Читать книгу Time Out Of Mind - Rachel Field - Страница 11

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It was June again when Rissa returned. I found a few late blooming pink lady slippers in the woods and had them in her favorite vase, and I carried in great armsful of white and purple lilacs for the Chinese jars in the hall. I waited by the steps in my new blue denim long before the packet whistled off the Narrows. But when the carriage actually drew up I turned shy and awkward and could barely muster a faint "Hello" when Rissa stepped out. She looked taller and much more grown up in the gray and cherry outfit that was of the latest fashion and far beyond Miss Addie's powers of creation. Even when she exchanged it later for last year's challis, I found her somehow unfamiliar. Her hair was tied back now, though it was as soft and curling, and her laugh was altogether different from the one she had taken away with her. She used queer expressions that I had never heard before. "You don't say", and "Pardon me" and "My heavens above" kept creeping into our conversations. I knew I could never manage to say them as she did any more than I could learn the waltz and those other dance steps she could do so easily. Only when we talked of Nat were we back upon the old footing, and we talked of him for hours on end those first days.

"He's been sick, you know," Rissa told me with a little worried frown. "Captain Mac Murty wrote father, but he said he was better again. It was some kind of a fever."

"I had a letter from him," I said, "but it was way back last Christmas. I hope he got that pipe to play on. When'll the 'Rainbow' be back?"

"Father isn't sure. He keeps saying a month and then it gets to be two months and now he thinks not till late August or September maybe."

"But that'll be a whole year since the launching," I reminded her. "He'll be most twelve, when he gets back."

Little by little from Henry Willis and the Major we learned there had been difficulties aplenty on the homeward voyage. First trouble with her rudder in a tropical gale, and then a long delay putting in at some remote islands for repairs. This and an unaccountable leak in the hold, had caused considerable damage to the cargo of valuable merchandise she was bringing back. Major Fortune was worried by every fresh bit of news he got and no wonder. I had grown to evade the sly questions Jake and the others put to me about the return. Bad news always gets about and there were plenty to carry the gossip from ship-yard to village. The lumber mill was busy, but shipping slack, and when Henry Willis or the Major went to Boston on business neither returned in a cheerful frame of mind.

"But everything's bound to be all right once the 'Rainbow' gets back," I told myself all through that long summer.

Even in late August when the word came that she was in New York discharging what was left of the cargo to the agents there, it seemed she would never come. There were further repairs needed, and Rissa and I grew despairing. Still, it was something to see her name in the fine printed columns of shipping news the Major's newspaper carried.

"Seem's if they're spell-set for sure," I told Rissa in mother's best style. "Some say it's on account of that accident at the launching. You know how they said she was bound for trouble." But Rissa wouldn't hear of such notions.

"It stands to reason," she reproved me, "that one man getting hit with a block couldn't bring them bad luck way off the other side of the globe." She looked a lot like the Major when she said that.

But I wasn't so sure. I had heard too many stories from Jake and George and others that winter not to feet queer about it. Rissa pleaded to go to Boston with her father and Henry Willis when they went to meet the "Rainbow" there and return on the final lap. But they wouldn't hear of it, so she had to wait at The Folly with me for the great return.

She came in at last under full press of sail on the first morning of September. George sighted her before breakfast while she was still only a speck on the horizon. He was coming from the barn with brimming milk pails in either hand. He set them down so hard the milk spilled over, but he could only think of getting to the cupola to ring the bell that had always clanged to announce returning Fortune vessels. Its sudden peal brought us all out of our rooms. Rissa and I stood on the landing in our long nightgowns.

"She's back, Kate! She's back!"

"She looks to be most to Heron Island now," I squinted against the early light. "But there's a big stretch of water between that and Old Horse Ledges."

"She'll make it fast with this favoring wind and tide," George said. "I'm going to harness the horses right off."

He had promised to take us with him and we were into our clothes with a hastily swallowed breakfast before he had brought the carriage round. Fancy and Fanny were full of spirit as they took the ups and downs of the road, but not so full of it as we two beside George on the high front seat. Sometimes when the spruce woods shut us in for a mile or more and we lost sight of those far topsails, we could scarcely contain our impatience till we sighted her again at the peak of the next steep rise. Presently we heard the bells in the steeples of the Baptist and Congregational churches sending out stirring clangs on the salt air.

"Fit to raise the dead," George chuckled as we passed the oldest burying ground with its scattered, tilting stones. "Still," he added, "it ain't much like the days when there was two maybe three anchored off shore, unloading or waiting for orders to sail."

People hailed us from houses all along our way. They were full of questions and comments as to the probable time she would make. Men were out in large numbers by the saw-mill and later at the post-office. But we kept on down to the wharf. George put the horses in a nearby barn, and we followed him. There were plenty of warm kitchens where we might have waited, but neither of us could bear the thought of watching from behind a pane of window glass. We found a corner, sheltered from the keen morning wind, on the Fortune wharf. A pile of lumber made us a seat, and George came back to keep an eye on us every once in so often. Already several boatloads of men were preparing to go out to meet the "Rainbow". Every skiff and dory in the Harbor was filling up. I saw Jake Bullard in one with some older boys and waved to him. I thought that perhaps if I had been alone he would have smuggled me along.

We hardly talked at all as we waited there, but the long months away in Philadelphia seemed to drop from Rissa and for that hour we were as we had been a year before. The "Rainbow" was tacking in through the difficult channel between the islands. We could see her plainly now, and her sails were no longer new and shining. Patches of lighter canvas showed jaggedly on more than one of the dingy, wind-curved sheets.

"She don't look the same ship that went out," I said to Rissa with a sudden pang, for never before had I seen with my own eyes the change that time and buffetings can work on paint and canvas. Just for a moment I felt my throat tighten, and something I couldn't put into words took me, even there in the joy of waiting to welcome Nat home again.

But it was no time for such thoughts with the long prow pointing into the nearer channel. Now dark dots appeared in the rigging, and I marvelled that these should be men, who would soon row ashore and walk to their own doors, hailing families and neighbors as they came. George joined us again, shading his eyes against the sun that glittered in broken brightness on every lifting wave.

"Making it pretty, she is," he said approvingly. "A couple more tacks and she'll be past the black buoy. By Godfrey, I'd like to be aboard her this minute!"

Now we lost all but her topsails as she dropped behind Little Heron Island. It was strange to see them moving so, above the ranks of dark tipped trees.

"Look," I whispered to Rissa, "it kind of puts me in mind of the pictures in that 'Ancient Mariner' book."

She nodded and her hands were clenched and chill to my touch. Then the prow pointed past the last rocks, and she came round to the mouth of the Harbor with a great flapping and rattling of canvas as she shifted sail. We could hear it plainly, we and the others who had gathered on the wharf. A quick murmur ran out in answer as if all of us there must have a part in the heart-lifting stir. Nearer and nearer she bore into the Harbor, the sun on every taut line and straining sheet. All the small craft stood off to give her room, even the crowded skiffs kept proper distance as was fitting so proud a return.

Anchor chains rattled. Canvas flapped and grew lax, and the group on shore and those in the boats broke into cheers that went out, thin and shrill across the narrow stretch of water. Other shouts came from those on deck to those in the nearer boats. We could scarcely stand still in our impatience. Now that she was in at last and almost within a stone's throw of us, it seemed that sails would never be furled or the little moving figures clamber down into the boats that clustered about the battered, green-filmed hull.

"Seem's if they'll never come ashore," Rissa sighed. "Why don't they hurry, George?"

"Got to make her fast first," he told us, "Fifteen minutes don't make much difference when you've been out a year."

"But that's just why"—Rissa broke off to wave her handkerchief frantically to the first boat starting back.

We got as close as we could to a wooden ladder that let down from the wharf to the water. The tide was in, it would be an easy climb. As the first boat came nearer we could make out Captain Mac Murty's big shape in the stern, and the Major's gray coat among the blue of the men. But there was no sign of Nat.

"Oh, dear," Rissa was almost crying with impatience, "I think father might have let him come in the first load!"

Everyone crowded so close to the landing place that we were pushed back by larger bodies and even George was too eager to help us. Suddenly we heard George call out:—"Hi, Major, here we be!" And then the little knot of people grew silent and fell back to make room for him. In another moment I knew why they had done so. He stepped slowly from the ladder, holding what looked like a bundle of blankets in his arms. Even as I stared, wondering that he should do such a thing, I saw the white triangle of Nat's face looking out from it.

There was not room for me in the carriage, so I had to trudge the three miles back to The Folly on foot and alone. I hardly knew how I went for my head was full of scraps I had heard on every side as I went through Little Prospect. The first boatload hadn't been ashore ten minutes before everyone knew that Nat Fortune was a very sick boy. I listened whenever I caught his name even though my feet were hurrying past every group by post office and doorsteps. Yes, they said, the doctor in Boston had told the Major Nat would have to be kept quiet in bed for months if his heart was to right itself. Chances of his pulling through were about even, I heard one of the blue-coated men tell several women who questioned him with concerned head-shakes.

"He wasn't bigger'n a spindle to start with," they reminded one another, "and now look at him. He'd have to stand up twice to make a shadow."

"The Major acted scared for once the time he come aboard and saw him." Another man put in.

"No wonder," chimed in one of the women, "he'll never raise him for the shipping or any other business."

"He'd better watch out that name he's so sot on the boy carrying on ain't on a tombstone by Spring. I don't care what any Boston doctor says he's got the look right in his eyes, same's his mother had the last time I seen her."

"Tom Rice says it's all the Captain's doing. Says he dosed him wrong time the boy took sick with that tropic fever, and made him get up 'fore he was fit to stand. Tom says he used to manoeuver to save the little fellow all he could, he felt so sorry for him."

"He was too little to go on any such voyage. I said so at the time and I say so again."

I was glad to be out of the clack of their tongues and the look of their faces, and when I got to The Folly at last I felt comforted to hear Rissa playing the piano in the east parlor.

"He wanted to hear me," she told me. "Oh, Kate, he most died, and even father's scared."

"I know," I said, and I tried to tell her the things I had heard them saying down in the Harbor. At least I told her what the men had said. I couldn't bear repeating all of it. She was frightened enough as it was.

They wouldn't let me go near his room till supper time when I carried up his tray.

"Hello, Kate," he said in a very small voice from the big bed he hardly dented as he lay there. "I brought you back another knife with a pearl handle to make up for that one you gave me I lost."

"You needn't have bothered," I told him, setting the tray down. "I'd be glad enough to see you back without any present."

"You've got big," he said, his eyes staring at me hard from the whiteness of his face against the white pillows. "Your hair'll be long enough to braid pretty soon."

It seemed wonderful to me that he should have noticed when he was as weak as all that, and I felt pleased and happier than I had been since the first boat load had come from the "Rainbow" that morning. Between us, Rissa and I coaxed him to take some soup. Turn about we fed him from the silver spoon with the curly F. on the handle. I don't know how I came to think of such a thing, but suddenly there sprang up in my mind a saying I had heard once somewhere.

"That's a spoon you'll sup sorrow with yet!"