Duffels Part 6

Judith turned toward the house, followed by the peddler. Sanford Browne was still sitting in the entry just as Judith had left him, surprised and in a sense paralyzed by the sudden and effective opposition which his wife had offered to the gratification of his only grudge.

"Mr. Browne!" called Judith, almost hysterically, her tense nerves suddenly shaken again. "What's that? Something's happened down at the quarters."

Looking through the wide pa.s.sage into the dim twilight beyond, she could see running figures like shadows approaching the house. Sanford Browne rose at his wife's summons in time to meet the convict Lewis, still manacled, as he rushed into the pa.s.sage at the back of the house and dashed out again at the front. Browne attempted to arrest his flight, crying out, as he made an effort to seize him, "Stop, you old villain, or I'll kill you!" But the momentum of the flying figure rendered Browne's grasp ineffectual, and in a moment he was out of doors, just as Bob and Jocko and the other servants entered the pa.s.sage in a pell-mell pursuit.

As the running man emerged from the darkness of the pa.s.sage, Perkins, thinking his profit in jeopardy, threw himself athwart his path, and cried: "Here! Where be you a-goin' so fast with them things on your wrist?"

"To h.e.l.l and d.a.m.nation!" yelled Lewis, striking the peddler fair in the breast with both manacled hands, and sending him rolling on the ground.

The convict did not pause a moment in his flight, but, with the whole pack in full cry after him, dashed onward to the bank and down it.

Before any of his pursuers could lay hands on him he was aboard the sloop.

"Ketch him! Ketch him!" cried Captain Perkins, once more on his feet, and giving orders from the top of the bank.

The cabin boy had just emerged from the cabin to call the man to supper. He and the sailor tried hard to seize the fleeing man, but Captain Lewis swerved to one side and ran round the gunwale of the sloop with both men after him. When he reached the stern he leaped beyond their reach, and plunged head first into the water, sinking out of sight where the fast-ebbing tide was now gurgling round the rudder.

In vain the boy and the sailorman looked with all their might at the place where he had gone down; in vain they poked a long pole into the water after him; in vain did Bob and Jocko paddle in the canoe all over the place where Black Jim Lewis had sunk.

Perkins took the precaution, before descending the bank, to say: "You'll remember, Mis' Braown, that I only bought him on conditions, and stipple-lated I wuz to be satisfied when I come to look him over.

'Tain't no loss of mine." This caveat duly lodged, he descended to the deck of his sloop, where he found the cabin boy shaking as with an ague.

"What be you a-trimblin' abaout, naow? Got a fever 'n' agur a'ready? Y'

ain't afeard of a dead man, be yeh, Elkanah?"

"I don't noways like the idear," said Elkanah, "of sleepin' aboard, an'

him dead thar by his own will, a-layin' closte up to the sloop."

"He ain't nowher's nigh the sloop," responded Perkins. "This ebb-tide's got him in tow, an' he'll be down layin' ag'in' the Nancy Jane afore mornin'. That's the s.h.i.+p he'll ha'nt, bein' kind uv used to her."

Browne had remained standing at the top of the bank, without saying a single word. He turned at last, and started slowly toward the house.

Judith, forgetting her invitation to the peddler, went after her husband and took his hand.

"I'm so glad he's dead," said she. "I know the cruel man deserved his fate. He'll be off your mind, now, dear; and n.o.body can say you did it."

A BAs.e.m.e.nT STORY.

I.

It was one of those obscure days found only on the banks of Newfoundland. There was no sun, and yet no visible cloud; there was nothing, indeed, to test the vision by; there was no apparent fog, but sight was soon lost in a hazy indefiniteness. Near objects stood out with a distinctness almost startling. The swells ran high without sufficient provocation from the present wind, and attention was absorbed by the tremendous pitching of the steamer's bow, the wide arc described by the mainmast against no background at all, and by the smoky and bellying mainsail, kept spread to hold the vessel to some sort of steadiness in the waves. There was no storm, nor any dread of a storm, and the few pa.s.sengers who were not seasick in stateroom bunks below, or stretched in numb pa.s.sivity on the sofas in the music saloon, were watching the rough sea with a cheerful excitement. In the total absence of sky and the entire abolition of horizon the eye rejoiced, like Noah's dove, to find some place of rest; and the mainsail, smoky like the air, but cutting the smoky air with a sharp plane, was such a resting place for the vision. This sail and the reeky smokestack beyond, and the great near billows that emerged from time to time out of the gray obscurity--these seemed to save the universe from chaos. On such a day the imagination is released from bounds, individuality is lost, and s.p.a.ce becomes absolute--the soul touches the poles of the infinite and the unconditioned.

I do not pretend that such emotions filled the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of all the twenty pa.s.sengers on deck that day. One man was a little seasick, and after every great rus.h.i.+ng plunge of the steamer from a billow summit into a sea valley he vented his irritation by wis.h.i.+ng that he had there some of the poets that--here he paused and gasped as the s.h.i.+p balanced itself on another crest preparatory to another shoot down the flank of a swell, while the screw, thrown clean out of the water, rattled wildly in the unresisting air and made the s.h.i.+p quiver in every timber--some of those poets, he resumed with bitterer indignation, that sing about the loveliness of the briny deep and the deep blue--but here an errant swell hit the vessel a tremendous blow on the broadside, making her roll heavily to starboard, and bringing up through the skylights sounds of breaking goblets thrown from the sideboards in the saloon below, while the pa.s.senger who hated marine poetry was capsized from his steamer chair and landed sprawling on the deck. A small group of young people on the forward part of the upper deck were pa.s.sing the day in watching the swells and forecasting the effect of each upon the steamer, rejoicing in the rush upward followed by the sudden falling downward, much as children enjoy the flying far aloft in a swing or on a teetering see-saw, to be frightened by the descent. Some of the young ladies had books open in their laps, but the pretense that they had come on deck to read was a self-deluding hypocrisy. They had left their elderly relatives safely ensconced in staterooms below, and had worked their way up to the deck with much care and climbing and with many lurches and much grievous staggering, not for the purpose of reading, but to enjoy the society of other young women, and of such young men as could sit on deck. When did a young lady ever read on an ocean steamer, the one place where the numerical odds are reversed and there are always found two gallant young men to attend each young girl? This merry half dozen, reclining in steamer chairs and m.u.f.fled in shawls, breathed the salt air and enjoyed the chaos into which the world had fallen. On this deck, where usually there was a throng, they felt themselves in some sense survivors of a world that had dropped away from them, and they enjoyed their social solitude, spiced with apparent peril that was not peril.

The enthusiastic Miss Sylvia Thorne, who was one of this party, was very much interested in the billows, and in the attentions of a student who sat opposite her. From time to time she remarked also on some of the steerage pa.s.sengers on the deck below; particularly was she interested in a young girl who sat watching the threatening swells emerge from the mist. Miss Sylvia spoke to the young lady alongside of her about that interesting young girl in the steerage, but her companion said she had so much trouble with the Irish at home that she could not bear an Irish girl even at sea. Her mother, she went on to say, had hired a girl who had proved most ungrateful, she had--but here a scream from all the party told that a sea of more than usual magnitude was running up against the port side. A minute later and all were trying to keep their seats while the s.h.i.+p reeled away to starboard with vast momentum, and settled swiftly again into the trough of the sea.

Miss Thorne now wondered that the sail, which did not flap as she had observed sails generally do, in poems, did not tear into shreds as she had always known sails to do in novels when there was a rough sea. But the blue-eyed student, having come from a fresh-water college, and being now on a homeward voyage, knew all about it, and tried to explain the difference between a sea like this and a storm or a squall. He would have become hopelessly confused in a few minutes more had not a lucky wave threatened to capsize his chair and so divert the conversation from the sail to himself. And just as Sylvia was about to change back to the sail again for the sake of relieving his embarra.s.sment, her hat strings, not having been so well secured as the sail, gave way, and her hat went skimming down to the main deck below, lodged a minute, and then took another flight forward. It would soon have been riding the great waves on its own account, a mark for curious sea gulls and hungry sharks to inspect, had not the Irish girl that Sylvia had so much admired sprung to her feet and seized it as it swept past, making a handsome "catch on the fly." A sudden revulsion of the vessel caused her to stagger and almost to fall, but she held on to the hat as though life depended on it. The party on the upper deck cheered her, but their voices could hardly have reached her in the midst of the confused sounds of the sea and the wind.

The student, Mr. Walter Kirk, a large, bright, blond fellow, jumped to his feet and was about to throw himself over the rail. It was a chance to do something for Miss Thorne; he felt impelled to recover her seventy-five-cent hat with all the abandon of a lover flinging himself into the sea to rescue his lady-love. But a sudden sense of the ludicrousness of wasting so much eagerness on a hat and a sudden lurch of the s.h.i.+p checked him. He made a gesture to the girl who held the hat, and then ran aft to descend for it. The Irish girl, with the curly hair blown back from her fair face, started to meet Mr. Kirk, but paused abruptly before a little inscription which said that steerage pa.s.sengers were not allowed aft. Then turning suddenly, she mounted a coil of rope, and held the hat up to Miss Thorne.

"There's your hat, miss," she said.

"Thank you," said Sylvia.

"Sure you're welcome, miss," she said, not with a broad accent, but with a subdued trace of Irish in the inflection and idiom.

When the gallant Walter Kirk came round to where the girl, just dismounted from the cordage, stood, he was puzzled to see her without the hat.

"Where is it?" he asked.

"The young lady's got it her own self," she replied.

Kirk felt foolish. Had his chum come down over the rail for it? He would do something to distinguish himself. He fumbled in his pockets for a coin to give the girl, but found nothing smaller than a half sovereign, and with that he could ill afford to part. The girl had meanwhile turned away, and Kirk had nothing left but to go back to the upper deck.

The enthusiastic Sylvia spoke in praise of the Irish girl for her agility and politeness, but the young lady alongside, who did not like the Irish, told her that what the girl wanted was a s.h.i.+lling or two.

Servants in Europe were always beggars, and the Irish people especially. But she wouldn't give the girl a quarter if it were her hat. What was the use of making people so mean-spirited?

"I'd like to give her something, if I thought it wouldn't hurt her feelings," said Sylvia, at which the other laughed immoderately.

"Hurt her feelings! Did you ever see an Irish girl whose feelings were hurt by a present of money? I never did, though I don't often try the experiment, that's so."

"I was going to offer her something myself, but she walked away while I was trying to find some change," said Kirk.

The matter of a gratuity to the girl weighed on Sylvia Thorne's mind.

She had a sense of a debt in owing her a gratuity, if one may so speak.

The next day being calm and fine, and finding her company not very attractive, for young Kirk was engaged with some gentlemen in a stupid game of shuffleboard, she went forward to the part of the deck on which the steerage pa.s.sengers were allowed to sun themselves, and found the Irish girl holding a baby. "You saved my hat yesterday," she said with embarra.s.sment.

"Sure that's not much now, miss. I'd like to do somethin' for you every day if I could. It isn't every lady that's _such_ a lady," said the girl, with genuine admiration of the delicate features and kindly manner of young Sylvia Thorne.

"Does that baby belong to some friend of yours?" asked the young lady.

"No, miss; I've not got any friends aboard. Its mother's seasick, and I'm givin' her a little rest an' holdin' the baby out here. The air of that steerage isn't fit for a baby, now, you may say."

Should she give her any money? What was it about the girl that made her afraid to offer a customary trifle?

"Where did you live in Ireland?" inquired Sylvia.

"At Drogheda, miss, till I went to work in the linen mills."

"Oh! you worked in the linen mills."

"Yes, miss. My father died, and my mother was poor, and girls must work for their living. But my father wanted me to get a good bit of readin'

and writin' so as I might do better; but he died, miss, and I couldn't leave my mother without help."

"You were the only child?"

"I've got a sister, but somehow she didn't care to go out to work, and so I had to go out to service; and I heard that more was paid in Ameriky, where I've got an aunt, an' I had enough to take me out, an' I thought maybe I'd get my mother out there some day, or I'd get money enough to make her comfortable, anyways."