Читать книгу Time Out Of Mind - Rachel Field - Страница 5

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A good many stories and sayings had gathered about Fortune's Folly. Jake Bullard took pains to tell me some when mother and I would spend a Sunday in Little Prospect with Cousin Sam and his family. I heard them again at the district school where I went alone each day with my books and lunchpail. The other scholars were not a little awed when they found out that I lived in the great white house on the bluff and talked and played with the mysterious girl and boy they only saw riding to the store and post-office or sitting in the Fortune pew at church.

One of these stories went back to Indian times and to a Medicine Man who had chosen the site for his heathen doings. They said he had made human sacrifices there, and that there were still heaps of bones and skulls under the cellar. They said, too, that he had known a spell to summon up storms, and you could still hear his tom-tom beating through particularly wild ones. Nat and Rissa and I always used to listen for it and imagine that we heard the drum-beats after I brought the story back to them from school, and once when we found a chipped Indian arrowhead where a new garden bed was dug, we were convinced of its truth. But Medicine Man or not there had been plenty of Indians about when the first Nathaniel Fortune took possession of the land. He had held a high commission in the French and Indian wars, and after the fall of Louisburg had been rewarded for his bravery by a huge land-grant.

That first Nathaniel Fortune had been Rissa and Nat's great-grandfather and it was said that he and George Washington had fought side by side in their young days and had called one another by their Christian names. However that may have been, the same artist had painted portraits of them in Continental blue and buff. The Fortune painting was sold years ago. They tell me it hangs now in a great museum, and is counted a rare treasure. But we three children found him a familiar sharer of our secret doings in the east parlor, for the lifelike look of his painted eyes always made it seem that he was watching us.

"Great Grandfather's got his eye on us!" Nat used to say, and it was true. Even the terrier, Frisky, felt something alive about the canvas. I have seen her go into fits of barking with her head cocked up at the portrait.

That first Nathaniel Fortune might have been a high up man in politics if he had cared to take himself to Philadelphia after the Revolution. He could have matched wits with Washington and Jefferson and Franklin and the rest there, but he would not leave his northeast corner of New England and his timberlands that would one day take the Fortune name around the globe. So all his strength and foresight went into keeping his thousands of acres clear of entanglements and squatter claims. His grants lay on either side of Fortune's Creek, that fine waterway down which logs might be floated from far inland, and from which power might be had to turn them into lumber. He was one who knew how to make tides and trees serve him. "Regular Fortune Luck" became a common phrase among the scattered settlements on the Maine coast even in his own day.

The wife he brought to the great house that had been called his "Folly" almost before its first beams were raised, hailed from the region about Castine. It is a pity no artist painted her, for her strain of French and Indian blood must have lent picturesqueness to any portrait. Her high cheek bones have cropped out in later generations of Fortunes; even young Nat inherited them, though otherwise he was his mother all over again. They were as plain as could be in the picture of the second Nathaniel, Rissa and Nat's Grandfather.

His portrait, nearly twice the size of the earlier one, had nothing arresting about it. We children never looked up from our play, half fearful of finding his eyes bent upon us. It was a more ambitious affair, done, I suppose, by some traveling artist. What I remember chiefly about it, is the arrangement of small objects on a table beside him, all carefully chosen to suggest his tastes and business. His hand rested on a globe, while on the crimson tablecloth were spread out compass and charts and the model of a sailing vessel fully rigged. Even his tombstone in the family lot bore witness to his calling, for an anchor was cut into the marble with the inscription:—"They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord." Certainly he took to shipping as a duck to water; cut his teeth on a piece of tarred rope, and had been twice round the Horn before he was twenty-one. He lived in the hey-day of shipping and died just as the shadow of smoke from stack and funnel was beginning to appear on the horizon. There were no swifter vessels with taller masts or greater spread of canvas than those that left the Fortune ship-yard in his day. He was proud of them and of their records, and more than half of the pictured vessels that hung in the hall and study of Fortune's Folly were of his building.

I can remember still the sound of their lovely names as Rissa and Nat and I spelled them off on days when the weather kept us indoors. "Comet"; "Sea Garland"; "Wild Deer"; "Aurora B."; "The Maypole"; "Tropic Bird", and "Fortunate Star", I can say them yet and see in the mind's eye the painted dark blue water, the pointing prows and the proud sweep of canvas. Most of the curiosities we loved best had come in the hold of one or another of these ships. The stone Buddha that came out to sit between delphinium and lily clumps each summer had been brought in one; the teakwood chest and carved ivory chessmen in another, and the French enamel clock with the little woodsmen as well. Rissa's best summer dress was of wrought India muslin; and her winter one of Chinese crepe had come that way. Her petticoats were edged with real Hamburg, and she had enough to fit out half a dozen girls her age.

After I had been a month at The Folly I came to take Rissa's finery as a matter of course, and to accept as her brother did, her father's indulgence of her. She was the veritable apple of Major Fortune's eye. He felt he could unbend a little with such a pretty daughter. But a son was an altogether different proposition. Mother and Cousin Martha Jordan used to say he took Nat hard. It was natural, I can see now, as I couldn't then. He was a grim, close mouthed man, who had married late in life, and had never quite shaken off the ravages of malaria that had nearly taken him in a Southern camp during the Civil War. He must have loved his wife, for he mourned her sincerely. Young Nat's being so frail and puny was a cross to him, but he could have put up with that better than his being so different in his mind from the rest of the Fortunes. The boy was his hold on the future. He had been brought up to think in terms of timber, in canvas and cargoes and such-like, and he'd made up his mind that his son should keep the name one to be reckoned with on the coast. He wouldn't admit, not then or afterwards, that Nat could do that in any other way than with ships and lumber.

So it was always Rissa who was sent to beg favors of her father. Mostly she got her way with him in all but one particular. It was not long before I found out what this was and from the day I did we three were joined in league against him. There is nothing so binding, whether one happens to be young or old, as some secret shared in common. I should not, perhaps, have given myself to aiding and abetting them if it had been Rissa's battle, and not Nat's that we fought by strategy. But from the first evening when we had stood together about the piano I was no more than putty in the hands of the queer, dark eyed boy.

The trouble all came of Rissa's taking music lessons and Nat's being forbidden to touch the piano. Almost before he was out of petticoats those black and ivory keys drew him as if they were magnets. Annie Button told me once that his mother had been gifted the same way and would play by the hour there in the east parlor. She said that the Major tried to break Nat of it from the first. He'd rap him hard across the knuckles every time he caught him there. He felt it was no kind of thing for a son and tried to crush it out of the little fellow. But by hook or by crook Nat would contrive to pick out tunes on it and even to try his hand at the harp. He was always humming music under his breath and that was another thing that his father couldn't abide. Sometimes after they'd had a terrible set-to over it and the Major had lost his temper, Nat would get one of his spells and mope about the place as pale and limp as if he'd been struck with dry-wilt. It seemed as if those two were born to be at logger-heads.

Well, about a year before we came to live at The Folly Rissa started to take music lessons. Miss Ada Joy, from down in Little Prospect, who played the organ at church and who had studied in Boston in her young days, came up once a week to teach her. The Major thought it was high time Rissa learned some accomplishments, but he gave orders that Nat wasn't to put his nose out of his own room the whole hour the music lesson went on. He didn't trust him much, so he arranged for it to be on Friday afternoons when he was home from the ship-yard and could see no liberties were taken. Rissa learned fast and kept to her practising faithfully, but she never had her brother's gift. She knew it herself and would gladly have given him her chance. She'd have cut off her ten fingers for Nat if he'd wanted them, I'll say that for Rissa.

It wasn't till that first summer that I found out how those two were contriving between them. Before then I was away at school till almost supper time and my only chance to see Nat and Rissa was evenings when they'd sneak out to play games with me by the kitchen table or I would be called in to keep them company by the east parlor fire. I dreaded going there unless it happened that Henry Willis had driven up to take supper and stay the night. Now that the weather was warmer and the evenings long he was much there. He was the kindest of men, and though the Major and he went off to the study across the hall as soon as the meal was over, his presence was always welcomed by the three children who ran out to meet him when he drove up. Having no wife or family of his own he made more of us than most. But for all his easy, gentle ways he could stand up to the Major as no other man dared. Certainly he had a far better head for the shipping business as it turned out later.

I remember so well the evening in June, just after the last school term was over, when he drove up with presents on the seat beside him—the first bunch of bananas I had ever seen; a book of fairy tales in green and gold binding, and a box of red firecrackers. I could hear them all laughing together in the dining room as I helped mother and Rose in the big pantry. Nat's peals came so clear and happy sounding that even mother took notice.

"He's a queer one," she said to Rose, "nothing halfway about him."

"Sometimes he acts spell-set to me," Rose answered shortly as she turned to carry in the roast.

"Well, I wouldn't go that far," mother put in mildly, "it's more as if he wasn't pitched right. Like a see-saw, up one minute and down the next, that's young Nat all over."

I knew even then what she meant. I had come to dread the sudden clouding over of his face, like an east wind that will steal the blue out of sea and sky all in a moment. By the same token his gaiety passed all bounds.

I was sent for after the meal to eat a banana from the bunch Henry Willis had brought, and the two men having taken their cigars and the decanter of port into the study across the hall, Rissa, Nat and I sat down to a game of dominoes. But though we spread them out on the table under the lamplight we dawdled over them and talked in half whispers instead.

"Uncle Henry brought the book and the firecrackers all the way from Boston," Rissa told me.

"I wish he'd given me the book and you the firecrackers," Nat complained. "They make too much noise."

"Well, never mind, Fourth of July's a long way off yet. Kate, father's promised I'm to christen the 'Rainbow'."

"Can I go when you do it?" I asked, for I was still not certain of what I might and might not share with these two.

"Everyone'll go," Nat broke in, "but it won't be till September. That's why Mr. Sandford isn't coming to give us lessons anymore. They'll need him all the time down at the yards."

I rejoiced over this news. It meant that the three of us would be free of lessons for the summer. Mr. Sandford was a grave young accountant who came up every other day to tutor them in arithmetic, writing, grammar, and Latin, for the Major had no opinion of the district school and its troop of village boys and girls.

"Listen," Nat whispered, his dark head cocked towards the hall. "They're having words."

"Uncle Henry's talking back to him," Rissa told me. "He mostly does when he comes back from Boston."

They had forgotten us and their voices came clear through a blue fog of tobacco smoke. It was the first time I had ever heard men talking together of anything besides crops and cattle or maybe town politics round the stove in Trundy's General store. I knew their words were not intended for our ears, and so I listened with guilty intentness. No doubt that is why they have stayed by me to this day, like the print of a fern or leaf on some rock that once was clay.

"Well, Nathaniel," Henry Willis was saying, "I'd advise you to take up the Foster bid for the 'Rainbow'. Not that you're likely to take advice from me this time anymore than last, but I'm bound to give it to you all the same."

I could hear the shuffling of papers before the Major replied.

"We didn't do so badly last quarter, Henry. We'll make a fair profit when they settle those last payments on the 'Yankee Belle'."

"When they settle—you mean if they do. I tell you I know what I'm talking about. I saw and heard enough in Boston last week to set me figuring. Why I haven't seen old Jenkins so down in the mouth since the Atlantic Cable was laid and he knew there'd be no more betting on cargoes. Rotch and Hammond closing their yards ought to show you the way the wind's blowing."

"All the more business for the rest of us, Henry. That stands to reason."

"Business, yes, if you're willing to take small bids and stick to the fishing and coasting trade. They're what's kept us going the last three years."

"I'm not building the 'Rainbow' to go to the Banks or carry timber between here and New Orleans. She's going to be the finest five masted vessel we've built in years and I won't have her turned into a coasting tub."

"If you're planning to back her for foreign trade you might as well dump the money off Old Horse Ledges and be done with it."

"You're as fidgety as an old hen when it comes to taking chances!" A growing note of annoyance had come into Major Fortune's voice. "Besides, it's the looks of the thing I care more about than the money. I can always count on the timber lands to carry any losses we might have before she pays for her first voyage."

"I thought that was what you had in the back of your mind, and Joe Sargent let out to me yesterday you'd talked to him about selling off another hundred acre lot of the best woods. I told him he couldn't have understood you right."

We could hear a chair scrape and there was a long silence before any answer came.

"Well, I didn't commit myself to him or anyone else. But I thought I might bring the price up by giving out I'd had other offers for it. After all, it's ready money—"

"For you to throw away on more ships to lie idle at the wharves, same's they're rotting now in Salem and Newburyport. This isn't yesterday. Steam's here to stay."

"What if it is? Our yards are still open."

"And they'll stay open if you'll stick to building schooners and fishing smacks and forget your clippers and barks. Your future's in timberlands now, and if you're as shrewd a man as your grandfather Fortune was, you'll hang on to every acre you've got."

We three moved closer together around the table. It was somehow unnatural to hear the Major being talked back to. Nat hugged his knees and began to shake with spasms of soundless laughter. Rissa frowned and put her finger to her lips. It was no time to remind her father of our presence. But when Nat was able to stop laughing, he went into a fit of hiccoughs and grew scarlet in the face trying to stop them by holding his breath. It ended by his exploding in a loud report that sent us all into a panic. Rissa caught his hand and hurried him up the stairs to bed, while I waited with beating heart behind the portières. We need not have been so fearful, for as it turned out, the two men never so much as came to the study door. After awhile I stole out and began putting away the scattered dominoes, which is how I came to hear the last of their argument.

"I'll have to give the Foster offer an answer tomorrow," Henry Willis was saying, "I can't keep them waiting any longer."

"You tell them the 'Rainbow' isn't for sale. I've got other plans for her."

"That's final, Nathaniel?"

"Yes, and you can put some extra hands on tomorrow. I'm counting on the launching for the first week in September."

"Then that means I'd better begin drawing up the papers for that hundred acre deal." Henry Willis' voice sounded tired and flat. Though only half their words were clear to me then, I guessed, as children will, that something tremendously important had happened within my earshot.