The Tides of Barnegat Part 9

Captain Holt threw down his paper and rising hurriedly from his chair, followed her into the sitting-room. The manner of the nurse surprised him. He had known her for years, ever since his old friend, Lucy's father, had died, and the tones of her voice, so different from her usual deferential air, filled him with apprehension.

"Ain't n.o.body sick, is there, Martha?"

"No, but there will be. Are ye alone?"

"Yes."

"Then shut that door behind ye and sit down. I've got something to say."

The grizzled, weather-beaten man who had made twenty voyages around Cape Horn, and who was known as a man of few words, and those always of command, closed the door upon them, drew down the shade on the sunny side of the room and faced her. He saw now that something of more than usual importance absorbed her.

"Now, what is it?" he asked. His manner had by this time regained something of the dictatorial tone he always showed those beneath him in authority.

"It's about Bart. You've got to send him away." She had not moved from her position in the middle of the room.

The captain changed color and his voice lost its sharpness.

"Bart! What's he done now?"

"He sneaks off with our Lucy every chance he gets. They were on the beach yesterday hidin' behind the House o' Refuge with their heads together. She had on Miss Jane's red cloak, and Ann Gossaway thought it was Miss Jane, and I let it go at that."

The captain looked at Martha incredulously for a moment, and then broke into a loud laugh as the absurdity of the whole thing burst upon him.

Then dropping back a step, he stood leaning against the old-fas.h.i.+oned sideboard, his elbows behind him, his large frame thrust toward her.

"Well, what if they were--ain't she pretty enough?" he burst out. "I told her she'd have 'em all crazy, and I hear Bart ain't done nothin'

but follow in her wake since he seen her launched."

Martha stepped closer to the captain and held her fist in his face.

"He's got to stop it. Do ye hear me?" she shouted. "If he don't there'll be trouble, for you and him and everybody. It's me that's crazy, not him."

"Stop it!" roared the captain, straightening up, the gla.s.ses on the sideboard ringing with his sudden lurch. "My boy keep away from the daughter of Morton Cobden, who was the best friend I ever had and to whom I owe more than any man who ever lived! And this is what you traipsed up here to tell me, is it, you mollycoddle?"

Again Martha edged nearer; her body bent forward, her eyes searching his--so close that she could have touched his face with her knuckles.

"Hold your tongue and stop talkin' foolishness," she blazed out, the courage of a tigress fighting for her young in her eyes, the same bold ring in her voice. "I tell ye, Captain Holt, it's got to stop short off, and NOW! I know men; have known 'em to my misery. I know when they're honest and I know when they ain't, and so do you, if you would open your eyes. Bart don't mean no good to my bairn. I see it in his face. I see it in the way he touches her hand and ties on her bonnet.

I've watched him ever since the first night he laid eyes on her. He ain't a man with a heart in him; he's a sneak with a lie in his mouth.

Why don't he come round like any of the others and say where he's goin'

and what he wants to do instead of peepin' round the gate-posts watchin' for her and sendin' her notes on the sly, and makin' her lie to me, her old nurse, who's done nothin' but love her? Doctor John don't treat Miss Jane so--he loves her like a man ought to love a woman and he ain't got nothin' to hide--and you didn't treat your wife so.

There's something here that tells me"--and she laid her hand on her bosom--"tells me more'n I dare tell ye. I warn ye now ag'in. Send him to sea--anywhere, before it is too late. She ain't got no mother; she won't mind a word I say; Miss Jane is blind as a bat; out with him and NOW!"

The captain straightened himself up, and with his clenched fist raised above his head like a hammer about to strike, cried:

"If he harmed the daughter of Morton Cobden I'd kill him!" The words jumped hot from his throat with a slight hissing sound, his eyes still aflame.

"Well, then, stop it before it gets too late. I walk the floor nights and I'm scared to death every hour I live." Then her voice broke.

"Please, captain, please," she added in a piteous tone. "Don't mind me if I talk wild, my heart is breakin', and I can't hold in no longer,"

and she burst into a paroxysm of tears.

The captain leaned against the sideboard again and looked down upon the floor as if in deep thought. Martha's tears did not move him. The tears of few women did. He was only concerned in getting hold of some positive facts upon which he could base his judgment.

"Come, now," he said in an authoritative voice, "let me get that chair and set down and then I'll see what all this amounts to. Sounds like a yarn of a horse-marine." As he spoke he crossed the room and, dragging a rocking-chair from its place beside the wall, settled himself in it.

Martha found a seat upon the sofa and turned her tear-stained face toward him.

"Now, what's these young people been doin' that makes ye so almighty narvous?" he continued, lying back in his chair and looking at her from under his bushy eyebrows, his fingers supporting his forehead.

"Everything. Goes out sailin' with her and goes driftin' past with his head in her lap. Fogarty's man who brings fish to the house told me."

She had regained something of her old composure now.

"Anything else?" The captain's voice had a relieved, almost condescending tone in it. He had taken his thumb and forefinger from his eyebrow now and sat drumming with his stiffened knuckles on the arm of the rocker.

"Yes, a heap more--ain't that enough along with the other things I've told ye?" Martha's eyes were beginning to blaze again.

"No, that's just as it ought to be. Boys and girls will be boys and girls the world over." The tone of the captain's voice indicated the condition of his mind. He had at last arrived at a conclusion. Martha's head was muddled because of her inordinate and unnatural love for the child she had nursed. She had found a spooks.h.i.+p in a fog bank, that was all. Jealousy might be at the bottom of it or a certain nervous fussiness. Whatever it was it was too trivial for him to waste his time over.

The captain rose from his chair, crossed the sitting-room, and opened the door leading to the porch, letting in the suns.h.i.+ne. Martha followed close at his heels.

"You're runnin' on a wrong tack, old woman, and first thing ye know ye'll be in the breakers," he said, with his hand on the k.n.o.b. "Ease off a little and don't be too hard on 'em. They'll make harbor all right. You're makin' more fuss than a hen over one chicken. Miss Jane knows what she's about. She's got a level head, and when she tells me that my Bart ain't good enough to s.h.i.+p alongside the daughter of Morton Cobden, I'll sign papers for him somewhere else, and not before. I'll have to get you to excuse me now; I'm busy. Good-day," and picking up his paper, he re-entered the house and closed the door upon her.

CHAPTER VI

A GAME OF CARDS

Should Miss Gossaway have been sitting at her lookout some weeks after Martha's interview with Captain Nat Holt, and should she have watched the movements of Doctor John's gig as it rounded into the open gate of Cobden Manor, she must have decided that something out of the common was either happening or about to happen inside Yardley's hospitable doors. Not only was the sorrel trotting at her best, the doctor flapping the lines along her brown back, his body swaying from side to side with the motion of the light vehicle, but as he pa.s.sed her house he was also consulting the contents of a small envelope which he had taken from his pocket.

"Please come early," it read. "I have something important to talk over with you."

A note of this character signed with so adorable a name as "Jane Cobden" was so rare in the doctor's experience that he had at once given up his round of morning visits and, springing into his waiting gig, had started to answer it in person.

He was alive with expectancy. What could she want with him except to talk over some subject that they had left unfinished? As he hurried on there came into his mind half a dozen matters, any one of which it would have been a delight to revive. He knew from the way she worded the note that nothing had occurred since he had seen her--within the week, in fact--to cause her either annoyance or suffering. No; it was only to continue one of their confidential talks, which were the joy of his life.

Jane was waiting for him in the morning-room. Her face lighted up as he entered and took her hand, and immediately relaxed again into an expression of anxiety.

All his eagerness vanished. He saw with a sinking of the heart, even before she had time to speak, that something outside of his own affairs, or hers, had caused her to write the note.

"I came at once," he said, keeping her hand in his. "You look troubled; what has happened?"

"Nothing yet," she answered, leading him to the sofa, "It is about Lucy. She wants to go away for the winter."

"Where to?" he asked. He had placed a cus.h.i.+on at her back and had settled himself beside her.

"To Trenton, to visit her friend Miss Collins and study music. She says Warehold bores her."

"And you don't want her to go?"