Читать книгу Mirthful Haven - Booth Tarkington - Страница 8

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On the morning of the first of May the early motor-bus from New Yarmouth, the railway station nearest to Mirthful Haven, set down in Cargo Square a thin, elderly woman in dark grey clothes intelligently suited to travel. The ’bus did not bring the mail, and the Square still lay bleak in its winter vacancy; the arrival of the elderly woman had the attention of only one observer. This was Willie Briggs, the one-legged, “tongue-tied” man who seldom leaves the Square, except after bedtime, no matter how calamitous the weather; his lifelong cheerful passion is to be at the centre of things, where there is the most passing of his fellow-men and the greatest likelihood of event. He turns his head frequently, with the sudden motion of a bird, lest even a cat flit across the Square and he be unaware, so sharp is his interest in life and the delight he takes in it. He cannot talk of what he sees, nor in words discuss with anyone the many matters that give him pleasure; yet he is loquacious in an expressive kind of crowing and has a talent for pantomimic gesture. Leaning against the granite pedestal of the cast-iron Union soldier, he watched eagerly, and even anxiously, the opening of the door of the New Yarmouth motor-bus and the descent of the elderly woman therefrom to the beaten dust of the Square. Instantly, he began to gesticulate and to crow with vehemence.

The ’bus went on, and the elderly woman, approaching Willie Briggs, nodded to him gravely. “You seem to remember me,” she said. “I always told people you had as good a mind as anybody and I should say your remembering me after all this time pretty well proves it.” She set down her travelling-bag, produced a black leather purse and took from it a dime, which she gave him. “You mean you do remember me, don’t you?”

The vehemence of his crowing increased reassuringly, and, in further testimonial to his memory, he held his hand at the height of her head, for an instant, then at the height of her shoulder, then at about three feet above the ground, where his gesture seemed to indicate the patting of an invisible child’s head. After that, he laughed delightedly and pointed toward the post-office.

“Exactly,” the elderly woman said. “You mean me with my two step-granddaughters, one quite a little older than the other, and the three of us usually coming down for the mail together. I suppose you know only one of them lives here now?”

His response was eloquent. He crowed loudly, laughed, looked sly, winked, then kissed his hand explosively to the sky.

The elderly woman regarded him with an increased gravity. “Very well,” she said a little grimly, and, taking up her bag, walked thoughtfully away. From the Square she turned into the short street that is like a grey Gothic aisle with a white New England church as an altar at the end of it, for the church faces down the street, and in the leafless seasons is framed, steeple and all, in the pointed archway of the elm branches. Half-way to the church, she opened a white picket-gate, stepped within, upon a gravelled path that divided a neat yard into symmetrical halves, went up the path to the front doorway of a small white house, and clanked the polished brass knocker. A stout woman of about her own age almost immediately opened the door and looked at her seriously. “Don’t you know me, Mary?” the visitor asked.

“Martha Shellpool!” the stout woman exclaimed. “Be funny if I didn’t know you, seeing’t I was expecting you and you not changed a mite in eight years! Come in; I guess it’s just as well you’re here at last. I can tell you all you care to hear and only too likely more than that! Come in.”

Mrs. Shellpool went into the house; the door closed, and thus she was removed from Willie Briggs’s field of observation. He had crossed Cargo Square, the better to see where she went, and the closing door seemed to bring upon him a slight bafflement; he put his head momentarily upon one side, like a dog in acute perplexity, then slowly returned to the other end of the Square and again eased his back upon the granite pedestal. He was still there, two hours later, when a few of his fellow-citizens began to cluster about the post-office door and Captain Francis Embury, coming down for the morning mail, crossed the Square, walking widely yet commandingly. At sight of him Willie Briggs crowed loudly and began to gesticulate insistently, pointing alternately at the Captain and at the corner of the street that led to the church.

Captain Embury stopped and regarded him whimsically. “Some friend of mine’s gone up Church Street, you say, Willie? Well, ’t wouldn’t be so unlikely. Who was it? A man?”

Willie shook his head vigorously.

“Oh, a lady! Young? No, not young. Friend of mine, though, you say. Lives on that street? No? Somewhere near here? Well, if she doesn’t, I’m sure I don’t know who it could be.” Then, as Willie nodded repeatedly to indicate that this knowledge could be easily acquired, the Captain laughed. “No; I don’t know, and I guess maybe it’s no great matter,” he said, and passed on, amused and wondering a little what lady, not young, Willie Briggs had in mind.

Several times, later in the day, this wonder vaguely recurred to him, and it was not until after three in the afternoon that Willie’s meaning was made clear to him. The Captain had just left his house to go down for the afternoon mail, when he saw, coming toward him, the figure of the elderly woman who had arrived in Mirthful Haven by the early ’bus. For a moment he thought her a stranger in the village; then, recognizing her, he smiled and walked faster to meet her. “Mrs. Shellpool!” he exclaimed; and, when they had shaken hands, he laughed. “It was you Willie Briggs was tryin’ to tell me about this mornin’, then—that you’d come back to town again after all this time and he knew I’d be delighted to see you, as I certainly am! He tried to tell me you’d gone up Church Street.”

“Yes, I spent most of the morning on that street with Mary Thomas and Clara Fogg. Just now I was coming to see you, Captain Embury.”

“Were you? We’ll go right back—”

“No,” Mrs. Shellpool said. “I was only coming to ask you to go somewhere with me.”

“Well, I—” he began, and hesitated, glancing over his shoulder at the schoolhouse. “I don’t know but I could, though I’ve got kind of an appointment for along about four o’clock this afternoon.”

“It might keep you longer than that,” Mrs. Shellpool said. “But it’s important, Captain—I don’t mean to you, but to other people. I want you to come up to Harry Pelter’s with me.”

“To Pelter’s?” he asked, and, after another glance at the schoolhouse, became thoughtful. “I see Long Harry sometimes at the post-office and along the road; but I declare I don’t believe I’ve been inside his house in all the long time since you left there, Mrs. Shellpool. Fact is, I believe the last time I was there was at your poor daughter’s funeral—must be as much as eight years ago. I’m ashamed to think how long I’ve neglected lookin’ in at Pelter’s to see how that little family was gettin’ on.”

“I suppose you know it’s only a family of two now, Captain? You know what happened to my older step-granddaughter?”

“I knew she left here two three years ago,” he said, and added, with a little embarrassment, “I never was a great hand to listen to gossip.”

“It’s worse than gossip,” Mrs. Shellpool informed him gravely. “The worst that could be said would be true, I’m afraid. You say you’re ashamed of not having looked in on that little family for so long a time; think of how much more cause I have to be ashamed of myself for the same reason! I never could understand why my daughter married Harry Pelter, except that he had a queer, fascinating power over her and she’d never seen how he lived until he brought her here after they were married. When she died I felt I could never bear to see the place again, though I knew Providence had sent me a duty to perform toward those two young stepdaughters of hers that we were both so fond of. They were nice children then, too; it was my duty to keep them nice—and I failed to perform it. Well, every year my conscience has been heavier and heavier upon me for it, until lately I just couldn’t stand its pressure. I’ve got hold of the older girl, Nettie, the one that ran away, and I’ve tried to do what I could with her. Now I’ve got to get hold of the younger one and I want you to help me because you’re the one person in the world who has any influence with Harry Pelter.”

“Me?” the Captain said uneasily. “Well, I don’t know that I—”

“Yes, you have,” she said earnestly. “His father sailed with you and brought him up to respect you and your opinions—about all he’s ever respected in this world, I think! I haven’t seen him yet; I want you to go with me because he’ll listen to me if you’re there and seem to be in sympathy with me. I spent a good part of the morning listening to terrible stories, Captain Embury—and if this child’s to be helped at all, it must be done now or she’ll be utterly lost. She can’t be wholly hardened yet; she’s only fifteen, and they say that in her studies she’s one of the brightest pupils in the high school here. As a little child, when I knew her, she was always gentle and affectionate, and such a pretty little thing, too—beautiful I’d call her, with eyes the clearest blue I ever saw in my whole life and the loveliest light brown hair!”

“Light brown?” the Captain said inquiringly. “Not reddish?”

“Yes, maybe a little, as I recollect it; it looked reddish at a distance.”

“Well, well!” the Captain said, and his eyes sparkled. “Then don’t you believe a single word Mary Thomas and Clara Fogg said about her—not a single word! Pair o’ biddybodies—”

“No, no, Captain, they’re good, kind women, and that makes what they’ve told me all the more terrible. Besides, there were others who told me: Jennie Bailey and—”

“All biddybodies!” the Captain insisted loudly. “Don’t you believe a word they say! Long Harry Pelter’s daughter, is she? Well, well! Old Harry Pelter’s granddaughter! Not a single word o’ truth in what those old biddybodies told you about her, Mrs. Shellpool, not a single word! Always were one o’ the best lookin’ families in the world, all the Pelters! Might ’a’ guessed who she was, long ago! Finest girl in Mirthful Haven and don’t let anybody coax you into doubtin’ it for an instant!”

Mrs. Shellpool shook her head. “No. I’m afraid you haven’t heard—”

“No, and don’t want to!” the Captain said stoutly. “Don’t want to hear! Always be jealous, biddybodies will, and stirrin’ up talk because their own children look like a shillin’s worth o’ brass filin’s alongside of a Ceylon pearl. Finest girl in a thousand! Finest in a million! Don’t ever let anybody—”

“You’ll go with me, Captain?”

“I certainly will!” he said with vigor. “This board walk’s too narrow for the two of us alongside, but if you’ll just turn around and walk ahead of me until we get to River Road I’ll beg you to do me the honor to take my arm and let me act as convoy the rest o’ the way to Pelter’s.”

He went on talking, in his hearty and sonorous voice, as they walked to the corner in the order of precedence he had suggested; then they turned into River Road, and the street of the ancient sea magnates was quiet again. Its peace was disturbed some minutes later by the noisy exodus of the lower grade pupils from the schoolhouse, and, at four o’clock, by the less impetuous coming forth of the high school students; but, at half-past four, when Edna Pelter was released, alone, from the ugly building, the stately neighborhood was once more all silent, except for a steady whispering from the distant surf. The girl’s face was flushed and brooding; her eyes seemed disturbed by an anxiety and her mouth was set with the stubbornness that still remained upon it after half an hour’s interview with the Principal of the high school. He had detained her for an intricate questioning into the matter of Nina Grier’s sweater; this was by no means her first subjection to such probings, moreover, and she had begun to fear that the mere interminableness of the results of an act generally held to be sinful might in time break down her energy for denial. She walked home gloomily by River Road, meeting no one; but, as she turned from the sidewalk and stepped upon the outermost plank of the front yard at Pelter’s, she halted, hearing from within the house the astonishing sound of Captain Francis Embury’s loud, sailor voice.

“What in the world!” she murmured; and her troubled imagination presented her on the instant with the stricken conjecture that the Captain was accompanied by a deputy sheriff and had come to Pelter’s upon the matter of the sweater. Edna had read insatiably the autumn leavings of the summer cottagers and she had been often to the motion-picture theatre at New Yarmouth; the Captain was the rich man of the village and undoubtedly of late had curled his moustache for her benefit. Would he first hound her, then malignantly offer to protect her? She went on tiptoe to listen close by the front door, and what she heard was incomparably more startling than the sinister fragment of drama just sketched by her imaginings.

“ ’Tisn’t the most important question at all, Harry,” the Captain was saying. “Whether or not legal adoption papers are goin’ to be made out for your daughter, why, that doesn’t so much matter. The question you have settled was the main one: whether you were goin’ to keep her here or let her have a good home and higher education and a woman’s care, such as she needs, and a chance to get something better out of her life than she’ll ever have here under the circumstances her step-grandmother’s been talkin’ about. I don’t for a minute say it isn’t goin’ to be a sacrifice or that you mightn’t have needed her here to cook for you, wash dishes, make beds and—”

“Never mind ’bout all that,” Long Harry’s voice interrupted. “I did my own cookin’ and so on plenty well enough when the children was little, and I lived here alone right enough before I ever was married. The idea of jest bein’ here alone don’t fret me a mite and maybe you’ll laugh when I tell you what’s the main cause, as you might say, Cap’n, why I keep on a-hesitatin’ to do what you say, no doubt rightly, is the good thing to do. Yet I guess maybe you’re the very one man that’d understand me best. You see Pelter is an old name here—”

“I know ’tis; no one knows that better ’n I do.”

“Well, the name dies out with me, Cap’n, and of course that can’t be helped; but, when my time comes, I kind o’ would like to think that some o’ the old blood was goin’ on here in Mirthful Haven, and there wouldn’t be any chance o’ that if Edna—”

“Why wouldn’t there?” the Captain’s voice cried testily. “She could come back here some day, couldn’t she, if she’s a-mind to? After she comes of age, or ’most any time her step-grandmother’d be willin’, she could come back, couldn’t she? Certainly hope she will, myself, because already she’s the best ornament Mirthful Haven’s got, no matter about all that biddybody talk. I wouldn’t urge on any man to sign papers declarin’ that he’d never in his whole life even so much as lay eyes on his own child again! Adoption papers or not, the main thing is that her step-grandmother is goin’ to take her away and have her for two three years or more until—”

“Take who away?” Edna gasped, and, throwing open the door, walked into the big room to stare dazedly at the three people who sat there engaged in this strange consultation. “Take who away?”

Captain Embury jumped up with a lightness of movement unweighted by the number of his years, and came to her. “I’m Captain Francis Embury, Edna Pelter,” he said. “I’m an old friend of all your family, though you may not remember me and—”

“Yes, I know you,” she said, looking not at him but at her father, who sat meditatively in a broken rocking-chair and did not even glance up at her. “What’s this talk about my goin’ away somewheres?”

“Your step-grandma’d better tell you, I think,” the Captain said gently, with a deferential gesture toward Mrs. Shellpool. “It’s what she’s here for.”

Mrs. Shellpool’s gloved fingers fumbled with a dampened handkerchief in her lap as she leaned forward to look searchingly at the agitated girl before her. “Don’t you know me, Edna? Don’t you remember me?”

“Yes. What’s this talk about somebody takin’ me away somewheres?”

Mrs. Shellpool did not reply directly. “You’re almost sixteen, aren’t you? You’re growing up to be as pretty as you were when you were a little child,” she said. “They all admit that about you, Edna; but they think it makes matters the worse. You need somebody to take care of you, child.”

“Do I? Guess us Pelters can look out for ourselves!”

“You wouldn’t mind being with me, would you?” Mrs. Shellpool asked gravely. “I don’t mean you’d be with me all the time; you’d be in school, of course. Perhaps you don’t remember very much about me. When I was young I taught school myself for a few years before I was married, and my best friend was another teacher, Miss Branch. She has one of the best girls’ schools in the country, now, at Stony Brook in New Jersey, where I live, Edna. She’s willing to take you as a day pupil next September if I prepare you during the summer, and that won’t be difficult if I take you to Stony Brook now to live with me. You do remember at least that I was kind to you when you were little, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. But I’m not goin’ anywheres to live.”

“Wait,” Mrs. Shellpool said. “You’re old enough to understand what we’ve been trying to make clear to your father, Edna. I’m entirely alone in the world now; you and Nettie are only step-relatives, but you’re the nearest I have. I’ve seen Nettie, and I’ve done what I could for her; but I was too late for it to amount to a great deal. I can do more for you, because you’re younger. I can’t leave you any money in my will, because I live on an annuity—I want to explain everything to you, Edna—but I can give you proper care and an excellent education. If you were my own daughter I’d rather have you at Miss Branch’s school than at any girls’ college, and you’ll be comfortable in the cottage where I live, at Stony Brook; you won’t have to cook or do housework, because I keep a servant. You’ll have suitable clothes and—”

“I don’t want ’em!” Edna said suddenly and fiercely; but she had begun to tremble all over. “I don’t want ’em!”

“Edna, your father’s consented to your going with me,” Mrs. Shellpool returned quietly. “All that remains to be settled is whether or not this is to be a legal adoption; but that’s a point I won’t stress, because it’s immaterial.”

“You say—” Edna began; then she walked to her father and stood before him, while he still did not look up at her but sat fumbling with his pipe and seemingly engaged in a gloomy contemplation of it. “She claims you ’greed to it,” the daughter said huskily. “Leastways, she—she claims you did!”

“Well—” Long Harry polished the bowl of his pipe against the palm of his hand. “Cap’n Embury and my mother-in-law certain’y ’peared to have some good arguments. Too stiff fer me to answer, anyways. I like to have you with me—always did git along all right together—but of course it would be a nice thing to have you fixed to do better than Nettie’s done, I guess. Tells me all she could do fer Nettie was to kind o’ reform her—guess you might call it so—and fix her up in a private family in Lynn, or somewheres, doin’ housework. Hired help!” He laughed with some bitterness, and added ruefully, “Kind of a comedown in the world fer Pelters, you might say. Guess it’d be a good thing if you could git as far up as Nettie’s gone down.”

Edna’s trembling increased, and she stared at him with eyes widened to their utmost. “You—you ’greed to—to let me—”

“Well—” His attention still seemed concentrated upon the polishing of his pipe. “Yes—guess I did!”

“Well, I haven’t!” she said thickly, and turned a quivering face upon Mrs. Shellpool and the Captain. “Guess you better—you better ask me whether I want to get adopted or not, hadn’t you? Guess you better ask me whether I’m goin’ to—whether I’m goin’ to leave Mirthful Haven or not, hadn’t you? Guess you better—” But here her voice failed; she tried to control her trembling and the twitching of her lips and eyelids so that the intruders should see before them a firmly defiant figure never to be overcome. For the first time since her stepmother’s death, somebody was trying to be useful to her; the only distinction she made between this effort and the selfish pressures that had been put upon her to do things she did not wish to do was that she found this one staggeringly the more painful. She had usually yielded to the other pressures and had only despair to oppose to this one, since her father abandoned her to it. Dismally overwhelmed by the suddenness with which her life already seemed to be changing, and herself bereft of the one being for whom she passionately cared, she was still impelled to offer the show of a resistance that she herself knew had no substance. “Better ask me, I guess,” she said again, indistinctly; but her breathing had become too rapid and her trembling too violent to be exhibited endurably before these virtual strangers. She ran to the rickety stairway and fled upward, clutching the stretched rope that served for a railing. “Better ask me, hadn’t you?” she tried to cry fiercely as she went; but was unable to make the sounds she uttered into words.