Читать книгу Flint: His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes - Maud Wilder Goodwin - Страница 7

"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."

The road from the station at South East to Nepaug Beach was long and dusty, tedious enough to the traveller at any time, but especially on this July afternoon when the sun beat down pitilessly upon its arid stretches, and the dust, stirred by passing wheels, rose in choking masses.

Jonathan Flint, however, surveyed the uninteresting length of highway with grim satisfaction. It was the inaccessibility and general lack of popular attractions which had led him to select Nepaug as a summering place. Mosquitoes and sand-fleas abounded; but one need not say "good-morning" to mosquitoes and sand-fleas, it is true. The fare at the inn was poor; but one was spared that exchange of inanities which makes the average hotel appear a kindergarten for a lunatic asylum; and, finally, the tediousness of the journey was a safeguard [Pg 12] against the far greater tedium resulting from the companionship of "nauseous intruders," striding in white duck, or simpering under rose-lined parasols.

The horse which was drawing the ramshackle carryall in which Flint sat, toiled on with sweating haunches, switching his tail, impatient of the flies, and now and then shaking his head deprecatingly, as if in remonstrance against the fate which destined him to work so hard for the benefit of a lazy human being reclining at ease behind him.

Flint was, indeed, the image of slothful content, as he sat silent by the side of old Marsden, who drove like a woman, with a rein in each hand, twitching them uselessly from time to time, and clucking like a hen to urge on his horse when the sand grew unusually deep and discouraging.

Ignoring his companion, or dreading perhaps to let loose the floods of his garrulity by making any gap in the dam of silence, Flint sat idly inspecting his fishing-tackle, shutting it up, then drawing it out, and finally topping it with the last, light, slender tip, quivering like the outmost delicate twig of an aspen as he shook it over the side of the carryall. In fancy, he saw it bending beneath the weight of a black bass such as haunted the translucent depths of a fresh[Pg 13] water pond a mile or two away. In fancy, he could feel the twitch at the end of the line, then the run, then the steady pull, growing weaker and weaker as the strength of the fish was exhausted. Suddenly into the idler's lotus-eating Paradise came a rushing sound. A sharp swerve of the horse was followed by an exasperating crackle, and, lo! the beloved fishing-rod was broken—yes, broken, and that delicate, quivering, responsive, tapering end lay trailing in the dust which whirled in eddies around a flying vehicle.

Flint saw flashing past him a racing sulky drawn by a half-tamed colt, and driven by a girl—if indeed it was a girl and not, as he was at first inclined to think, a boy in petticoats.

The young woman took the situation jauntily. She reined in the colt, adjusted her jockey-cap, and pulled her dog-skin gauntlets further over her sleeves.

"I beg your pardon," she called out as Flint's wagon overtook her. "I'm awfully sorry to have broken your rod; but I saw that we had room to pass, and I didn't see the pole hanging out. It never occurred to me," she added with a dimpling smile, "that any one would be fishing on the Nepaug road."

Flint had labored hard to subdue the outburst of profanity which was the first impulse of the [Pg 14] natural man, and had almost achieved a passing civility, but the smile and the jest put his good resolutions to flight. The milk of human kindness curdled within him.

"You could hardly," he answered, raising his hat, "have been more surprised than I was to see a horse-race."

A trace of resentment lingered in his tone. The mirth died out of the girl's eyes. She returned his bow quietly, leaned forward and touched the colt with the tassel of her whip. The creature reared and plunged.

"Great Heavens!" exclaimed Flint, preparing to jump out and go to her assistance.

"Let her alone!" said Marsden, with unmoved calmness, shifting the tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other. "That girl don't need no guardeen. She's been a-drivin' raound here all summer, and I reckon she knows more about managin' that there colt'n you do. It's my colt, and I wouldn't let her drive it ef she didn't."

"I hope to thunder you won't again, at least while I'm about, unless you intend to pay for damage to life and property," Flint answered testily.

By this time colt and driver had been whirled away in a cloud, Elijah-like.

"Nice kind of a girl that!" said Flint to [Pg 15] himself with savage, solitaire sarcasm. He felt that he had appeared like a fool; and it must be a generous soul which can forgive one who has been both cause and witness of such humiliation. To conquer his irritation, Flint proceeded to take his injured rod to pieces, and repack it gloomily in its bag of green felt. When he looked up again, all petty annoyances faded out of his mind, for there ahead of him, behind the little patch of pines, lay the great cool, cobalt stretch of ocean, unfathomably deep, unutterably blue.

The young man felt a vague awe and exaltation tugging at his heart. But the only outward expression they gained was a throwing back of the head, and a deep indrawing of the breath, followed by the quite uninspired exclamation, "Holloa, there's the ocean!"

"Why shouldn't it be there?" inquired the practical Marsden. "You didn't think it had got up and moved inland after you left, did you?"

"Well, I didn't know," Flint answered carelessly. "I've seen it come in a good two hundred feet while I was here, and I couldn't tell how far it might have been carried, allowing for its swelling emotions over my departure. But I'm glad to see it at the old stand still; and there's the pond too, and the cross-roads and the [Pg 16] Nepaug Inn. I declare, Marsden, it is like its owner—grows better looking as it gets old and gray."

Marsden's face assumed that grim New England smile which gives notice that a compliment has been received and its contents noted, but that the recipient does not commit himself to undue satisfaction therein.

"Yes," he responded, "the old inn weathers the winters down here pretty middlin' well; but it's gettin' kind o' broken down, and its doors creak in a storm like bones that's got the rheumatiz. I wish I could afford to give it a coat o' paint."

"Ah!" said Flint, with a shrug, "I hope, for my part, you never can! I can see it now as it would be if you had your way—spick and span in odious, glaring freshness, insulting the gray old ocean. The only respectable buildings in America are those which the owner is too poor to improve."

Marsden turned sulky. He did not more than half understand Flint's remarks; but he had a dim impression that he was being lectured, and he did not enjoy it; few of us do.

Flint, however, was wholly unconscious of having given offence. It would have been difficult to make him understand what there was objectionable in his remark, and indeed the [Pg 17] offence lay more in the tone than in the words. Flint's sympathies were imperfect, and he had no gift for discerning the sensitiveness which lay outside his sphere of vision. To all that came within that rather limited range, he was kind and considerate; beyond, he saw nothing and therefore felt nothing.

Yet he himself was keenly sensitive, especially to anything approaching ridicule. He had not yet forgiven his parents, for instance, for naming him Jonathan Edwards. He was perpetually alive to the absurdity of the contrast.

"What if the great Jonathan was an ancestor! Why flaunt one's degeneracy in the face of the public?" As soon as he arrived at years of discretion, he had proceeded to drop the Jonathan from his name; but it was continually cropping up in unexpected places to annoy him. The very trunk strapped onto the back of the carryall, that sole-leather trunk which had travelled with him ever since he started off as a freshman for the university, was marked, in odiously prominent letters, "Jonathan Edwards Flint."

It provoked him now as he reflected that that female Jehu must have seen it as she drove by. Perhaps that accounted for the suspicion of a smile on her face. He didn't care a fig what she thought, and he longed to tell her so.

[Pg 18]

The most tedious road has an ending, and the Nepaug highway was no exception, except that instead of a dignified and impressive ending, it only narrowed to a grass-grown track, and finally pulled up in the backyard of the Nepaug Inn. The inn had stood in this same spot since the days of Washington, and there was a tradition that he had spent a night beneath its roof, though it puzzled even legend-mongers to invent an errand which could have taken him there, unless he was seized with a sudden desire for salt-water bathing, and even then it must have been of a peculiar kind, for the inn stood far back from the ocean, at the head of a salt-water pond, shadeless and low-banked, a mere inlet of the sea.

This pond, however, was the great attraction of Nepaug to Flint, for in one of its coves lay an ungainly boat of which he was the happy owner. She was a bargain, and, like most bargains, had proved a dear purchase. True, the hull had cost only five dollars and the sails ten; but she yawed so badly that a new rudder had become a necessity, and that article, being imported, cost almost more than hull and sails together. When all was done, however, and a new coat of paint applied, Flint vowed she was worth any sixty-dollar boat on the pond. Once afloat in "The Aquidneck" (for so Flint had [Pg 19] christened her, finding her a veritable "isle of peace" to his tired nerves) he seemed to become a boy again. The Jonathan in him got the upper hand. All the super-subtleties of self-analysis which in other conditions paralyzed his will, and congealed his manner, gave place here to the genial glow of careless happiness.

It was his fate to be dominated alternately through life by the differing strains in his blood: one, flowing through the veins of the old Puritans, chilled by the creed of Calvin; the other, of a more expansive strain perpetually mocking the strenuousness of its companion mood. Flint's friends were wont to say, "Flint will do something some day." His enemies, or rather his indifferents, scoffingly asked, "What has Flint ever done anyway?" Flint himself would have answered, "Nothing, my friends, less than nothing; but more than you, because he is aware that he has done nothing."

The morning after Flint's arrival at Nepaug broke clear and cloudless, yet he was in no haste to be up and actively enjoying it. Instead, he lay a-bed, taking an indolent satisfaction in the thought that no bustling duty beckoned him, and amusing himself by a leisurely survey of the various corners of his bed-room.

It was scarcely eight feet in height, and the heavy, whitewashed beams made it look still [Pg 20] lower. In the narrow space between the ceiling and wainscot, the wall was covered with an old-fashioned paper, florid of design, and musty of odor. On the mantel-shelf stood two brass candle-sticks with snuffer and extinguisher. As Flint stared idly at them, wondering what varied scenes their candles had shone upon, his eyes were drawn above them to a picture which, once having seen, he wondered that he could ever have overlooked so long. It was a portrait of great beauty. He propped himself on his elbows to study it more closely.

"It looks like a Copley," he said to himself, "or perhaps a Gilbert Stuart. How the devil could such a picture get here, and how could I have failed to see it last year? I must have it—of course I must! It is absurd that it should be wasted here! I wonder if Marsden knows anything of its value?"

Here Flint fell back upon his pillow and found, to his disgust, that his metaphysical conscience was already at work on the problem of the equity of a bargain in which the seller is ignorant of facts known to the buyer, and whether the buyer is in honor bound not to take advantage of his professional training.

The picture which had given rise to this long and complicated train of thought was the portrait of a young woman in Quaker dress, her [Pg 21] hair rolled back above a low and subtle brow, her lace kerchief demurely folded over a white neck. Her head was bent a little to one side, and rested upon her hand. At her breast sparkled a ruby—a spot of rich, luminous flame.

"That is odd," thought Flint. "I fancied Quakers never wore jewels—conscientiously opposed to them, and all that sort of thing. Perhaps this damsel was a renegade from the faith, or perhaps this was some heirloom—a protest against the colorless limitations of the creed. Queer thing the human soul. Can't be formulated, not even to ourselves. Sometimes I've seen people show more of their real selves to utter strangers at odd moments than their nearest and dearest get at in a life-time."

This disjointed philosophy beguiled so much time, that Flint was late to breakfast. His fellow-boarders, a pedler and a fisherman, had gone about their business, and he sat down alone at the oilcloth-covered table, and twirled the pewter caster while he waited for his egg to be boiled. It was one of his beliefs that a merciful Heaven had granted eggs and oranges to earth for the benefit of fastidious travellers who could wreak their appetites in comparative security, especially if they did their own cracking and peeling. At length the breakfast [Pg 22] appeared, and with it the innkeeper, who sat down opposite Flint.

He had many weighty questions to put.

Should oakum or putty be used in the seams of "The Aquidneck"?

Should he pack the dinner-basket with beef or ham sandwiches?

Would Flint take lines for fishing, or a net for crabbing?

When all these were settled, Flint's thoughts drifted back to the portrait in the bed-room overhead. He began his questioning somewhat warily. "I suppose you've lived in this house for some time?"

"Wall, ever since I wuz born."

"And your father before you?"

"Yes, and my gran'father before him, and hisn fust."

"Ah, I see—an old homestead; and that portrait in my room is the wife of 'hisn'?"

"Not exactly—we never had no womenfolks in our family ez looked like that—stronger built is ourn, with more backbone, and none of that lackadaisical look raound the eyes."

"Pre-cisely," answered Flint. "And how does it happen that this lackadaisical-eyed portrait has hung so long without getting packed off to the garret?"

"Wall, you see," began Marsden, slowly and [Pg 23] with evident relish, "thet's quite a story about thet theer."

"Yes?" said Flint, with a rising inflection which invited further confidence.

"Yes, indeed," answered Marsden, expanding still further and stroking his chin-whisker as he proceeded. "You see 't wuz this way—Captain Wagstaff—he wuz the portrait's uncle—wall, he wuz in command of a fleet that lay in the harbor up yonder, in the Revolutionary War. When he wuz ashore, he spent most of his time to this haouse; and when his sister down to Philadelphy died, leavin' this daughter and no one to take care on her, he brought her on here to live with him. He'd been brought up a Quaker—'Friend,' he called it—though he did fight for his country, and right enough, sez I. Wall, this girl—Ruth, her name wuz—she came here and stopped awhile; and then there wuz a fight off the shore between the Captain's ship and a British cruiser. The cruiser wuz run down and sunk; but one of the officers they picked up waounded and brought ashore, to this house, and Miss Ruth she set to work takin' care on him.

"Wall, what with cossettin' of him, and all sorts of philanderin', she got kinder soft on him, and one day, fust any one knowed, she'd jest run off with him."

"And what did the Captain say to that?" [Pg 24] asked Flint, more interested than he was wont to be in Marsden's narratives.

"The Captain? Oh, they say he took on about it like thunder, and swore he'd never forgive her. But Ruth, she sent him her marriage lines, and wrote him what a good husband she'd got; and after the war wuz over, she kep' a-beggin' the Captain to come over and live with them. He wouldn't go; and I don't know ez I blame him any. Europe is so fur off, and such a wicked place—seems onsafer ez you get old. New England's the best place in the world to die in, and so he thought.

"Howsumever, she kep' a-sendin' him money and things; and one day ther came this here box—I've often heard my gran'mother tell how she looked on when 't wuz opened, and this picter turned out. Gran'ma wuz only a little thing, and she didn't know what to make of it all; for the Cap'n, he cried like a baby when he seen it. He had it taken up right away to his room (thet's whar you're a-sleepin') and hung over the mantel jest whar he could see it from his bed. Thar it stayed ez long ez he stayed on airth, and when he lay a-dyin'—He died, you know, in that very bed you're a-sleepin' in—only o' course the mattress is new—the old one wuz a feather-bed. My gran'mother wuz with him at the end, and she said he stretched out his arms to the pictur, [Pg 25] same ez ef 't ed been his niece herself; and he sort o' cried out, 'God bless you, Ruth! I wish I'd 'a' understood you better!' Wuzn't that a queer thing for him to say when he wuz a-dyin'?"

"Poor Ruth!" murmured Flint, with that placid, mild melancholy born of a sad story heard under comfortable circumstances. His fancy travelled back to the damsel in her Quaker dress, and he fell to wondering if the garb had been donned, with innocent hypocrisy, to please her old uncle, or if she always wore it in her faraway new home.

When he had got so far in his musings, his host recalled him to the present by continuing, "I dunno ez we've a very good claim to the pictur; but there ain't no heirs turned up, so ez the Cap'n wuz a little behind in his board bills, we sort o' kep' it."

Flint sat drumming with his fingers on the table, while his host still maundered on after the fashion of old age, which has so few topics that it cannot drop them with the light touch-and-go of youth.

Flint had already firmly determined that he would be the possessor of that portrait; but he was too shrewd to make any further advances now.

Instead, he turned again to the subject of "The Aquidneck," and, rising, made his way to the porch, where he almost walked over a speckled [Pg 26] hen so nearly a match for the floor that his near-sighted eyes failed to perceive her, paying as little heed to her clucking and fluttering as he bestowed upon the smiles of a girl who stood in the doorway and moved, with conspicuous civility as he passed. He stalked around to the corner of the porch where stood his long boots, for which he exchanged his low ties of russet leather, and, picking up fishing-tackle and crabbing nets, started off at a brisk pace for the shore of the pond, leaving Marsden to follow with the pail of dinner.

When all these were stowed away in the locker of "The Aquidneck," together with a straw-covered flask and a volume of Omar Khayyam, Flint bade a cheerful good-bye to Marsden, who stood rolling up his shirt-sleeves, and giving copious advice. The amateur skipper cast off from the little dock, lowered the centreboard, and stretched himself lazily in the stern, with one hand on the tiller. Peace was in his heart, and a pipe in his mouth—what could man ask more of the gods?

The white sails of "The Aquidneck" fluttered in the light breeze as if tremulous with the ecstasy of motion. The sea, beyond the low grass-covered sand-bar which enclosed the pond, lay bright and smooth to southward, its surface dotted with craft of various sizes. Here skimmed [Pg 27] a white-winged schooner; there panted and puffed a tug absurdly inadequate to its tow of low-lying coal-barges. Far on the horizon, a swelling island raised its bulk, purple as Capri, against the golden haze.

Flint might have been a better sailor had he not been so good a swimmer; but, having no fear of the consequences of a sudden bath, he took all risks, sailed into the very apple of the eye of the wind, and habitually fastened his sheet—a practice strongly reprehended by old Marsden.

"There's a new boat on the pond," said Flint to himself, as a cat-rigged craft, white-hulled with a band of olive, shot out from behind a point of rock. "Her lines are rather good. A good sailor aboard too, I should say, for she runs free and yet steady. I'd like to try a race with the chap some day; maybe it would be hardly fair if he's a new comer, for I know the pond like—Damn it! what's that?"

That was a sunken rock which Flint, in his self-satisfied musings, had failed to keep a lookout for. It had struck "The Aquidneck" full (or vice versa, which amounts to the same thing); and here was a pretty pickle. Navigation is like flirtation: all goes smoothly till the shock comes, and then everything capsizes, with no chance for explanation.

"The Aquidneck" began to fill, and then to [Pg 28] sink so rapidly that Flint, not caring to risk entanglement in the sheets, thought it prudent to jump overboard, and struck out lustily for the shore. Fortunately for Flint, the shore was near and the water shallow. Unfortunately, the shore was at the end further from the inn, his clothes were soaking, and his tobacco and whiskey flask in the locker, already under water in the midst of mud and eel-grass.

Determined to make the best of a bad situation, Flint swam ashore, calmly disposed his coat and knickerbockers over the bayberry bushes, and seated himself, in his dripping under-garments, to dry in the sun to consider his next move.

"Certainly things couldn't be much nastier," he grumbled. "Yes, they could too," he added, as he heard a female voice calling from beyond the screen of bayberry bushes.

"Boat ahoy! What's the matter?"

Flint's first impulse was to hide; but fearing the voice and its owner might come ashore to investigate the extent of the calamity, he hastily donned his outer clothing and emerged, like a dripping seal, from his retreat. "All right!" he called out.

"All wrong! I should say," the voice replied; and in an instant he knew it for the voice which had called to him from the sulky on the previous afternoon.

[Pg 29]

"That girl is a hoodoo!" he muttered.

"Can I do anything for you?" inquired the voice, with that super-solemnity which results from the effort to conceal amusement—a solemnity doubly insulting to its object, implying at once his absurdity and his vanity.

"Thank you!" answered Flint, stiffly; "if you will be kind enough to send some one over to give me a lift, I will be greatly obliged."

"Why not get in with us? Luff her in, Jim!" With this the girl and her companion, a boy of twelve years old, bare of leg and freckled of face, brought the boat around, and Flint climbed aboard with rather a bad grace.

To tell the truth, he was in a fit of the sulks. I admit that the sulks are not heroic; but Homer permitted them to Achilles, and why should I conceal the fact, unpleasing though it be, about my lesser hero.

Doubtless his ancestor, Jonathan Edwards, would have felt a like discomposure, had his pulpit given way under him in the presence of his congregation; and even that other fiery orator, Patrick The Great, might have lost his balance had his new peach-colored coat split up the back, when he was hurling death and destruction upon tyrants and pleading for liberty or death. To be ridiculous with equanimity is the crowning achievement of philosophy.

[Pg 30]

The boy addressed as "Jim" stared at Flint with open-mouthed enjoyment.

"You didn't fetch where you meant to, did you?"

"Hush, Jim!"

"Why, Fred, what am I saying wrong now? You're always hushing me up. I didn't mean to guy him, but he did look so jolly glum."

Seeing that intervention was vain in this quarter, his sister essayed a change of topic, and, womanlike, rushed on to the one she had most steadfastly promised herself to avoid.

"Were you fishing when the accident happened?" She stopped and colored nervously.

"No," observed Flint, dryly. (His remarks were the only dry things about him.) "My fishing-rod happened to be broken. It is of no consequence however," he hastened to add, seeing her blush deepen painfully. "The fish about here are not gamey enough to make fishing an exciting sport. Do you find it so?"

"I never fish."

"Ah, I am surprised."

"I hate to see the poor things suffer—"

"You are too tender-hearted?"

"Say rather too weak-nerved—I should not care if every fish in the sea died a violent death after prolonged suffering, provided I was not obliged to watch the process."

[Pg 31]

Flint smiled.

"But don't you know these cold-blooded creatures can't be made to suffer? I dare say the keenest enjoyment a fish ever feels is when his nervous system is gently stimulated by a hook in his mouth."

"Perhaps—I don't know—I tell you it is no question of sympathy. It is simply physical repulsion; and then I loathe the soft slipperiness of the bait."

"That's so," put in the boy at the tiller. "Fred groans every time I put a worm on the hook, and squeals when the fish flop round in the bottom of the boat, especially if they come anywhere near her skirts."

"Fred," repeated Flint to himself, "I might have known she would have a boy's name—" Aloud, he said: "I suppose, Master Jim, you have found all the best fishing-grounds in the pond."

Jim softened visibly at this tribute to his skill.

"Well, I know one good one over at Brightman's, and I'll show it to you to-morrow, if you like."

His sister shot a warning glance from under her level eyebrows.

"Don't make plans too far ahead, Jim. Sufficient unto the day, you remember—and unless this gentleman gets dry and warm soon, I am [Pg 32] afraid he will spend some days to come under the doctor's care. Haven't you some brandy or whiskey?" she asked, turning more fully toward Flint, and noticing for the first time that his lips were blue and his teeth chattering in spite of his efforts at unconcerned conversation.

"Yes," he answered; "a flask full of excellent old whiskey—over there," and he pointed disconsolately to the line of green water where the tell-tale fluttered above the wrecks of "The Aquidneck."

The young lady knit her brows in puzzled thought, "What is in our locker, Jim?"

"Bread and butter, cocoanut balls and ginger-ale."

"Get out the ginger-ale."

"But it is your luncheon," deprecated Flint.

"No, it isn't—it is your medicine. Try it."

Flint pressed the iron spring, and poured down the spluttering liquid, striving to conceal his wry face.

"Bully, ain't it?" exclaimed Jim, not without a tinge of regret for lost joys in his tone.

"Excellent!" returned Flint, perjuring himself like a gentleman.

"It is better than nothing," Miss Fred answered judicially. "I will send Jim up to the inn with some brandy; Marsden's stuff is rank poison. I had some once this summer when [Pg 33] I was ill, and straightway sent off to town for a private supply. If you feel able to exercise, I should advise you to let us put you off at this point, and make a run across country to Marsden's."

"I don't know how to thank you," Flint murmured as Jimmy pulled the row-boat up, and the young man prepared to climb in after him.

"There is no occasion for thanks. But if you insist on a debit and credit account, please charge it off against the ruin of your fishing-rod."

"I am humiliated."

"You?"

"Yes; I must have been a model of incivility."

"No; it was I who was in fault, rushing about the country like a jockey riding down everything in sight."

"Who except a fool would have had a fishing-rod trailing half-way across the road?"

"Look here," grumbled Jim, "I can't hold this dory bumping against the side of the boat forever—"

"Don't be impertinent, Jim. Besides apologies never last long. It is only explanations which take time—"

Flint jumped from the gunwale of the sail-boat into the dory, and took the oars. As he headed for shore, he turned his eyes once more to the sail-boat, and the glimpse that he had of [Pg 34] its skipper he carried for long after—the vision of her standing there in the stern, against the stretch of blue water, her soft handkerchief of some red stuff knotted about her throat above the gray jacket, her felt hat thrust up in front above the waves of her hair, and her eyes smiling with frank mirthfulness.

[Pg 35]