Читать книгу Tobias o' the Light - James A. Cooper - Страница 5

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Old Winter wrapped in his grave clothes stalked the flats and sand dunes about the Twin Rocks Light. Spring had smiled at the grim old fellow only the day before. She would flutter back again anon to dry the longshore wastes and warm to life the scant herbage that tries its best to clothe the Cape Cod barrens.

But now the wind blew and the sleet charged against the staff of the lighthouse, masking thickly the glass that defended the huge Argand lamp. Its steady ray filtered through this curtain with difficulty.

Tobias Bassett pulled on his oilskins and buckled down the sou'wester over his ears preparatory to venturing upon the high gallery to scrape the clinging snow from the glass.

"You have a care what you're doing up there, slipping around outside the light," advised his sister Hephzibah, who should have been named "Martha," being cumbered by so many cares. "You ain't so young as you used to be, Tobias."

"And you don't have to throw it up to me. I know my age well enough without looking into the family Bible, Heppy," chuckled the lightkeeper. "I'm sure you ain't changed it. I ain't cal'latin' to be like old Miz' Toomey that when she went to vote for the first time told the poll clerk she was thirty-six years old but had lived in this district fifty-four years. I ain't goin' to let go all holts yet. Leastways, not while I'm climbing about that gallery!"

"You'd ought to have an assistant, Tobias," sighed his sister, who was preparing supper, always served at an early hour in winter on the Cape. "A young fellow to do the hard work. The Government ought to give you one."

"They think one man to a stationary lamp like this is enough. But I can have a helper if I want one," her brother announced.

"Then, why don't ye?"

"'Cause I'd have to pay his wages out o' my own pay check, and feed him in the bargain," chuckled the lightkeeper. "I figger we can't afford that."

"Oh, dear!" croaked the lachrymose Heppy, "if Uncle Jethro Potts would only leave us some of his money when he dies. The good Lord knows we need it as much as ary rel'tive he's got."

"Wal," commented Tobias, picking up his lighted lantern, "Jethro Potts has got to slip his cable pretty soon to do us much good, Heppy. We're getting kind o' along in years to enjoy wealth."

"Speak for yourself, Tobias Bassett!" said his sister, more energetically. "I ain't too old to know what to do with money—if I had it."

"Ho, ho!" ejaculated her brother. "Slipper's on t'other foot, ain't it? I wonder what age you give the poll clerk?" and he went out of the kitchen chuckling.

He mounted the spiral stairway leading up through the lighthouse. After passing the level of the second story, where were the family bedrooms, at intervals there were narrow windows—mere slits in the masonry. These were blocked with glass and only on the leeward side could Tobias see through them.

"Winter's dying hard," was his comment, climbing steadily to the lamp room. "This squall come as sudden and as savage as ary storm we've had this winter. And the sleet sticks to the glass like all kildee!"

He stepped into the lamp room, closing the door at the top of the stairway. It was warm in here, with a strong and sickish smell of burning oil. He shaded his eyes with the sharp of his hand to look into the lamp, the wick of which he had ignited half an hour before.

It was burning evenly and with a white clear light. But warm as the lamp room was and strong as was the reflection of the light upon the outer panes, the sleet had frozen to the glass, making a lacework curtain which the warning ray of the lamp could pierce only with difficulty.

Tobias took a steel scraper and an old broom, opened a door at the back, and went out upon the leeward gallery of the light. The snow wraiths swept past the staff on either hand, whipping away over the sand dunes and disappearing in the pall of darkness that hovered over the land.

When he ventured around to the front gallery he found a pallid radiance on the sea superinduced by the muffled ray of the lamp. The snow, driven by the gale, plastered the light tower on this side from its cap ten feet above the lamp to that point twenty feet above its base to which the spray from the wavecaps was thrown. There was a drift of snow, too, on the railed balcony, through which the lightkeeper waded.

"Whew!" he gasped, turned his back to the blast, and began using the scraper vigorously. "I can see I've got an all night's job at this off an' on if this sleet holds to it. Ain't going to be heat enough from that old lamp to melt the ice as fast as it makes."

He muttered this into the throat-latch of his storm coat while using the scraper. The frozen sleet rattled down in long ribbons. He dropped the scraper finally and seized his broom. It was then that he first heard that cry which was the tocsin of the unexpected series of events which marched into Tobias Bassett's life out of this late winter storm.

He dropped the broom and strained his ears for a repetition of the cry. Was it the voice of some lost seafowl swept landward on the breast of the storm? A gale out of the northeast brought many such to be dashed lifeless at the foot of the lamp tower.

There was a human quality to this sound he had heard that startled Tobias. If from the sea, then the craft on which the owner of the voice was borne, was doomed.

There had not been a wreck on the Twin Rocks within the present lightkeeper's experience. He shuddered to think of the horror of such a catastrophe.

A vessel driven upon the grim jaws of the reef that here were out-thrust from the sands, would be wracked to mere culch within the hour. The life savers from Lower Trillion could never put off a boat or shoot a line into the teeth of such a gale as this.

Tobias stooped for the broom again. Then he heard the cry repeated. If it came on the wings of the wind——

He scrambled around to the leeward side of the tower. Here the savage pæan of the storm was muffled. The drumming of the waves on the rocks, the eerie shriek of the wind, the clash of the snow and sleet as they swept by, left the lightkeeper in a sort of unquiet eddy.

Against the gale came a repetition of the cry—a faint "Ahoy!"

Tobias struggled with the latch of the lamp room door, and finally got inside the tower. He hurried to the stairway and descended to the warm and odorous kitchen where Heppy was heaping the brown and flaky fishcakes upon the platter on the stove-shelf.

"What is the matter with you to-night, Tobias Bassett?" she demanded. "You're as uneasy as a hen on a hot brick. Where are you going now?" as he started for the outer door.

"There's somebody out in this storm," he told her. "I heard 'em shouting."

"For love's sake! In a boat?"

"No. From the land side. Somebody on the road."

Tobias banged the door behind him. In clear weather there was not much to be seen from the entrance of the lighthouse in this landward direction, save sand. Now about all Tobias could see was snow.

"Ahoy! Aho-o-oy the light!"

The cry was shattered against the singing gale. But the lightkeeper made out the direction from which it came and started down the road toward Lower Trillion. In the other direction were the summer residences of certain wealthy citizens on the Clay Head. While beyond lay Clinkerport at the head of the bay, the entrance to which the lighthouse guarded.

Tobias announced his coming by a hearty hail. He saw a muffled glow in the snow pall ahead. Then the outlines of a low-hung motor car that was quite evidently stalled in a drift.

"Hey!" he demanded. "What you doing in that contraption out in this storm? Ain't you got no sense?"

"Now don't you begin!" rejoined a complaining voice, and a rather stalky figure appeared in the half-shrouded radiance of the headlights. "I've been told already what I am and where I get off. It isn't my fault that blame thing got stalled."

"It is your fault that we came this way from Harbor Bar," interposed a very sweet but at present very sharp voice. ("Jest like cranberry sarse," Tobias secretly commented.) "We should not have taken the shore road."

"You didn't say so when we started," declared the tall young man, indignantly.

"I was not driving the car. You insisted on doing that," chimed the tart voice instantly.

"One would think you expected me to be omniscient."

"Well, you appear to be omnipresent—you are always in the way," and a much shorter figure, muffled in furs, and quite evidently that of a young woman, appeared beside the taller individual from the stalled car.

"And I cal'late, Heppy," Tobias explained, relating the event later to his sister, "that them two socdologers of words would have brought on a fist fight if I hadn't stepped into the breach, so to say, and the smaller of them castaways hadn't been a gal! Some day when I get time I'm going to look up 'omniscient' and 'omnipresent' in the dictionary. They sound like mighty mean words."

It was the lightkeeper's interference that saved further and more bitter words between the two stranded voyagers. Tobias got another look at the taller figure's face, and in spite of the pulled-down peak of his cap and the goggles he wore, recognized it.

"If 'tain't Ralph Endicott!" exclaimed the lightkeeper. "And who is that with you? Not Miss Lorna?"

"Oh, Mr. Bassett!" cried the young woman, stumbling toward him. "Take me to the light. I shall be so glad of its shelter. Is Miss Hephzibah at home?"

"She was when I left," said Tobias. "An' I cal'late she won't go gaddin' endurin' this gale. It don't show right good sense for anybody to be out such a night."

"That's what I tell him," the girl cried. "Anybody with sense——"

"You wanted to come over here and see what shape the house was in, Lorna Nicholet!" stormed Ralph Endicott. "I was only doing you a favor."

"Do you call this a favor?" demanded the girl.

"Anybody would think I brought this storm on purposely."

"You certainly tried to get through a road that you should have known would be drifted when it did begin to snow. Bah! Give me your arm, Mr. Bassett. He's the most useless——"

"Ain't no good you staying out here, Ralphie," advised the old lightkeeper. "Nobody will run off with that little buzz-cart of yourn. Heppy's got fish balls for supper—a whole raft of 'em."

The young man followed through the snow, grumbling. The prospect of a good meal, as Tobias later acknowledged, did not seem to influence a college man as it once might the long-legged harum-scarum boy who had raced these beaches for so many summers.

Endicott and Lorna Nicholet were of the sandpiper class. So Tobias usually referred to the summer visitors who fluttered about the sands for several months of each year. These young folks had been coming to Clay Head each season since they were in rompers. Lorna's aunt, Miss Ida Nicholet of Harbor Bar, and head of the family, owned the rambling old house overlooking the mouth of the bay. The Endicotts—"the Endicotts of Amperly," to distinguish them from numerous other groups of the same name whose habitat dot the sea-coast of Massachusetts—usually occupied one of the bungalows on Clay Head during the summer.

"See what the gale blowed in, Heppy," was the lightkeeper's announcement as he banged open the outer door.

His sister turned, frying-fork in hand, and peered through her spectacles at the snow-covered figures of the visitors. She was a comfortably built person, was Hephzibah Bassett, with rosy-brown, unwrinkled face, despite her unacknowledged age of fifty-odd. Her iron-gray hair was parted in the center and crinkled over her ears in tiny plaits, being caught in a small "bob" low on her plump neck behind. She never went to bed at night without braiding her hair on the side in several "pigtails" (to use her brother's unsavory expression) to be combed out into this wavy effect when she changed her house gown in the afternoon. It was a style of hair-dressing which, if old-fashioned, became her well.

There was something very wholesome and kindly appearing about Hephzibah Bassett. She might not possess the shrewdness of her brother, the lightkeeper, and she did nag a good bit. Yet spinsterhood had not withered her smile nor squeezed dry her fount of human kindness.

"For love's sake!" she cried now, when she had identified the petite figure shaking its furs free of the sticky snow. "If 'tain't Lorny Nicholet! Do come and give me a kiss, Lorny. I can't leave these fishballs or they'd scorch."

The girl wriggled out of her coat and let it drop to the braided mat. She was just such a looking girl as one might expect from her name. There was French blood in the Nicholets. Lorna was distinctly of the brunette type, small limbed, as lithe as a feline. Perhaps that was why she could scratch! There were little short curls framing her broad, low forehead. The gloss of a crow's wing accentuated the blackness of her hair.

Her face glowed now from facing the storm—or was it from indignation? Her eyes sparkled so luminously that one could not be sure whether they were black or brown. She was one of those girls who seem all alive, all of the time. She had the alert appearance of a wild bird on the twig—ready for instant flight.

"Oh, how good it smells in here, Miss Heppy!" She fluttered across the big kitchen and imprinted upon the woman's cheek a warm kiss. She hugged, too, the ample arm that Heppy did not use in turning the fishballs in the deep frying kettle.

"You certain sure give us a surprise, Lorny," said the lightkeeper's sister.

"Of course I intended giving you a call as we passed," the girl said. "But I started for the special purpose of looking over the house for Aunt Ida and listing such new things as we shall need for the summer. This doesn't look much like summer, does it?"

"Oh, it's the last quintal of winter, I cal'late," said the woman, spearing a brown cake. "Lucky I made a mess of these. I didn't really expect any visitors to-night."

"That's just it, Miss Heppy! How will I ever get back to Harbor Bar to-night?"

"You won't. Why should you? Your aunt will know you are safe—with him."

Miss Heppy glanced slyly around at Ralph Endicott, whom she had but briefly greeted. The girl, seeing her glance, pouted.

"I wish you wouldn't!" she said in a low voice. "It fairly gets on my nerves. Everybody does it."

"Does what, child?" asked Miss Heppy, with surprise.

"Takes it for granted that Ralph Endicott and I are engaged."

"Wal—you be sort o' young, I suppose——"

"If I was forty I wouldn't be engaged to him!" flared up Lorna.

"For love's sake!" exclaimed the woman. "Don't say that. Though at forty you ought to've been married to him a good many years," and she broke into an unctuous chuckle that shook her ample bosom like jelly.

"I'll never marry him!" cried the girl, but under her breath.

"Now, now!" urged Miss Heppy. "You always be quarreling with Ralphie. But you know they're jest love spats. He's a good fellow——"

"You don't know what it means, Miss Heppy, to a girl to have a man just forced on her. Everybody trying to make her take him, willy-nilly."

"Um-m. None warn't never forced on me," admitted the woman, dividing her attention between the frying fishballs and Lorna's affair of the heart. "But I reckon, Lorna, they couldn't force a better boy on you."

"That is one of the worst phases of it," declared the girl seriously. "There is not one single, solitary thing to be said against Ralph's character. Unless—well, there was a girl when he went to college. At least, so they say. But I suppose all boys must have their foolish puppy-love affairs," concluded Lorna, with an owllike appearance of wisdom that revealed the quite unsophisticated girl who believes she "knows it all."

Miss Heppy merely stared. In her secluded life love was love. There were no gradations known either as "puppy-love" or by other terms of rating.

"It isn't that Ralph isn't good enough, Miss Heppy," whispered the girl. "But he's been thrown at me all my life long!" She was not yet twenty-one. "I just won't marry him."

She stamped her foot on the hearth. Tobias, who had been leisurely taking off his storm coat and unbuckling the strap of his sou'wester as he talked cheerfully to the rather glum looking Ralph, now turned to the women.

"I feel some like stomping in my stall, too," was his comment upon Lorna's emphatic punctuation of her whispered defiance. "Bear a hand with the supper, Heppy. I've got to go up to the gallery again and clear the snow off the lamp. It surely does stick to-night. I was just getting the glass clear when I heard you young folks shouting for rescue.

"Come, Miss Lorna! Come, Ralph! Pull up cheers for yourselves. Supper's ready, I cal'late, ain't it, Heppy?"