on their way to the old house back in the cedars. They were casting curious glances at the Station, for the Professor was still playing, and they were plainly bewildered at these sounds of melody emerging from so unlikely a source. The young lad made a motion as if to steer his mother up toward the Station door to investigate, but she pulled him back peremptorily, and they continued on their way. At the same moment the music stopped. Monsieur had also seen them through the window and called out to Marty and Ted, whom he had heard talking in the kitchen:

“Who ees zis who goes by zis so unfrequented place?” The two came into the mess-hall where the pianos stood and Marty explained to him the unlooked-for invasion. And Ted supplemented the account by giving him some of the curious facts about Thusy that he had just learned from Marty. Monsieur ran his hands through his hair and wrinkled his brows in solemn thought. Then he broke in.

“Ah! Zee parrot! How strange ees zis mystery about heem! But listen, mes enfants—moi, I make one deescoveree about heem only yesterday. I talk to heem in zee French—oh, zee very long while! He do not answer, but I keep right on. Alors—after long, long time, vat you theenk happen? I keep saying to heem, ‘Bon jour, Thusy!’ Over and over I say eet. And zen I wait. And zat parrot, he put hees head to one side, and he look like he theenk hard, and zen he say, ‘Bon-bon-bon jour—monsieur!’ ” He stopped impressively and waited for their reaction. Both looked slightly puzzled for a moment and Ted was first to catch the implication of Thusy’s response.

“But that’s wonderful!” he cried. “If Thusy had just been repeating what you said, it would have been ‘Bon jour, Thusy!’, wouldn’t it? Instead he put in ‘monsieur.’ But maybe that’s because he’s heard us calling you ‘Monsieur.’ ”

“Non, non!” cried the Professor, running his hands wildly through his much-disheveled hair. “Zat can not be so. Not enough has he heard you say zat to me. Only two-three times. Zat ‘Bon jour, monsieur!’ he learn from some one long ago who teach heem zee French. He say eet so perfect—like he learn to say eet long ago!” And he ended impressively:

“Mes enfants, leesten to me! Zat bird—he once belong to some one who ees French. He know more French zan zat. And me, I am going to find out how much he know!”