Читать книгу Admiral's Light - Henry Milner Rideout - Страница 6

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“Runagates,” said his grandfather, with mournful relish. “I had hoped you—but what’s in the blood will out. All runagates!”

Athwart the dim panes of the bedchamber, hackmatack boughs swayed to the chill drone of a dying wind. A rigid profile against twilight, the old man spoke as to some third presence. Often the boy had seen that profile, ploughing a furrow of thought which cast him aside; yet he stirred on his pillows uneasily, almost guiltily.

“So with Christopher,” continued the speaker, “and so with your father Godfrey. When they strayed off into the world, what did they become? A sailor to be drowned and a soldier to be killed. My sons were small comfort.”

“My father,” objected Miles, timid yet indignant, “was fighting for—”

“And what if he was?” exclaimed his grandfather, turning with a violent start. “Does that excuse you, sir, for scouring the country with gypsy thieves? Eh? And risking your neck at horse-jockey tricks? And lying useless abed this fortnight, while Ella and I do your work at the lights? Next you’ll slip off, like them, and then the contract for the light-keeping will be taken away, and I’ll become a pauper indeed. Runagates! Eh? What’s that? What did you mutter?”

“Nothing, sir,” said Miles. He understood now the old man’s gloom, and lay still, with long thoughts of pity and contrition. The rebuke was just: had he not been lying here, his head full of day-dreams, plans, vainglorious romance? He could ride—he had proved that; he loved the sea with an inborn longing. Which, then, was the better life, soldier’s or sailor’s? Dull peace at home, he had thought, was not to be endured. The brief spice of action, of danger, had so edged his fancy that the whole fortnight had passed among conjured shapes of adventure: brigantines navigated through seas not in the atlas, coral islands raised against the dawn, typhoons weathered, cannibals beaten off—were these better than a red whirl of cavalry, with trumpets, with sabres, with leather creaking like Jubilee’s saddle? The choice had seemed, at times, easy and immediate. And now grandfather had somehow scolded him to his senses. He could not put the new emotion into words, but in a flash he had seen that this pictured joy of living was the mere pride of life.

“What’s wrong?” grumbled the old man.

“Ankle twinged. Nothing,” replied Miles. He could not explain what brightness had died out.—Ella’s step mounted toward them, and the shadow spokes of banisters wheeled in a striped flange across the ceiling, before he spoke again.

“Don’t worry about all that, grandfather.”

The advice, the audacity, surprised them both; neither was aware that between boyhood and youth a door had closed forever.

Closed it had, nevertheless, and Miles, when afoot once more and outdoors, wondered vaguely at the change in his little world. Frost-bitten fields, white-caps on the border river, birch groves and maple shifting their bleak reticulation against a sky that threatened snow—these formed a background for new and sober thoughts. He had lost the conviction that his future must be different, transplanted and transformed, bright with surprise, excitement, and good fortune. All that was nonsense. Here lay his life, studying by day, trudging by night down to the twin lamps; for variety, he wore now his threadbare reefer, now his mittens and great helmet of moth-eaten fur; now plodded on snowshoes over drifts, where powdered gold puffed upward, at each step, into the lantern-light; now cleared the tower windows of damp snowflakes; now waded in hip-boots through pools of freshet. One deeply starred spring night, he surprised himself recalling that the girl’s name was different from Abram’s. “Perhaps she was adopted,” he thought, as he sniffed the damp sweetness of reviving earth, “or an orphan, like me.” On the heels of this, he could excuse her folly: “I was hurt, of course, and she felt sorry that she’d stumped me. Perhaps Abram would beat her, too—” Why should he speculate, so long afterward, about persons whom he would never see again?

The next years saw him grow into a young man, silent, grave, with a tranquillity that a stranger might have mistaken for contentment. On one point, indeed, he was contented: his grandfather, who had rebuked his father’s memory, could find no major fault with the second generation.

One June evening he lay stretched on the mouldered planks of the Admiral’s deck, a book of next day’s lessons opened flat before him. A sunset swarm of midges, down-sifted by a breath of air, suddenly confused Euclid’s lines and dots with a dance of jigging motes. Miles swept an impatient hand, glanced off the page, and forgot both insects and trapezoids. A boat was making straight toward him—a green “lap-streak” dinghy, rowed by some Yankee from across the river, and carrying on the stern thwart a jaunty passenger in light gray. No sooner had the boat nosed the undulating fringe of seaweed than the stranger sprang nimbly to the rocks, and scrambled over their slippery, tangled hummocks, in a diagonal course up the beach. He disappeared under a shoulder of the bank, and, as Miles still lay wondering, suddenly emerged from the firs beside the old quarter-deck.

“Hello!” he said, with an odd, pleasant intonation. “May I come in? Jolly little nook for reading, haven’t you? No, don’t get up. Just tell me how to strike the path to the house, above there, will you?”

Except the tender’s gig, no boat ever touched at Admiral’s Light. No such visitor, certainly, had landed within Miles’s recollection. Burly but active, with the body of a blacksmith or pugilist clad in pale gray flannels of a knowing, worldly cut, he seemed at once young and mature, sophisticated and breezily adventurous. The same hand which held two primly folded gloves bore on its back a foul anchor tattooed in blue. Bright gray eyes in a swarthy face, clean cutwater profile, reckless good-humor playing about the lips, bespoke one who had taken a man’s share of life with a boy’s share of amusement.

“Do you know the old gentleman that lives up there?” he continued. “Your grandfather, eh? Well, now, perhaps you can tell me. Had he a relative named Christopher?”

“That was my uncle,” said Miles, getting to his feet.

“The dickens! You!” cried the stranger, and grasped his hand. “You! Doesn’t that beat the merry Hell—elujah? You Kit Bissant’s nephew! He stood up for me when I was a prentice your size. Ever hear him tell about Florio? Tony Florio? No? That’s so, why should he? His nephew, by Jove! Isn’t it a funny little world, though?” With twinkling eyes, he studied the boy’s face, then turned abruptly. “I’m off to tackle the old gentleman. See you later!”

His footsteps rang hollow and distant on the gully foot-bridge. Miles, listening, felt unreasonably glad. Unreasonably, as often, in spite of all geography, a long hill suggests a hidden prospect of plain or ocean, as a turn of woodland road beckons to some joyful ambush or far-thought pilgrimage, so the landfall of this stranger, the alacrity and vigor of his contact, promised immediate events. Just what events, the youth, with all his eager surmise while climbing homeward through attenuate shadows, could not guess.

Their evening meal—a haddock usually, with cornbread, tea, berries, or cheese-cakes—the old man always called dinner, and further dignified by appearing in the crumpled broadcloth and linen of a bygone generation. To-night he entered with even greater solemnity, leading to their bare little table the sun-burned man in gray.

“My grandson Miles, Captain Florio,” he said. And bending his fierce old countenance toward the one flickering candle, he added in the same breath: “For the bounty of the present day, and of all days past and to come, we thank thee, O Lord, and now seek thy blessing.” With the same stiff ceremony, he did the honors for the haddock, presided over the raspberries, and ignored the flustered awkwardness of Ella.

The stranger appeared to enjoy both his fare and his company.

“Beautiful country hereabout, Mr. Bissant,” he declared heartily. “Beautiful, by George! Shore life for me, if ’twas all like this. I tell you, Miles, we’ll have a jolly time together. Show me your lighthouses to-morrow night, will you? Right! What are they, fixed? You know, once when I was wrecked off the Hook of Indramaiu—”

He rambled into stories of orient and tropic seas. Had they been of anthropophagi and antres vast, Miles could have listened no more hungrily; for even at second hand, this was the life which he once had dreamed. The sole incredibility was that such a brilliant tropic wanderer should now shine out in their gloomy, sequestered house. The mountain had come to Mahomet, the world to a captive. His grandfather, visiting Miles at bedtime, brought explanation.

“My boy,” he said—and for the first time in their life together he spoke with hesitation, almost as though making excuses to an equal—“my boy, Captain Florio is to be our—that is, hmm! well, our lodger.” Frowning at the candle flame, he brought out the word defiantly. “I should never consent to this—mercenary relation, but it seems—he was a friend of my son Christopher’s. He will stay with us for some time. It’s—it’s unnecessary to say more. Good-night.”

Humiliation underlay the speech—humiliation which Miles felt dimly, but could not share. A lodger’s money, even a damaged pride, counted little against the change from apathy to interest, from silence to fireside and table talk, from routine to variety. Next morning, indeed, five minutes after lessons, Miles had forgotten that the relation was mercenary.

“Hello,” Florio hailed him. In jersey and puttees, he looked like some heavy-weight amateur training in retirement. “Look here, how’s this? Caught Ella carrying water uphill from that gully below. There’s a spring above.” He waved up toward the site of the burned mansion.

“That hill’s too steep,” said Miles.

“Ho-ho!” laughed the other. “You’re a bright boy, aren’t you, now? Come along topside with me.”

Two joyful days followed, in which they built a little wooden aqueduct from the Admiral’s Spring down to a trough at Ella’s very door. When nails gave out, the seafarer joined their supports with marvelous temporary lashings. “Chinese trick,” he grinned. “Now we’ll run the flowage down into your gully. How’s that, señor?”

With ties no less secure he had bound Miles to admiration, as much by his manual cunning, his boyish enthusiasm for practical designs, as by his galloping accompaniment of strange tales. Hammering or sawing like a born carpenter, he recalled sharp, flashing pictures of life in antipodes—pearl-divers in Polynesia, “sun-downers,” mutinous coolies at sea, plague-stricken pilgrims to Mecca dying like flies, aboard ship; midnight murderers in sampans.

“Damn it, no Captains and Misters!” he cried once. “There, I didn’t mean—your grandfather’ll ship me off for swearing! But call me Tony. Let’s be chums.”

Chums, therefore, they became, though not without capitulation. The lighthouses first showed them certain differences.

“Do you mean,” cried the wanderer, as they stood, one evening, in the glare of the lamp-room, “do you mean to say you leave a warm bed twice every night to watch these two tame lightning-bugs? Let ’em burn, boy! Get your sleep. What the devil, they’ll not go out; or if they did, who’d know? Must be as many as one schooner a fortnight pass that ledge after dark. Ho, ho! You stay in bed!”

“But it’s our agreement,” Miles protested.

The sailor’s gray eyes twinkled.

“Roman sentinel, eh? That’s nonsense, boy. Take your beauty sleep. Let ’em burn.”

“Why, ’twouldn’t be honest,” said the young keeper, somewhat shocked.

“Honest?” jeered Florio. Then his tone changed. “Oh, well, no harm done. Strict ideas—I s’pose somebody’s bound to have ’em. Tough on you, all the same.”

The upshot of their argument was that with high good-nature Tony insisted on making the last rounds himself. “I’m used to night work. This is my pidgin. You go to bed.”

The volunteer was faithful. Often thereafter, waking by force of habit at midnight or three in the morning, Miles rose from his pillow to watch, for a luxurious instant, the sailor’s lantern bobbing along through underbrush far below. He dropped asleep with drowsy gratitude. Yet in spite of kindness and the ascendency of experience, his new friend left something unfinished, dubious, unexplained. To grandfather, the man was another commercial contract like the light-keeping, a fender against evil days, a presence courteously tolerated; to Ella—and, through her, perhaps, to the outer world—a “visitin’ gentleman,” friend of the late Captain Christopher; to Miles, a frank companion and—what?

Why should a man in the thirties, ebullient and a rover, suddenly choose to vegetate? Grandfather had called him “Mercury Resting.” For all his cheerful enthusiasm, the sailor could care little about their northern valley, the sad, rugged beauty of their border. When Miles proposed a favorite tramp, he had replied: “Kilmarnock Brook? What’s to see there? Nothing but scenery.” Nor could books dull the edge of his restlessness. “No, thank you. Not much on reading,” he replied, when grandfather gave him the freedom of the meagre “library.” And later, out of doors, he explained to Miles: “Print’s nearly all lies. Now them, why, every day, right in the open air, you can meet live men that’ll tell you them—fresh lies, not old ones—and act ’em out to boot. So why rack eyesight over print?” Meantime, he taught Miles to box, and with his aid rebuilt the kitchen chimney, pruned the deserted orchard, shored up the Admiral’s quarter-deck. Yet these employments could not last.

Again, he had said, “I’m alone in the world.” And yet after a tranquil month, he was plainly fretting about letters. He and Miles often traversed the river road, up hill and down, to the half-deserted village of Kilmarnock; and always on the final crest, the red granite ledge where, sudden as a night-hawk’s downward wheel, the freed vision of the climbers fell wide over a landward prospect, following toward the sunset alternate wedges of bright water and black crenelated headlands—there, always, the sailor paused and sat down.

“I’ll smoke here,” he said. “Great view, eh? Land and water, land and water—in layers, like Ella’s chocolate pie o’ Sundays.” Then, nodding toward the slate-gray houses clustered far below in a meadow cove: “You go on down and ask. May be a letter, this time.”

Once, when Miles clambered up again, empty-handed as ever, the sailor sat musing.

“Can you keep a secret?” he asked, with a glance at once introverted and shrewd. “We’re mates, aren’t we? Right, then. You’re the sort a man can trust. If a stranger comes asking for me, or any foreign-looking man, you know, you keep your tongue at home, and come straight to me, first. I’ll tell you why, some day. Long story—”

He watched a slim pillar of smoke rising from a cottage chimney, out of evening shadow, to vanish in the breeze on their glowing height. Then he sprang up, and started briskly homeward.

“Sometimes, you know,” he said, when they had scrambled down hill for a furlong, “sometimes, at sea, a man makes enemies.”