Читать книгу Time Out Of Mind - Rachel Field - Страница 10

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There is little to tell of that late fall and winter. Fortune's Folly was strangely quiet and when Rissa and I talked we found ourselves speaking in whispers as if someone had lately died. The piano was unlocked now but Rissa could not bring herself to touch it often. She shunned the east parlor, preferring the kitchen when I was about, or sitting alone in her bedroom hunched over some book. Her father did his best to please and distract her, but she was not one to be easily diverted. So, though she answered his questions dutifully and thanked him for the gifts he brought her, a chill of distrust had come between them.

"It ain't right for a child to hang on to a grudge so," mother would say when Rose brought out a half touched plate to show her. "I know she was dreadful cut up over the Major sending the boy away, and I can't say's I blame her. Nat's too small and pindling for such a long voyage. They should have broke him in easy on short ones. But Rissa's got a granite streak in her and it's commencing to crop out."

It was no use the Major telling her that Nat would not be over worked. He explained that he had given Captain Mac Murty orders to put no heavy duties on him. Odd jobs, helping in the galley and carrying the mess out, wouldn't hurt, only toughen him. Even Henry Willis was called upon to reassure her.

"I know you miss Nat," he told her kindly one night after supper. "But he's most likely enjoying himself aboard ship by now. Lots of fun for a boy on a long sea voyage and once they make foreign ports he'll have the time of his young life."

"Not Nat," Rissa answered, and shut her lips tight. "He's not like most boys."

"That's just why your father sent him," Henry Willis reminded her. "Some boys have gone younger than eleven."

"He'd hate it if he was a hundred and eleven!" Her eyes turned steely gray like the Major's.

They gave up arguing with her at last. Only when we two were alone would she talk freely, and then it was always of Nat. I missed him in my own way which was not her set, unrelenting sort. Mine would be sudden storms of remorse for my own part in the affair. For I still went back to the day at the piano and my failure to give warning in time. The Major had said he had made up his mind then and there to ship Nat off, and I couldn't ever get that quite out of mind. Sometimes I had to burst out with my feelings.

"You know, Rissa," I would remind her as we sat together in her bedroom through those chill early winter twilights, "it was my place to watch for the carriage. I don't see how I ever came to miss it that time, but still I did and so I'm most to blame."

"I guess he'd have sent him anyway." Rissa tried to be kind. "I wouldn't mind so much if it wasn't for that Captain Mac Murty. But you know he's so big and he loves to tease. He'll go out of his way to plague Nat."

Sometimes we pored over an old Atlas together, wondering if the "Rainbow" could have got to the Equator by then. We measured with our knuckles the way to Singapore which we knew was the port for the lumber. It depressed us to find how small a part of the universe the State of Maine occupied. We took to reading books together. Rissa was given to poetry about that time and one evening she fetched me upstairs to show me a passage she had found earlier in the day. I don't remember what poem it came in, but there was mention of "white horses" in it, and from the rest of the verse we could tell that meant white capped waves. Neither of us had ever heard them called that before and we stared at one another dumbfounded.

"Remember, Kate, what Old Lady Phibben told Nat about white horses that time she told his fortune?"

"Yes," I said, trying to recollect her very words. "There was something about a thin black stick, but first she said there'd be the white horses to watch out for. They'd try to break him, she said."

"Well, you see, that's what she meant," Rissa nodded, "not real horses the way we thought, but the salt water ones. Oh, dear, I wish we'd known before."

"It's queer her talking like poetry." I said.

Everything we read then became related to Nat for us in some way, but a large red book we pulled out of a bottom shelf is most bound up for me with those days. We began first by poring over the engraved pictures, most of which had to do with a great ship, fully rigged, and her crew of strange and bearded men. One of them had wilder eyes than the rest and a huge white bird dangled from his neck. Every page we turned the pictures grew more frightening, and yet we could not keep from looking. The icicles on the rigging and the driving snow sent shivers down our spines, and it was worse later on when the crew turned to spectres with staring eyes in ghostly sockets.

"Oh, Rissa," I cried, spellbound over the one that showed coiling snakes and sea-monsters, "Oh, Rissa, it's awful!"

And then she read me all about it. I can never hear a driven northeast rain at the windows without remembering those pictures and Rissa's voice reading "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". We quaked together and drew closer, and still we must keep on to the end, as if the old man's glittering eye was upon us right there in Fortune's Folly.

"O, Wedding Guest, this soul hath been Alone on a wide, wide sea, So lonely 'twas that God himself Scarce seeméd there to be."

Even now as I set the words down on the page before me, my heart knocks at my ribs as it did that day I first heard them.

"O God," I prayed alone in bed that night, remembering, "don't let Nat feel like that, don't let him please. Amen."

I was to spend many hours over those pages before that winter was over. It was a long and bitter cold one, with such storms of freezing sleet that I was often away from school for days on end. I was much alone then, for in December Major Fortune took Rissa by the packet to Boston. From there they went on to spend Christmas with the Philadelphia relatives. Rissa was to remain till Spring. The Major thought it high time she attended a young ladies' finishing school and dancing classes. He counted on this change and new companionship to rouse her from her grim listlessness. Nat's frailness only caused him annoyance and humiliation, but Rissa's lack of appetite and spirit were on his mind.

"She'll pick up in a milder place," I heard him telling mother. "Her Aunt wants her to know more young girls, and I can fetch her back in May or June."

Rissa made no protests, though she would have preferred not to go.

"I'll write you, Kate," she said at parting, "and you write me, too. Be sure they don't touch a thing in Nat's room and mine."

After she went away, looking so beautiful in a brown beaver cap the color of her hair, and her green broadcloth coat, it was quieter than ever for me. The arrival of the big leather mail sack each evening became the most important event of each day, for shortly before Christmas there was a package and letter from Rissa. It was the first I had ever had all to myself and it lies before me now, the letters set down in her neat, fine handwriting.

"Dear Kate

Father and I got here day before yesterday, and this morning Aunt Esther and my cousins took me shopping. The stores here are enormous and we got presents for everybody and I bought this collar for you to wear on your plaid dress. Lace collars are very stylish here, also bangles and Roman sashes. I have one that looks like a rainbow, but the stripes go the wrong way, and I wish it was the other Rainbow instead. You know what I mean.

Father got a report from Captain Mac Murty from Bordeaux, and he says everything is all right, but he has had a time with Nat. O dear, I had to cry when he told me and when we went to church and the big organ played and I had to cry into my muff because I got wanting Nat to hear it too.

I start in at the Academy for young ladies after New Year's. My cousins go to it, but they know everyone there already and I don't yet. Please see that nobody breaks the vase with the china lamb on it in my room and be careful about dusting Nat's things.

Merry Christmas and happy new year from

Clarissa Fortune."

I sent her a handkerchief case that mother helped me sew, and I wrote to her too. But I didn't know where to send a letter to Nat. He was in my mind on Christmas eve when mother and I went to stay with the Jordan cousins down in Little Prospect. Cousin Sam was able to sit up a little by then. I helped Jake pick nut meats and make a snow man for the front yard, and it was fun when he took me sliding on his bob-sled.

"You're a lot nicer when those Fortunes are away," he told me with his widest grin, "I hope they don't come back again and stuff your head with fool notions."

"I like their notions, Jake Bullard," I answered him back. "You've got no call to make remarks about Nat and Rissa when they're my best friends."

"You'd better not say that in front of Sam Jordan," he warned me. "He's down on the whole lot of 'em."

Before we returned to The Folly I knew that was the truth. Cousin Sam Jordan was so bitter that even mother told George on the way home she guessed the accident had turned him sour.

Nat's letter to me came the last day of the old year. I carried it into the window seat in the east parlor and stared at my name in his funny, crooked writing and all the queer colored foreign stamps. There was just light enough left for me to make out the penciled letters that are even fainter now as I copy them down.

"Dear Kate,

Everybody on bord is writing letters to send off by a stemer when we get to Bordo tomorro maybe. Jim Jarvis from Little Prospect let me have his pencil and paper while he is up on watch, so I will write to you and Rissa. He was good to me when I was sea sick at first, so was Torn Rice. I am better now but my hands pretty sore from the ropes, and I have blisters to. I can clime to the yard arms and not get very dizzy, but I don't like it or carrying food out in bad weather. There are rats on bord and I have tamed one. He comes when I whisel a tune I made up and give him things to eat I sneak from the galley. He looks like Miss Ada Joy his nose is so long and his eyes little and blinky.

I do wish I was home again. They say Indyer will be hot as blazes, but Jim says you can buy bamboo pipes to play on there. I want one only my fingers have got pretty stiff. I miss Rissa and I miss you too and this is all the paper I can find so good-bye from

Nat."

Mother was calling me from the kitchen as I put the letter in my pocket and left the east parlor. It was striking six by the French enamel clock and I stopped to see the little figures come out and pull away with their cross-saw at the log that wasn't really there. When they would do it twelve times it would be another year. I thought how strange it was that years came and went like that, and it seemed to me suddenly that perhaps they were like the clock's unseen log that fell away, like time itself, under the woodsmen's cross-saw.