The Tides of Barnegat Part 8

Lovers with their heads together interested the gossip no longer, except as a topic to talk about. Such trifles had these many years pa.s.sed out of the dress-maker's life.

So Miss Gossaway, busy with her own thoughts, kept on her way unnoticed by either Lucy or Bart.

When she reached the cross-road she met Doctor John driving in. He tightened the reins on the sorrel and stopped.

"Lovely afternoon, Miss Gossaway. Where are you from--looking at the sunset?"

"No, I ain't got no time for spoonin'. I might be if I was Miss Jane and Bart Holt. Just see 'em a spell ago squattin' down behind the House o' Refuge. She wouldn't look at me. I been to Fogarty's; she's on my list this week, and it's my day for visitin', fust in two weeks. That two-year-old of hers is all right ag'in after your sewing him up; they'll never get over tellin' how you set up all night with him. You ought to hear Mrs. Fogarty go on--'Oh, the goodness of him!'" and she mimicked the good woman's dialect. "'If Tod'd been his own child he couldn't a-done more for him.' That's the way she talks. I heard, doctor, ye never left him till daylight. You're a wonder."

The doctor touched his hat and drove on.

Miss Gossaway's sharp, rasping voice and incisive manner of speaking grated upon him. He liked neither her tone nor the way in which she spoke of the mistress of Yardley. No one else dared as much. If Jane was really on the beach and with Bart, she had some good purpose in her mind. It may have been her day for visiting, and Bart, perhaps, had accompanied her. But why had Miss Gossaway not met Miss Cobden at Fogarty's, his being the only cabin that far down the beach? Then his face brightened. Perhaps, after all, it was Lucy whom she had seen. He had placed that same red cloak around her shoulders the night of the reception at Yardley--and when she was with Bart, too.

Mrs. Cavendish was sitting by her window when the doctor entered his own house. She rose, and putting down her book, advanced to meet him.

"You should have come earlier, John," she said with a laugh; "such a charming girl and so pretty and gracious. Why, I was quite overcome.

She is very different from her sister. What do you think Miss Jane wants to do now? Nurse in the new hospital when it is built! Pretty position for a lady, isn't it?"

"Any position she would fill would gain by her presence," said the doctor gravely. "Have they been gone long?" he asked, changing the subject. He never discussed Jane Cobden with his mother if he could help it.

"Oh, yes, some time. Lucy must have kept on home, for I saw Miss Jane going toward the beach alone."

"Are you sure, mother?" There was a note of anxiety in his voice.

"Yes, certainly. She had that red cloak of hers with her and that miserable little dog; that's how I know. She must be going to stay late. You look tired, my son; have you had a hard day?" added she, kissing him on the cheek.

"Yes, perhaps I am a little tired, but I'll be all right. Have you looked at the slate lately? I'll go myself," and he turned and entered his office.

On the slate lay the rose. He picked it up and held it to his nose in a preoccupied way.

"One of mother's," he said listlessly, laying it back among his papers.

"She so seldom does that sort of thing. Funny that she should have given it to me to-day; and after Miss Jane's visit, too." Then he shut the office door, threw himself into his chair, and buried his face in his hands. He was still there when his mother called him to supper.

When Lucy reached home it was nearly dark. She came alone, leaving Bart at the entrance to the village. At her suggestion they had avoided the main road and had crossed the marsh by the foot-path, the dog bounding on ahead and springing at the nurse, who stood in the gate awaiting Lucy's return.

"Why, he's as dry as a bone!" Martha cried, stroking Meg's rough hair with her plump hand. "He didn't get much of a bath, did he?"

"No, I couldn't get him into the water. Every time I got my hand on him he'd dart away again."

"Anybody on the beach, darlin'?"

"Not a soul except Meg and the sandsnipe."

CHAPTER V

CAPTAIN NAT'S DECISION

When Martha, with Meg at her heels, pa.s.sed Ann Gossaway's cottage the next morning on her way to the post-office--her daily custom--the dressmaker, who was sitting in the window, one eye on her needle and the other on the street, craned her head clear of the calico curtain framing the sash and beckoned to her.

This perch of Ann Gossaway's was the eyrie from which she swept the village street, bordered with a double row of wide-spreading elms and fringed with sloping gra.s.sy banks s.p.a.ced at short intervals by hitching-posts and horse-blocks. Her own cottage stood somewhat nearer the flagged street path than the others, and as the garden fences were low and her lookout flanked by two windows, one on each end of her corner, she could not only note what went on about the fronts of her neighbors' houses, but much of what took place in their back yards.

From this angle, too, she could see quite easily, and without more than twisting her attenuated neck, the whole village street from the Cromartins' gate to the spire of the village church, as well as everything that pa.s.sed up and down the shadow-flecked road: which child, for instance, was late for school, and how often, and what it wore and whether its clothes were new or inherited from an elder sister; who came to the Bronsons' next door, and how long they stayed, and whether they brought anything with them or carried anything away; the peddler with his pack; the gunner on his way to the marshes, his two dogs following at his heels in a leash; Dr. John Cavendish's gig, and whether it was about to stop at Uncle Ephraim Tipple's or keep on, as usual, and whirl into the open gate of Cobden Manor; Billy Tatham's pa.s.senger list, as the ricketty stage pa.s.sed with the side curtains up, and the number of trunks and bags, and the size of them, all indicative of where they were bound and for how long; details of village life--no one of which concerned her in the least--being matters of profound interest to Miss Gossaway.

These several discoveries she shared daily with a faded old mother who sat huddled up in a rocking-chair by the stove, winter and summer, whether it had any fire in it or not.

Uncle Ephraim Tipple, in his outspoken way, always referred to these two gossips as the "spiders." "When the thin one has sucked the life out of you," he would say with a laugh, "she pa.s.ses you on to her old mother, who sits doubled up inside the web, and when she gets done munching there isn't anything left but your hide and bones."

It was but one of Uncle Ephraim's jokes. The mother was only a forlorn, half-alive old woman who dozed in her chair by the hour--the relict of a fisherman who had gone to sea in his yawl some twenty years before and who had never come back. The daughter, with the courage of youth, had then stepped into the gap and had alone made the fight for bread.

Gradually, as the years went by the roses in her cheeks--never too fresh at any time--had begun to fade, her face and figure to shrink, and her brow to tighten. At last, embittered by her responsibilities and disappointments, she had lost faith in human kind and had become a shrew. Since then her tongue had swept on as relentlessly as a scythe, sparing neither flower nor noxious weed, a movement which it was wise, sometimes, to check.

When, therefore, Martha, with Meg now bounding before her, caught sight of Ann Gossaway's beckoning hand thrust out of the low window of her cottage--the spider-web referred to by Uncle Ephraim--she halted in her walk, lingered a moment as if undecided, expressed her opinion of the dressmaker to Meg in an undertone, and swinging open the gate with its ball and chain, made her way over the gra.s.s-plot and stood outside the window, level with the sill.

"Well, it ain't none of my business, of course, Martha Sands," Miss Gossaway began, "and that's just what I said to mother when I come home, but if I was some folks I'd see my company in my parlor, long as I had one, 'stead of hidin' down behind the House o' Refuge. I said to mother soon's I got in, 'I'm goin' to tell Martha Sands fust minute I see her. She ain't got no idee how them girls of hers is carryin' on or she'd stop it.' That's what I said, didn't I, mother?"

Martha caught an inarticulate sound escaping from a figure m.u.f.fled in a blanket shawl, but nothing else followed.

"I thought fust it was you when I heard that draggle-tail dog of yours barkin', but it was only Miss Jane and Bart Holt."

"Down on the beach! When?" asked Martha. She had not understood a word of Miss Gossaway's outburst.

"Why, yesterday afternoon, of course--didn't I tell ye so? I'd been down to Fogarty's; it's my week. Miss Jane and Bart didn't see me--didn't want to. Might a' been a pair of scissors, they was that close together."

"Miss Jane warn't on the beach yesterday afternoon," said Martha in a positive tone, still in the dark.

"She warn't, warn't she? Well, I guess I know Miss Jane Cobden. She and Bart was hunched up that close you couldn't get a bodkin 'tween 'em.

She had that red cloak around her and the hood up ever her head. Not know her, and she within ten feet o' me? Well, I guess I got my eyes left, ain't I?"

Martha stood stunned. She knew now who it was. She had taken the red cloak from Lucy's shoulders the evening before. Then a cold chill crept over her as she remembered the lie Lucy had told--"not a soul on the beach but Meg and the sandsnipe." For an instant she stood without answering. But for the window-sill on which her hand rested she would have betrayed her emotion in the swaying of her body. She tried to collect her thoughts. To deny Jane's ident.i.ty too positively would only make the situation worse. If either one of the sisters were to be criticised Jane could stand it best.

"You got sharp eyes and ears, Ann Gossaway, n.o.body will deny you them, but still I don't think Miss Jane was on the beach yesterday."

"Don't think, don't you? Maybe you think I can't tell a cloak from a bed blanket, never havin' made one, and maybe ye think I don't know my own clo'es when I see 'em on folks. I made that red cloak for Miss Jane two years ago, and I know every st.i.tch in it. Don't you try and teach Ann Gossaway how to cut and baste or you'll git worsted," and the gossip looked over her spectacles at Martha and shook her side-curls in a threatening way.

Miss Gossaway had no love for the old nurse. There had been a time when Martha "weren't no better'n she oughter be, so everybody said," when she came to the village, and the dressmaker never let a chance slip to humiliate the old woman. Martha's open denunciation of the dressmaker's vinegar tongue had only increased the outspoken dislike each had for the other. She saw now, to her delight, that the incident which had seemed to be only a bit of flotsam that had drifted to her sh.o.r.e and which but from Martha's manner would have been forgotten by her the next day, might be a fragment detached from some floating family wreck.

Before she could press the matter to an explanation Martha turned abruptly on her heel, called Meg, and with the single remark, "Well, I guess Miss Jane's of age," walked quickly across the gra.s.s-plot and out of the gate, the ball and chain closing it behind her with a clang.

Once on the street Martha paused with her brain on fire. The lie which Lucy had told frightened her. She knew why she had told it, and she knew, too, what harm would come to her bairn if that kind of gossip got abroad in the village. She was no longer the gentle, loving nurse with the soft caressing hand, but a woman of purpose. The sudden terror aroused in her heart had the effect of tightening her grip and bracing her shoulders as if the better to withstand some expected shock.

She forgot Meg; forgot her errand to the post-office; forgot everything, in fact, except the safety of the child she loved. That Lucy had neglected and even avoided her of late, keeping out of her way even when she was in the house, and that she had received only cool indifference in place of loyal love, had greatly grieved her, but it had not lessened the idolatry with which she wors.h.i.+pped her bairn.

Hours at a time she had spent puzzling her brain trying to account for the change which had come over the girl during two short years of school. She had until now laid this change to her youth, her love of admiration, and had forgiven it. Now she understood it; it was that boy Bart. He had a way with him. He had even ingratiated himself into Miss Jane's confidence. And now this young girl had fallen a victim to his wiles. That Lucy should lie to her, of all persons, and in so calm and self-possessed a manner; and about Bart, of all men--sent a shudder through her heart, that paled her cheek and tightened her lips. Once before she had consulted Jane and had been rebuffed. Now she would depend upon herself.

Retracing her steps and turning sharply to the right, she ordered Meg home in a firm voice, watched the dog slink off and then walked straight down a side road to Captain Nat Holt's house. That the captain occupied a different station in life from herself did not deter her.

She felt at the moment that the honor of the Cobden name lay in her keeping. The family had stood by her in her trouble; now she would stand by them.

The captain sat on his front porch reading a newspaper. He was in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves and bareheaded, his straight hair standing straight out like the bristles of a shoe-brush. Since the death of his wife a few years before he had left the service, and now spent most of his days at home, tending his garden and enjoying his savings. He was a man of positive character and generally had his own way in everything. It was therefore with some astonishment that he heard Martha say when she had mounted the porch steps and pushed open the front door, her breath almost gone in her hurried walk, "Come inside."