Erica Folger sat cross-legged on the flat, railed platform known to Nantucketers as “the walk,” which perched astride the sloping roof of her aunt’s shabby, well-weathered gray house on Orange Street, overlooking the blue waters of the harbor. The water was very blue on that late October day, and the sunshine very clear and golden on the distant commons of the unromantically named “Pest-house Shore” across the harbor, where the brilliant coloring of autumn was already flaming in a riot of orange sedge, and the red and gold and rose of turning huckleberry.
The air was full of the clean tang of sea salt and of sweet-fern and bayberry, mixed in a most aromatic fragrance. Erica, busy as she was about a highly reprehensible matter of vast importance to herself, sniffed it appreciatively. Vaguely, half her attention otherwise occupied, she decided, as she always decided each year at this time, that October was the best month of the whole twelve. She loved the snap and vigor of the crisp, sweet air, and the alive, ambitious feeling it put into fingers and toes. October smelled of so many interesting things on Nantucket.
Thinking of interesting things, Erica reflected that her present occupation, though undoubtedly interesting to herself, would not in the least interest Aunt Charity. She was sorry that Aunt Charity’s point of view so often ran counter to her niece’s, but Erica, turning to stare critically at her own reflection in the small, square mirror she had propped up on a box before her, felt no regrets as to her recent act of vandalism—which is what Aunt Charity would term it the minute she knew.
Though Erica Folger sat on the high walk above her home and stared at her reflection in the mirror more than eighty years ago—at that time even the Civil War would not be fought for a matter of nearly twenty years yet—she had just achieved, with no known precedent to guide her, a thoroughly modern “bob.” On the floor of the walk, beside her, lay Aunt Charity’s biggest cutting shears, and two thick braids of curly dark red hair, tied at the ends with demure black bows.
Following the shearing process, Erica had shampooed her shorn locks in a pail of warm water she had carried up the ladder when Aunt Charity was otherwise occupied, and now she sat there letting the bright October sunshine dry the new bob. (But Erica, years ahead of her generation though she was, did not know that it would one day be called a bob. She called it giving herself a sensible hair-cut, that should not require the half hour of tiresome brushing Aunt Charity insisted on each evening.)
The hair was almost dry now, and the mirror showed Erica a tumble of short red curls against either rosy cheek on a line with the just-hidden ears. Above the curls and the flushed cheeks were two widely opened eyes of the exact shade of the blue harbor-water below, a straight little nose well supplied with a powdering of faint golden freckles, and below that, again, a rather wide mouth that was made for courage and light-hearted laughter even in the face of discouragement.
Erica shook her head experimentally, and sighed with delight at the free, untrammeled feeling that had replaced the drag of her heavy braids.
“Aunt Charity’ll hate it,” she murmured, but without regret. “And Lis and Tommy’ll laugh. Oh, well, let’s get it over with.”
She rose to her feet, picked up her discarded braids, the mirror, and the pail of water, and carefully negotiated the ladder down to the floor below. It was unfortunate that Miss Charity Folger should have come out into the upper hall just then, and, discovering her always-unaccountable niece halfway down the ladder with a heavy pail of water, stopped aghast.
”Erica!” she said. “For the land’s sake! What were you doing up on the walk with that pail?”
It was too dark in the hall for her to notice Erica’s guilty little head, but at the sound of the unexpected voice below her the girl jumped, and one of the heavy red braids slipped through her clutching fingers. Miss Charity gave a stifled shriek as the long, sinuous object fell limply at her feet. Perhaps she thought it was a snake; but of a certainty her wildest imaginings never reached within a far cry of the truth. She gathered her full skirts higher about her ankles and, after a perceptible hesitation, bent over the puzzling object on the floor. Then, though she was not at all the kind of woman who screams easily, she uttered something that was very much like another little shriek.
“Erica,” she asked, in a much severer voice, “just what have you been doing this time?”
Erica, having by now arrived at the foot of the ladder, plunged eagerly to her own defense.
“I don’t see why only boys should be comfortable, Aunt Charity. I really don’t,” she said, vehemently. “My hair was heavy and hot. I got so I simply couldn’t bear it any longer. And all that brushing and brushing every night of my life! It’s such a waste of time. And—and so I cut it off. It’ll grow again, of course—probably thicker than——”
She stopped, her voice, for all its eager conviction, trailing off limply into silence at the expression on her aunt’s face.
“I—I’m sorry if you really feel badly about it, Aunt Charity,” she offered at last.
“I never know what you’ll do next, Erica Folger,” Miss Charity complained, despairingly. “You had nice hair, and I’ve always tried to see that you kept it in good condition. Her hair’s a woman’s crowning glory, so the Bible says. But of course, if you want to make yourself look a fright. Well, it’s done now and there’s no more to be said about it. I hope you’ll enjoy it.”
Erica put her hands up protestingly to her head. She had thought it looked rather—rather pretty, even if she had never seen a girl wear her hair short before. But now, under Miss Charity’s scathing words, her own enthusiasm fell suddenly flat, like a pricked toy balloon. Perhaps she had just been silly and impulsive again.
“Take that pail of water downstairs, and be careful you don’t spill it all over everything,” Miss Folger ordered, shortly. She had said her say on the other subject, and Erica knew by experience that she would not be apt to refer to it again. That was one of the nice things about Aunt Charity—she never nagged. Perhaps, though, Erica further reflected, uncomfortably, that made it all the worse when she did these unconsidered, impetuous things Aunt Charity worried over.
She went downstairs very soberly. The day had lost some of its early glamour already, but within another hour it was destined to become for Erica a very gray day indeed. Shortly before noon she heard a familiar whistling of an old sea tune from the garden that adjoined the house of her Folger cousins, next door. She went quickly through the dining-room door, out onto the sunny side porch, and whistled vigorously in response.
A tall, long-legged boy of fifteen swung himself easily over the low dividing fence, and was followed by a second long-legged boy, so exactly like him that a stranger might well have been excused for believing his own eyesight was playing him tricks. The only difference between them, which even a keen observer would have noticed at first glance, was that the fair hair of the boy first over the fence had an unruly kink in it that made it stand wildly on end at the slightest provocation, while the equally fair hair of his twin—for they could have been nothing else—was as straight and smooth and tractable as hair could be.
They came up the bricked path side by side, and then, at sight of Erica on the steps, stopped, stared incredulously, and went off into wild whoops of uproarious laughter.
Erica, one hand consciously touching her short locks, waited with obvious impatience until the two saw fit to come to order.
“Yes, I cut it off,” she said, hotly. “You would, too, long ago, if you’d had to drag those everlasting braids about everywhere. It’s comfortable, anyway.”
“Well, it looks queer,” the straight-haired twin said, bluntly. “But I guess it likely does feel more comfortable.”
“And there’s no good talking, as long as it’s cut,” the curly-haired twin added, good-naturedly. “Besides, Rick, we came over to talk about something much more important.”
Both boys’ faces sobered instantly, making them look, somehow, a good deal older. They sat down on the lowest step of the porch and looked up at the girl standing above them.
“We’ve settled the big question at last, Rick,” the one who had spoken last announced. “We spun a coin for it, and Lis stays home with mother and I go to sea as cabin boy in the Flying Spray, sailing out of Boston next week, bound for Macao, Canton, and Cochin-China. Hurrah! Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”
Some of the bright color faded from Erica’s face. She glanced at the straight-haired boy in swift interrogation. He nodded, his own face clouded.
“Yes, Rick, Tommy gets all the luck and adventure, this trip,” he said, ruefully. “Mother can’t be left alone while she’s so poorly, so we agreed to let the toss of a coin settle which was to go and which to stay. No sense in both of us being tied on Nantucket; and this chance came up unexpectedly through Captain Bartlet of the Spray being here for a few days with his sister—Mrs. Macy, you know, over on Pearl Street. He wants a boy for his next trip.”
“It was only decided last night,” Tommy added. “Mother and Captain Bartlet talked it over and agreed one of us should have the chance. They left it to us to say which one.”
“I don’t think an important thing like that ought to be decided by tossing a coin,” Erica objected, weakly. “It’s—well, it’s too much like gambling.”
“Oh, there’s Bible authority for casting lots—same thing exactly,” Tommy retorted. “Anyhow, it’s like your hair, too late to do anything about it now but groan.”
He grinned, and Erica bit her lip, flushing angrily. But the flush died as quickly as it had arisen. With the near prospect of losing one of the cousins who had been her inseparable companions from babyhood, she could not find it in her heart to resent anything teasing Tommy might say.
“I wish I were a boy,” she sighed a moment later. “Then I’d be on father’s ship right now bound home from China.” Her expression became less woe-begone. “La! I do envy you, Tommy! But why didn’t you wait for the Sea Gull? Father always promised one of you two a berth when the time came.”
“Yes, I know, but he won’t be back for months yet, probably,” Tommy replied. “And here was the chance to go right off, next week. Besides, I think it’s better not to sail with your family. Going with Captain Bartlet, I’ll stand on my own merits.” He couldn’t help an unconscious strut of importance, and both Erica and Lister laughed.
“You needn’t be so proud,” the former teased, “I came home from Canton on a clipper myself, before I was a year old; and had a Chinese nurse, too, that Sun Li sent home with me.”
For Erica Folger’s young mother had insisted on sailing with her captain on his voyages after their marriage, and on their second trip to China Erica had been born at sea, and her mother had died just two days from Canton.
“Maybe I’ll meet that mysterious godfather of yours, Rick,” Tommy suggested, out of the little silence that had fallen suddenly over the three. “Funny Uncle Eric won’t ever tell you anything definite about him.”
“Oh, but I do know lots,” Erica said, quickly. “He’s a very rich and powerful merchant in Canton—or at least, I think he’s a merchant,” she added, less certainly. “I know father met him years ago through carrying a cargo for him. And Sun Li had a little son born the same day I was, only his baby died and he’s never had any other children. So as he and father were friends, anyhow, that made him take a very special interest in me. He sent his little dead son’s nurse to take care of me on the voyage home, and every time the Sea Gull touches at Canton he sends me back a lovely present by father.”
The twins nodded, impressed as always by the story and the hint of mystery surrounding it. Also they had seen the “presents” in question, beautifully carved jade of deep, clear green, lengths of rich silks, ivory fans, and cunning teakwood boxes with trick drawers and detachable bottoms; things, as Aunt Charity pointed out disapprovingly, that were far too fine for a simple little Nantucket girl in her early ‘teens.
“Tommy, listen to me,” Erica cried, suddenly, her sea-blue eyes very bright with the new, exciting idea that had come to her. “It’s just possible that you will meet Sun Li if the Spray goes to Canton. Anyway, I’m going to give you something that will introduce you to him as my cousin if you do.” It was Erica whose voice held an important note now, but both her listeners were too absorbed to smile. “Wait here for me,” she added, eagerly. “I’ll be right back.”
She ran into the house, slamming the porch door behind her in the headlong tomboy fashion nothing that Miss Charity could say had succeeded in moderating. The twins heard her flying feet on the steep, carpeted stairs, and a moment later heard her come racing down them again.
She held a small ebony box very carefully in one hand, and, opening it, drew out a heavy gold ring set with a green jade seal. There were strange Chinese characters cut in the stone, and the ring itself formed a conventional dragon’s head, which held the seal in its wide-open mouth.
“Remember this?” she asked, breathlessly, holding it out to Tommy. “He sent it to me two years ago. Father said I was always to take great care of it, because it was Sun Li’s private seal, and the ring would have belonged to his son if he had lived. I’m going to give it to you, Tommy. When you’re in Canton, you can try to find out whose seal it is, and go to see Sun Li.”
“But he may not like that, Rick,” Lister interposed, his tone troubled. “If Uncle Eric hasn’t told us much about him, perhaps its because he’s been asked not to. Sun Li may not care to have visitors from across the ocean.”
“I don’t see why not,” Erica objected. “Anyhow, Tommy can use his judgment. He can inquire round a bit first, if you think he’d better——”
“Tommy’s judgment is just about as much to be relied on as your own,” Lister said. But his smile was gentle for her, as always. Lister felt himself years older, most of the time, than his twin and Erica.
Tommy took the ring and tried to slip it on his fourth finger. But it proved too small for that one, and too large for his little finger. He stared at it, frowningly, his face full of ingenuous disappointment.
“Never mind. You can wear it round your neck, like a sort of talisman,” Erica giggled. “I’ve got just the very cord for that—it’s Chinese, too. It came round the last box Sun Li sent me.”
She dashed upstairs a second time, and returned carrying a dark-blue cotton cord of a curious weave, knotted at intervals. Taking the ring from Tommy, she slipped it over one end of the cord, adding still another knot to the collection, which secured both ends firmly together. Then, with the air of a queen bestowing the accolade of knighthood on a subject, she flung the cord itself over Tommy’s fair, ruffled head, and tucked the ring down inside his collar.
“It’s safer to wear it out of sight, anyhow,” she advised him. “There are always rough men in those clipper crews, and you might have the ring stolen, if they knew you had it.”
She sat down, still breathless after her run upstairs, on the step between her two cousins and slipped an arm through an arm of each of them. Another little silence fell. In the midst of their banter and laughing plans the realization seemed to have seized on all three at once, that there were only a few more days left of the old, happy companionship.
Characteristically enough, it was Tommy who spoke first.
“Oh, well,” he observed, philosophically. “I won’t be gone more than a year. Probably not so much. The Spray’s one of the fast clippers, you know. Rick’ll just have time to let that silly hair-cut grow out long enough to wear the ivory comb I’ll bring her back from Canton or Cochin-China, in exchange for Sun Li’s ring.”
“All right,” Erica flashed back, her eyes bubbling over with fun again. “I’ll put it with all the rest of the Chinese presents Aunt Charity won’t let me use yet. But I’m not going to let my hair grow,” she added with firmness. “It’s much too comfortable this way.” Which again, had Erica only known it, was a remark that a good many other girls were destined to repeat, in the same tone of conviction, eighty years later.
The cobblestones of Main Street—until recently known as State—were slippery after a heavy shower, and Erica, picking a careful way across them that she might not bespatter her white stockings with mud, spied a plump and dignified figure in sober Quaker garb wending its way up the street ahead of her, and called after it, anxiously: “Mrs. Macy! Oh, Mrs. Macy, please!”
[Illustration]
The plump little lady turned at the sound of her name, smiling. “Good morning, Erica,” she said. “Was thee trying to overtake me, my dear?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Erica was panting with her own hurry. “But you walk twice as fast as Aunt Charity. I was just going to your house with a message. Aunt Charity wants that you and Captain Bartlet should come to supper tomorrow night at six o’clock. You know Tommy is going to sea in the Spray and—” A sudden twinkle in the little old lady’s blue eyes was answered by a twinkle in Erica’s. “Yes’m, I guess Aunt Charity thinks it’s her bounden duty to talk to Captain Bartlet about Tommy.”
“Walk home with me, my dear, and we’ll ask the captain,” Mrs. Macy invited. “For my part, I shall be pleased to accept. How does thee feel about Tommy’s going? Won’t thee and Lister both miss him very much?”
Quick tears blurred Erica’s eyes, but she pretended to be looking at something across Main Street, and wiped them away fiercely with the back of her hand—having, as usual, mislaid her neat white pocket handkerchief.
“Yes, ma’am, we will,” she said, dully.
The more she had thought about Tommy’s departure during the past three days since she had heard the news, the more utterly calamitous it seemed to her. But Erica’s code was the code drilled into her by Lis and Tommy, which insisted that tears, particularly in public, were shameful even for a girl; also that whining over what was fixed and settled was something only spoiled children did. Besides, Tommy was in the seventh heaven of delight at the prospect of his first voyage. Even delicate Aunt Callie, his mother, tightened her lips and tried to smile at his raptures, instead of dwelling on her own sense of loss.
“Yes’m,” Erica repeated, “we’re going to miss him, I expect.”
They turned into Center Street, and walked two blocks along it to Pearl—the latter name, changed a few years before, unfortunately, from India Street. Mrs. Macy’s house was small and neat and white, set back from the street behind a prim garden blazing with late fall dahlias, Spanish Browns, and small, hardy chrysanthemums.
A tall man with iron-gray hair and a gray beard stood in the open doorway, glancing up at the clouds breaking overhead after the rain.
“Judson,” Mrs. Macy greeted her brother, “thee needn’t study the sky for an hour. I can tell thee that it’s going to clear, unless the fog comes in again. Here’s Erica Folger bringing us an invitation from Miss Charity to supper tomorrow night—” She broke off with a little gasp. “La, Erica! what has come of thy nice thick braids?”
For without thinking what she was about, Erica had snatched off her bonnet, which had heretofore hidden her revolutionary hair-cut, and was fanning herself vigorously, swinging it by its strings. Erica hated bonnets among the many other restraining things of life that seemed to her young impatience so needless.
Now, startled, her hand flew self-consciously to her head, and her smile was sheepish.
“I forgot, or I wouldn’t have taken my bonnet off,” she admitted. “I cut my hair off day before yesterday. I’ve wanted to for a long while. My braids were so heavy and troublesome, and I’ve always envied Tommy and Lis being so—so free. At last I just chopped them off. Aunt Charity was like to have fainted when she saw me.”
“I don’t wonder,” Mrs. Macy said, decidedly. “My dear, who ever heard tell of a girl with short hair? If it had been Mollie, I don’t know what I would have done.”
Here Captain Bartlet interposed, seeing Erica’s cheeks crimsoning a deeper hue of combined anger and mortification.
“Belay there, Mary,” he said in his deep, kindly voice. “Thee is making the lass unhappy. And there’s no more use crying over a shorn head than over spilled milk, as I see it.” He looked at the red bob shrewdly. “Never having been a lass, I can’t say how they’re supposed to feel,” he added, a slow smile showing above the neatly trimmed gray beard, “but I guess that crop of red curls ought to be a sight easier to carry about than full sail. Hey?”
Erica flashed him a grateful smile. “Yes, oh, it is! Ever so much lighter and easier, Captain Bartlet!”
“Kind o’ pretty, too,” he said, gallantly. “An’ grows prettier the longer I look at it. Seems to me I used to know thee as a baby, or not much more’n one. Isn’t thee a sister of my new cabin boy, missy?”
“No, I’m his cousin,” Erica said, approving of this big, bluff, friendly Quaker captain more and more. She was so thankful he was like this, for Tommy’s sake. She felt suddenly emboldened to put her muscular, tanned young hand on his arm pleadingly. “He’s a nice boy—Tommy,” she said, breathlessly. “He—he really is. He’ll learn quickly. And—and I’d rather be going to sea, too, than anything in this world.”
“Ho!” said the captain, with a great shout of laughter. “So that’s why thee cut off the pigtails, missy?” He shook a huge forefinger at her playfully. “Some day thee’ll be adopting boy’s clothes, as well as a hair-cut, and running off to sea in my ship.” At sea, Captain Bartlet usually fell into the more usual “you” and “your,” but ashore in Nantucket he was always scrupulous about the Friends’ mode of speech.
“I’d like to,” Erica laughed back. “Only, if I did run, it would be in my father’s ship. He’s got a clipper, too, in the China trade.”
“Not Captain Eric Folger of the Sea Gull?” the other demanded in surprise. “Somehow, I’d forgotten to associate him with Nantucket, though I’ve known thy Aunt Charity and Tommy’s mother for years. Last voyage but one, the Spray and the Sea Gull lay side by side in the harbor at Canton, waiting for a fog to lift and let us up to the city.”
“I’ve been there, too,” Erica said, impulsively. “Only I don’t remember it. I was born at sea, two days before we put in at Canton. My mother died there, and a great friend of father’s—a Chinese merchant named Sun Li—sent his little son’s nurse on board to take care of me on the way home. Ever since then, every voyage father makes to China he brings me home a present from my Chinese godfather. That’s what he calls himself. Aunt Charity won’t let me wear the things yet, because she says they’re too gorgeous. But some of the jade has his seal on it—maybe you’d know him from it—like this.” With her finger nail she traced an intricate pattern of characters in the smooth dirt of a flower pot on the porch railing, looking up eagerly at the captain when it was done.
He bent over it, smiling at her enthusiasm, but when he lifted his head his expression was faintly astonished and puzzled.
“I don’t know of any merchant named Sun Li,” he said, but he bent once more and studied the crude little drawing in the dirt. “Thee is sure thee has it right, my dear?”
“I have every line by heart,” Erica said, proudly. “I’m sorry you don’t know him. Father does some trading with him, I think.”
“I don’t know him,” the captain repeated, but his thoughts were suddenly busy. Captain Folger of the Sea Gull was a name synonymous with fast voyages, also with better cargoes, more quickly loaded, than most of the clippers could boast. There had been rumors of special high protection—of favors and concessions shown the Nantucket man. Of course, it may all have been idle gossip of the water front and the bazaars. But Captain Bartlet had certainly seen a seal once before like these few scratched marks in the dirt of his sister’s flower pot. Only he knew of no one named Sun Li.
Erica hurried down the brick walk, anxious to find Tommy and report the captain’s genial mood. “I’ll tell Aunt Charity you will both come tomorrow,” she called over her shoulder to Mrs. Macy.
The boys and Erica were not permitted to be present at the supper party on the morrow. Aunt Callie was there, of course, and Mr. Presbyn, the Congregational minister, besides Mrs. Macy and the guest of honor, and the table groaned under a load of the good things Aunt Charity’s kitchen was famed for producing—home-cured sugar-baked ham; flaky soda biscuits still smoking from the oven; steaming, fragrant coffee in the old Folger silver pot; thick cream for the coffee and for the deep-apple pie that came afterward; unsalted butter, churned at home; and ginger preserve made from real ginger roots that had been brought across the Pacific in a tea clipper.
Erica, invited to keep the twins company at supper in Aunt Callie’s cheerful brick-floored kitchen, made their mouths water cruelly with a vivid account of the feast spread for their elders and betters on Aunt Charity’s side of the fence, meanwhile munching with zest fresh gingerbread and baked apples, washed down with glasses of cold, creamy milk.
“You’re awfully glad to be going to sea, Tommy, aren’t you?” she asked, wistfully, later, when the meal was over and the three had washed the supper dishes gayly, and now sat at ease before the huge fireplace, with its swinging crane, and the old Dutch oven at the side. (Aunt Callie still clung, as so many island housewives did, to the custom of cooking over the open fire.)
“‘Course I’m glad,” Tommy said, lolling back in his big chair with lazy content. And he added, teasingly: “Don’t you wish you were a boy? Poor Rick!”
“Yes, I do,” Erica declared, “but I’m not going to sit here all evening moaning about it. There’s the most gorgeous full moon outside—the ‘Hunter’s Moon,’ don’t they call it? Let’s all go down to the wharf and take a last look at Captain Joy’s Narwhal. She’s sailing tomorrow morning at high tide. A ship out in that harbor with the full moon on her is somehow awfully exciting. They always make me think of pirates, the sails look so black and mysterious against the moon.”
The Narwhal was a whaler, bound for the South Seas on what would probably be a three-year cruise, and Erica and the twins had known her captain and crew (most of them Nantucket men) as long as they could remember.
“Do you think Aunt Charity will like you to go down there so late?” Lister asked, doubtfully. Girls were supposed to sit at home in those days, when even the mildest of adventures were afoot.
“Oh, Tommy and you can protect me,” Erica retorted, flippantly. “Anyhow, I’m in disgrace with Aunt Charity already, on account of my hair, so a bit more or less won’t matter.” She was bundling on her wraps as she spoke, for the evening was cold outside with the chill of the strong northeaster blowing in from the sea.
Knowing Erica’s stubbornness of old, the twins pulled on caps and overcoats and followed her to the back door. Lis offered one final protest, but half-heartedly. “And mother won’t like it if we leave the house alone, with the fire burning and the lamp lit.”
“Bank the fire with ashes,” Erica said, resourcefully. “And we can blow out the lamp. Hurry up, you two, or I go without you.”
Five minutes later they were out in the cold, moon-flooded quiet of Orange Street. They walked in the middle of the deserted road, arms linked, whistling softly under their breaths. Erica’s spirits had soared suddenly and unaccountably as high as Tommy’s for this night at least, and Lis was always willing enough to share their moods, in his own contained, level-headed fashion.
Then, arms still linked, they fell to dancing in long, gliding skating steps, weaving from side to side of the road, spirits mounting hilariously with the exercise and the heady autumn air, that tonight smelled again of sea salt and the spicy scent of sweet-fern and bayberry. Finally, breathless with laughter, they swung about the corner into Main Street, and sobered to a more decorous gait.
“Aunt Charity will never,” Erica panted, “make a perfect lady of me. I love to move about, and run and shout and do things too much. Oh-h-h! there’s the Narwhal now! Doesn’t she look like a pirate ship, just as I said?”
They had reached the wharf, and stood gazing out at the dark harbor water, across which a broad golden pathway stretched from the Coatue shore almost to their feet. The moon itself, a huge round disk of orange, like a Chinese lantern, hung low in the sky, and it seemed to the three rapt children that the whole atmosphere about them was shot through with a fine golden mist that rose partly from the path of gold on the water, and partly dropped, curtain-like, from the moon above it.
“Oh, Tommy, think of how that moon’ll look at sea!” Erica cried, softly, clutching his sleeve with a new big lump in her throat. “If only I’d been a boy, you and Lis and I could have shipped together, and gone adventuring like those friends in that book in your mother’s library—The Three Musketeers.”
“Better not let Aunt Charity know you’ve read that book,” Tommy adjured her, wisely ignoring the little traitorous break in Erica’s voice. Of course Erica wasn’t the kind of girl who spilled tears all over the place, but then, as Tommy philosophised to himself, you never could be sure about a girl—even the most sensible of them surprised you once in a while.
“I hate this being always told ‘Don’t do this,’ ‘Don’t read that,’ or ‘Don’t say the other thing,’” Erica burst out, rebelliously. It was an old grievance. “There’s so little that’s really ladylike for a girl to do.”
“Listen,” Lis broke in, lifting an emphatic hand for silence. “It sounded like somebody calling ‘Help.’ Didn’t either of you hear it?”
Straining their ears, Tommy and Erica listened, and faintly but very distinctly there came to all three the sound repeated. There was no doubt this time about its being a cry of distress, and it appeared to come, alarmingly, from the water somewhere off the wharf’s end.
“Some one’s fallen overboard,” Tommy shouted, excitedly. And tearing off cap and coat with a single jerk, tossed these cumbering articles of apparel aside and raced down the dock in the direction of the cry. Lister and Erica were only a step or two behind him, but not near enough to hold him back from the reckless project he so obviously had in mind. Reaching the edge of the wharf, he mounted in one agile leap to the heavy timbering at the side and, lifting both arms above his head, dove into the blackness below.
Erica’s cry of frightened protest rang out simultaneously with Tommy’s dive, and the next moment both Lister and she were standing on the edge of the wharf, staring anxiously down at the choppy little waves raised by the wind’s violence.
The side of the wharf Tommy had dived from was that away from the moon, and until the eyes of the two up above grew accustomed to the darkness, they could make out nothing. Then, gradually, they could see the white outline of the little wave-crests and the blacker hollows between, and last of all a moving, dark object that looked like a head swimming very slowly back toward the dock.
“Tommy!” Erica called, urgently. “Tommy, is that you? Can you make the ladder—it’s right beside you—or do you want us to find a rope?”
“I’ve got a man here,” came Tommy’s voice, slightly muffled by a too inquisitive wave that hit him squarely on the mouth as he opened it to answer. “He’s either dead or unconscious. There—I’ve hold of the ladder now. I can keep us both afloat till you get help. He’s too heavy for Rick and you, and I can’t do much toward lifting him. Hit something when I dived, and hurt my knee.”
“Here comes some one now,” Lister cried in relief. “Hang on a minute longer, Tommy, and we’ll have you out.” Both Erica and he raised their voices in vociferous shouts to attract the attention of the two figures he had noticed farther up the wharf.
“Aye, aye, there! Coming!” a hearty bass voice responded, and the still night echoed to the clumping of heavy boots hurrying along the wharf planking. The events of the next few minutes moved so fast for Erica that afterward she never could quite fill in, by the aid of memory, what actually happened between the time Lis and she called and that when they stood on the wharf, looking down at the inert, drenched figure of a strange sailor stretched out on the ground, and at Tommy slumped back, curiously white and limp, but conscious, in the arms of a burly man whom she now recognized as Captain Joy himself, master of the Narwhal.
“Is—is he dead?” she asked, fearfully, pointing a shaking hand at the stranger.
The man with Captain Joy, who had been bending over the sailor, glanced up, shaking a disgusted head. He was Mr. Stebbins, Captain Joy’s mate, Erica saw. How very, very lucky for Tommy, and for all of them, that the captain and Mr. Stebbins had decided to stroll down to the wharf also, for a good-night look at their ship.
“He—looks so awfully dead,” Erica insisted.
“Not he. No thanks to himself, though, that he ain’t,” the mate growled. “He’s been celebratin’ our last night ashore, and likely enough just walked plumb off the end of the wharf here, without knowin’ he was headed for Davy Jones’s locker.” He added, apologetically: “He ain’t one of our Nantucket lads. He’s a new hand—a furriner we shipped on the Cape, last voyage. You jus’ leave him to me, missy, an’ don’t worry. I’ll see he gits out to the Narwhal an’ into his bunk; an’ in the mornin’ I surely aim to give him a talkin’ to that’ll turn his hair plumb gray—leastways, if he’s any sense of the danger he’s been in this night.”
“And Tommy’s hurt his knee,” Erica went on, anxiously, reassured as to the stranger’s fate. “Captain Joy, you have to doctor men on your cruises. Can’t you look at it and see how bad it is, please?”
The boy winced once or twice, in spite of his most herculean attempts at stoicism, as the captain’s big hands gently prodded his leg here and there.
“It—it feels like it was broken,” Tommy hazarded, his hands clenched into tense fists at his side.
Captain Joy nodded. “Not much doubt about that, my lad,” he said, cheerfully. “But a broken bone’s nothing at your age. Splints an’ rest’ll set that all shipshape again in a matter of a couple o’ months at most.”
”Months!” Tommy gasped, and his head collapsed weakly against Lis’s shoulder, which happened to be nearest. “But, Captain, I’m shipping on the Flying Spray, bound out for Canton, come Saturday.”
Tommy was carried home from the wharf, a decidedly white-faced and subdued Tommy, and laid on the big four-poster in the room Lis and he shared at the back of the house, while his mother was summoned from Miss Charity’s party and the doctor routed out of a peaceful, before-bedtime nap in his study farther up Orange Street.
Captain Bartlet escorted Mrs. Folger across the garden, and went upstairs with her to see his cabin boy. He was full of a bluff, kindly sympathy, and sat on the edge of the bed, letting poor Tommy grip hard at his big, muscular arm, while Dr. Spencer set the broken leg.
The first thing Tommy said, when that operation was over and he was lying back on the stiff white bolster, with his right leg swollen to an unrecognizable size by splints and bandages, was: “I guess this discharges me from sea duty, sir—for this voyage, anyhow. Will you take Lis in my place, please? He was just as anxious to ship as I was, you know.”
The captain looked keenly at the boy, and then at Lis, who had flushed suddenly scarlet.
“Want to take thy brother’s place, son?” he asked the latter. “I’m sorry about Tom’s accident, but I do need a cabin boy.” He added, smiling, “And, after all, I don’t know as I could tell thee from him in any case, so I won’t realize there’s been an exchange.”
Lis gulped, stared rather piteously at Tommy, and then at his mother. His heart had leaped at the unlooked-for opportunity that had come to him, but he plainly hated to accept it at the price of Tommy’s disappointment.
“You’ll be able to ship with Uncle Eric, Tom, when the Sea Gull comes in,” he suggested.
But Tommy shook his fair head decidedly. “Too far off. We don’t know just when the Sea Gull will return. No, this is your chance, Lis; better take it. And we can’t disappoint Captain Bartlet, either. He needs a boy, and this won’t be giving him fair notice to find another. He’ll go, sir,” he told the captain. “And he’s a lot steadier than I am, sir, so you’re getting a better man.”
“Tommy is right—you had better go, dear,” Mrs. Folger said, unexpectedly. “I know you have wanted to, all the time, and I was pleased by the way you kept your disappointment to yourself and did not spoil your brother’s pleasure by grumbling.”
So Captain Bartlet signed on another cabin boy, and arrangements were made for Lis to join the ship in Boston, the night before her sailing. He was to leave Nantucket on a fishing-boat belonging to a neighbor of theirs, another Captain Joy—brother to the Narwhal’s master—which was bound for Boston at the end of the week, with a cargo of fish for the city markets. Captain Bartlet himself, was going on the morrow, but Lis would need a few days to get his sea-going outfit together, before starting out in his new life.
The next four days before his departure were busy ones in the two Folger households. Miss Charity brought her sewing basket over to her sister-in-law’s, and helped in the work of altering such things as had been already purchased for Tommy, to Lister’s use. Though the two boys were so alike that strangers were constantly taking one for the other, Tommy was slightly broader in the shoulders than his twin—just enough difference to make certain takings-in necessary in fitting the clothes of one to the other.
Erica would have been pressed into service also, but her clumsiness with her needle was too well known to both aunts to make her help desirable. As Miss Charity phrased it in exasperation, she only “made double work when she put on a thimble. It took one person to rip out her stitches, and a second to replace them properly.”
Miss Charity had labored long and hard with this hoydenish young niece who was so mortifyingly unlike the other girls of her age and community. She even felt dimly that in some way it reflected unfavorably upon herself, that she could not, no matter how diligently she tried, teach her charge to be a “little lady” like the daughters of her island neighbors.
But in another way Erica managed to be of very real help, by constituting herself nurse and general entertainer for Tommy, and thus setting his mother free for more immediate duties. Tommy was finding it pretty hard to lie there in bed, day after day, unable to move his trussed-up leg or even to turn over without assistance. He had never been fond of reading, and now books seemed a rather contemptible substitute to offer an energetic, lively boy, for the glorious adventure of that lost voyage to China, in the Spray. Still, he graciously allowed Erica to read aloud to him on occasions, when her inventive faculty at devising other amusements ran temporarily dry. But the books of that period intended for boys, which could be found in either of the Folger houses, were such very mild, unexciting narratives, that the readings usually ended in both Erica’s and Tommy’s yawning desperately together and flinging the disappointing volume aside.
The only subjects that really interested the latter at this period dealt with nautical matters, and when Erica realized this she ransacked the libraries of all Miss Charity’s friends, to find old ships’ logs and journals of exploration which she could borrow. As Nantucketers have always been great travelers, almost every house in town proved to have some tale or other to offer, often containing the adventures of a seafaring ancestor, and the quaint language they were told in sent the young Folgers into peals of hilarious laughter.
Lis joined these reading sessions whenever he could, but his mother and aunt kept him busy undergoing tedious fittings, aiding them in checking and rechecking lists of his various needs for the voyage, and performing the usual household duties such as wood-chopping, fire-making, and the carrying of heavy pails, which formerly Tommy and he had divided between them. Mrs. Folger had arranged with young Martin Joy, two doors away, to do these chores until Tommy’s broken bones had mended, but he was not to enter on his duties until Lis had departed.
Instinctively, Erica tried to keep herself so busy that she should have no time left for remembering the change that was to break up the familiar threefold companionship shortly. But hard as it was on her, she guessed that it was going to be harder still for Tommy. The twins had never been separated for more than a few hours at a time, and Lis had always been the steady, self-reliant one on whom both Tommy and Erica herself unconsciously leaned. The latter two were more alike, bubbling over with high spirits, impetuous, apt to act on the moment’s enthusiasm, and they had come to feel it was Lister’s natural province to extricate them from the scrapes their own heedlessness led them into, and to provide a sort of moral balance wheel generally.
It was going to be queer, Erica reflected, sadly, going on with the old, everyday life, in the old, everyday surroundings, with no Lis. In fact, it was going to be worse than queer—it was going to be a pretty heart-breaking business.
The night before Lister’s sailing, Tommy took the jade seal ring from where it still hung about his own neck on the knotted Chinese cord and put it around his brother’s. “Be sure you look old Sun Li up for Rick and me,” he said. “Then remember every last thing about him—who he is, where he lives (better see the inside of his house if you can, so you’ll be able to describe it), and tell us all about it when the Spray comes home.”
Erica and both her aunts went down to the wharf the next afternoon, and saw Lis aboard Captain Joy’s sloop, which was to take him to Boston. They all kissed him good-by, and Aunt Callie cried a little because, just at the end, she simply couldn’t help it, and Lis’s own voice was more than a bit husky in the final exchange of last words, and promises to write if there should be a chance to send a letter back by another ship.
His mother and Miss Charity stayed on the wharf, continuing to wave their handkerchiefs until the sloop was so far out that she looked like a toy ship on the smooth, blue water. But Erica slipped away from them as soon as she was sure Lis could not see them any longer, and walked very fast up the beach to a point where she would be out of sight of houses and people, and there she sat herself disconsolately down on the warm, yellow sand, and told herself she wasn’t going to cry, not for anything in the world—and promptly contradicted her brave assertion by doing it.
However, being Erica, the tears didn’t last long, and at the end of the little fit of crying she sat up and wiped them away briskly, feeling better for the outburst, yet rather ashamed of herself, too.
“Now I’ll go back to Tommy,” she said aloud, addressing an inquisitive tern which had hovered a second or two overhead, on quickly-beating slim white wings, cocking its bright eyes down at this strange human in a brown plaid dress who sat huddled on the sand, and made funny, choking sounds that, even to a tern’s ears seemed to hold a note of distress. “Tommy’ll be feeling pretty bad, too,” Erica continued to address the tern, and then, as it darted away with a farewell flirt of its wings, she added with a little burst of admiration: “Oh, you beautiful, beautiful thing! If I can’t be a boy and go to sea, the next choice would be a tern or a great gray gull, so I could swoop about over the water all day long, fishing and enjoying myself, just as you do.”
She walked home slowly, close to the water’s edge, where the sand was wet and firm. There was usually a surf on the island’s south shore, but here on the north beach there were scarcely ever more than ripples coming in, and on that day the clear green water beat in softly against the dark sand like the pattering of fairy hand-clapping. Looking down into it, Erica could make out scores of small hermit crabs moving clumsily about in search of their midday dinners, dragging their big shell houses on their backs; and the more agile spider crabs crawling along the bottom among them, likewise intent on the serious question of food.
Erica loved all the quaint little sea creatures she had come to know on her beach walks, as well as the terns and the big gray herring gulls which arrived about this time each year, after the smaller, laughing-gulls of the summer had migrated farther south. The autumn was a wonderful season for seeing strange birds, that stopped a day or two on Nantucket to break their long, migratory flights to warmer climes.
The wild ducks had been passing over the island for more than ten days, now, and sometimes, in their tramps over the sweet-scented commons, the twins and Erica would come upon a small, jewel-like pond set down in a rosy sedge of reeds, and on its blue surface there would be stragglers from one of the big flocks, swimming up and down placidly, and perhaps wondering, in whatever thoughts a duck knows, whether this pleasant, fertile island might not be as happy hunting-grounds as any they would be likely to find farther south.
A little later, the long V-shaped wedges of the wild geese’s flight would be seen, usually late at night or very early in the morning, high up against the blue Nantucket sky. Erica, when she saw them, always waved to them enviously, and wished she were a wild goose, too—just as she often wished she were a boy, or a gull, or anything that was untrammeled and free, and the opposite of what proper little girls of her day and generation were supposed to be.
It was almost dark when she reached home and slipped through the side garden to Tommy’s house and up the broad, white-painted front stairs. Aunt Callie called to her, in a rather woe-begone voice, and bade her go in and talk to her cousin, who had had a lonely day and had been suffering a good deal, besides, with his leg.
The door to the back room which was Lis’s and Tommy’s stood ajar, but the lamp inside had not been lighted yet. Standing on the sill, Erica spoke Tommy’s name, but softly, in case he were asleep.
“Come in,” a muffled voice answered her, not too graciously.
Erica went in, and crossed the dim room to the big mahogany four-poster. Tommy had slid down uncomfortably in bed, the pillows bunched askew under his yellow head, which looked more wildly disheveled and moplike than usual. The covers were drawn up so that they half covered his face, and even in the dusk Erica could see that his cheeks were hot and flushed and that his forehead was puckered with a forlorn, childlike scowl of utter misery.
“Here, let me plump your pillows up nice and comfy,” she said, capably, and proceeded to lift his head with one strong, gentle arm and turn the hot and crumpled pillows with her free hand. For Erica had at least one womanly accomplishment—she was a good nurse in a sick-room, and was never more contented than when one of her family or neighbors borrowed her services.
Tommy neither demurred nor accepted her help, but as she turned the top pillow Erica’s fingers encountered a big, round wet spot just where the boy’s flushed face had been pressed when she entered. She made no comment, but she was suddenly conscious of that uncomfortable lump in her own throat once more. Tommy never knew she had discovered that he had been shedding a few bitter tears alone in the dark. It was probably partly homesickness for his twin, rebellion against lying there like a log, helpless and in pain, and a sudden break-down of the barriers he had built so pluckily about his disappointment.
Remembering her own crying-spell down on the beach that afternoon, Erica shrewdly suspected that Tommy would feel the better for giving way—as long as he never discovered that anyone knew of it. She finished beating his pillows, pulled up more smoothly the soft, hand-woven woolen blankets on the bed, and, going over to the table, lighted the lamp.
Aunt Callie appeared in the doorway just as she finished the last of her tasks. Mrs. Folger’s thin face was paler than usual, and her eyes, blinking a little in the yellow lamplight, had pink rims about them as if she too, had been crying; but her lips were smiling.
“I told Aunt Charity that I meant to keep you for supper, Erica,” she observed. “Tommy and I need you tonight. And I thought,” she went on, still determinedly cheerful, “that if you’d help me, my dear, we might all have our suppers up here on this table by Tommy’s bed. I’ve got fresh gingerbread, and I’m going to fry a chicken. I had Mart Joy kill one of the young roosters this morning. Will you children have chocolate to drink, instead of milk? It’s no trouble at all to make a pot.”
At fifteen the prospect of a good supper has a magically cheering effect. Both the girl’s and boy’s faces brightened perceptibly.
“Chocolate, please, ma’am,” Tommy elected.
The weeks it took for Tommy’s broken bones to mend were a trying period, not only for Tommy himself, but for his mother and Erica as well. The boy tried valiantly to be patient, but he had never stayed in bed a day in his active young life before, and as the days grew into weeks it seemed to him that he could not bear the terrible inaction and monotony another hour. Then, in spite of his best efforts, he would snap at everyone about him, refuse to be pleased with Erica’s hard-working efforts to entertain him, and behave--as he would admit shamefacedly when the grumpy fit had passed--like a spoiled baby generally.
Even Erica grew a little pale and peaked toward the end of Tommy’s convalescence, missing the outdoor life she was used to, but steadily refusing to desert her patient, who came to depend more and more on her as the days passed. Mrs. Folger could not be in the sickroom always, as she had a dozen household duties which must be seen to every hour of the day, and Miss Charity, though she came over when she could, was likewise engaged with her own housekeeping.
The latter insisted that Erica should take at least one brisk walk each day, and of course there was school in the mornings, which could not be given up even for the duties of a nurse. Formerly, Erica had often gone home for early dinner with one of the girls in her class, when the morning session was over—Molly Macy, over on Pearl Street, or perhaps pretty Sara Anne Gardener, who fulfilled all Aunt Charity’s requirements for being a “genteel little lady,” yet managed to be a pleasant enough companion for a few hours “when nothing more exciting offered”—as naughty Erica used to explain to the twins.
But since Tommy’s accident Erica had refused all these invitations, and hurried home to retail a carefully-remembered account of the morning’s events to his envious ears. Tommy felt that, as he had been so unfairly deprived of his exciting sea adventure, it was decidedly hard that he must fall behind his class in school, as well. Erica offered to ask the teacher to assign him some home work, which she could bring back with her each day, but Tommy was not the student Lis had been, and the idea of studying alone, without anyone to explain problems and help him over hard places, did not appeal to him, and the idea was abandoned.
Another factor which served to make both the boy and girl more rebellious against the indoor confinement was that that fall was a particularly fine and sunshiny one on Nantucket. The autumn colors blazed splendidly on the commons; seas and skies were a thrilling and cloudless blue, and the crisp air caused the blood to race faster, and stored up a daily-renewed fund of unspent energy that made a shut-in existence torture to the two active young people.
After the first three weeks, Tommy was allowed to be up and dressed and to go about the house, and even for a few stumping blocks along Orange Street on his new crutches. But that seemed, somehow, only an aggravation to a boy who wanted to run, play ball, tramp the commons, and take up his familiar every-day life along its usual lines. At length, however, what Tommy called bitterly his “term in prison” drew to an end, as most things, both pleasant and unpleasant, have a way of doing. And his final release from the hated crutches coincided with the near approach of Christmas, always a specially festive time on Nantucket.
To be sure, this year Christmas could not be quite like all the other happy Christmases in the two Folger households without Lis—Lis who would be having his Christmas at sea, more than two-thirds of the distance to Canton.
On the road to Surfside on the south shore of Nantucket there was a stretch of low pine woods where the twins and Erica had been in the habit of foraging each year for their Christmas trees. The wind swept over the island with such constant violence that it stunted even the pines growing on the commons. They looked like trees in Japanese prints, little and twisted, with writhing branches stretching out away from the blast. Where the pines were massed closely together, however, as in these woody patches, they were straighter, less tortured by sea winds, though even there they were dwarf trees.
Erica had always loved the clean, pungent fragrance of that pine woods, and she delighted in the gray-feathered, short-eared owls, with their wise little cat faces and stealthy mothlike flight, who lived in the green dimness of its piny aisles. Sometimes on a walk she had started up more than a dozen of the creatures in a single afternoon. And in spite of Lis’s and Tommy’s loud-voiced amusement, she had named that particular stretch of woods on the Surfside road, the “Owls’ Country.”
She used to wonder, whimsically, whether the owls ever guessed that the twins and she robbed their country of two of the biggest and branchiest trees each December, to hang their Christmas packages and candles on. And whether that would serve as an excuse for breaking into the quiet of the grove, and putting the owls to the trouble of removing their stately selves from one tree to another. Sometimes the owls scolded noisily when they were disturbed, and always they stared down their curved, horny beaks superciliously at the intruders, from a safe distance.
Lis was not here to go tree-hunting this year, and partly because Erica felt instinctively that Tommy and she would miss him more if there were only two of them, partly because Tommy’s reknit leg was not yet quite up to all the demands such an expedition would put upon it, she suggested making a party of the occasion and including half a dozen or more young folks. So Mollie Macy and her brothers, Jud and Alex, were invited to join them, with Martin and Lilla Joy, the two fat Covington boys, and Sara Anne Gardener.
The day before Christmas, Tommy harnessed his mother’s sedate brown mare, Polly, to the ancient springless cart that was used for hauling barrels of flour and apples from market, and for bringing in loads of potatoes, garden truck, and fragrant summer hay from the Folger farm out Madaket way. This farm belonged to Miss Charity, Mrs. Callie Folger and Captain Eric jointly, and was managed for them by a capable farmer named Amos Brett.
Tommy drove, since his leg was not strong enough for long walks, and the girls bundled into the cart behind him, sitting on a pile of hay spread out on the bare floor-boards. The other boys tramped alongside, finding no difficulty in keeping up with old Polly’s sober pace.
Miss Charity put a generously filled lunch basket in the cart just as it started, containing cold fried chicken, thick slices of homemade brown bread, still warm from the oven, red apples, crisp brown doughnuts, and a stone jug of sweet cider. Miss Charity was justly proud of her fame as a good cook and provider, and, knowing that Tommy and Erica had had very little pleasure that fall, she had taken particular pains to make the present party one to be remembered.
The cavalcade of young people started out of town in high spirits, and headed for Surfside and Erica’s “Owls’ Country” by one of the sandy rut roads that wound across the commons. It is usually fairly mild on Nantucket until January, and on a sunny day the commons will be almost warm in the hollows around noon. That day was no exception to the general rule. The sun shone down in a hot blaze of gold, and though the wind, when it came, left a nip and tingle in its passing, down in a certain deep depression Erica and Tommy selected for their picnic site near the pine woods the party was quite protected from the blasts.
The ground was carpeted to the depth of a foot or more with dried but still faintly colorful huckleberry vines, with here and there patches of sweet-fern, mealy plum, and soft clumps of the gray Iceland moss. An old blanket was spread out to serve as table and tablecloth in one, and the basket and stone jug were set in the place of honor in the center.
The eight hungry girls and boys sat about the edge of the blanket, and Erica unpacked the basket. Everybody’s appetite had been sharpened to extra keenness by their morning in the crisp December air, and they speedily made ravenous inroads on the tempting fare Miss Charity had provided. But since the business of tree-choosing and chopping was still ahead of them, no one lingered longer than necessary over the meal.
When everything had been neatly replaced in the basket, four shining, newly whetted axes were brought out of the hay on the floor of the cart, and, leaving old Polly to follow at her leisure, the boys and girls hurried on to the woods.
Choosing just the right size and shape always took time; and this year there were not two Christmas trees to be selected, but three, since the young Joys also wanted one for their holiday celebration. The rest of the children were willing enough to lend a hand in the work of cutting down the trees and to offer unsought advice as to the relative merits and failures of the pines finally chosen.
So it was not surprising that the business in hand took most of the short afternoon, and that the expedition should be overtaken by sunset and the soft, smoky purple twilight of early winter, before they had covered half the distance back to town.
They hurried a little faster then, prodding the indignant Polly to greater exertions—not because any of them was afraid of darkness on the familiar commons, but because this was Christmas Eve and there was much to do at home. Later, bands of carol-singers would go from house to house through the town, singing under their neighbors’ windows, and in each window lighted candles would blaze an answering greeting to them across the friendly dark of Christmas Eve.
Lilla Joy pointed toward the northwest, where a low, heavy-looking cloud had risen over the horizon soon after sunset.
“That’s a real snow cloud,” she insisted. “We’ll have a white Christmas, after all.”
“I’m glad,” Erica sighed happily, leaning back in the hay and drawing her woolly red cape about her more tightly, for the wind was decidedly sharp now. Her cheeks burned red from the cold and the day’s exertions, and her eyes, which were the exact shade of the harbor water when the sky was cloudless, shone starrily. She loved Christmas—loved it; every sweet old custom from choosing and bringing home the tree to trimming it with tinsel balls, gilt paper cornucopias, and bunches of gay red holly; and later still, the hanging up of the long, limp stockings over the mantel in the parlor. Last of all, there was the little ceremony of lighting the Christmas candles in all the front windows, upstairs and down.
Snuggled down cozily in the warm hay, Erica shivered excitedly and began to sing, very softly at first, that most beautiful of all the sweet old Christmas songs:
Her voice lifted a little, joyously, with the second line, and one by one the other children took it up and sang with her, the fresh, happy voices ringing out clearly in the dusk. And so, still singing, they walked and drove into town just as lights began to be lighted in the houses along Orange Street, and a few hardy stars came out overhead through the gathering snow clouds and twinkled down in benediction, as they must have twinkled over a far-away land across the seas, twenty centuries ago, on a group of young shepherds who also came, singing, to celebrate that first Christmas of all.
“Father’s boat was to get in today,” Lilla Joy declared as they dropped Mart and herself at their door. “He promised he’d be home for Christmas. I wonder what he’s brought from Boston.”
“Passengers, for one thing,” Mart laughed. “He was going to bring some cousins of the Gardeners’ over to spend the holidays—off-islanders, you know. I wish’t it was Lis who was coming,” he added, awkwardly. “Doesn’t seem just right to have Christmas without him, does it, Erica?”
Erica put out her hand impulsively and clasped his strong, calloused palm with sudden gratitude. “Thank you, Mart,” she said, softly. “No, it—it seems sort of—all wrong.”
When the others had been left at their several homes, Tommy helped Erica drag her tree into the house and set it up in the usual place between the hearth and the north window. Then, without waiting to trim it, the cousins went across the garden, dragging the last tree between them.
A sound of voices in the sitting room made them stop in the hall of the other house and peep in at the open door. Aunt Callie was seated in her big rocker by the hearth, with Aunt Charity opposite her, and between them, in chairs drawn comfortably up to the red glow of the coals, sat a fair, ruddy-cheeked young man with an unmistakably seafaring air about him, and a slender girl about Erica’s own age, dressed in black.
The girl’s face was pale in the firelight, and so thin the features looked oddly pinched and sharp. Her forehead was puckered in three fine, vertical lines that gave her a fretful, unhappy expression.
At Mrs. Folger’s feet—where the two at the door had not seen her in this first glance—a pretty little girl of three or four sat on a low hassock, one plump, rosy cheek pressed confidingly against Aunt Callie’s knee. The child’s hair, which clustered in tight, bronze-colored curls over her charming little head, reflected the firelight in warm splashes of reddish gold with each move she made, and now, at some sound from the hall, she turned a blue-eyed, baby smile that way.
Mrs. Folger called: “Tommy! Erica! Is that you, dears?”
They came in then, dragging the bushy pine tree, and the curly-haired baby uttered a little shriek of delight at sight of it.
“Clistmus t’ee!” she shouted, gleefully. “Barbee’s Clistmus t’ee. All for Barbee!”
Mrs. Folger addressed the young man with the seafaring look about him, who had risen politely at Erica’s entrance.
“Bernard, this is my niece, Erica Folger—you remember Captain Eric, of course. And my son Tom. Children, this is a cousin of mine, Mr. Bernard Gatchel, whom I have not laid eyes on since my marriage. He came to Nantucket today on Captain Joy’s sloop, on a sad errand.” She hesitated, and laid a gentle hand on the thin, fretful girl’s dark hair.
“These are his sister’s children—Mildred and Barbara Thorne. Their mother and I went to school together in Boston.” Mrs. Folger had not been a Nantucket girl. “Besides being second cousins, we were very close friends and loved one another dearly. Tommy has certainly heard me talk of Cousin Jane Thorne.”
The boy nodded bewilderedly, and then smiled in answer to a flash of small white teeth between Barbee’s parted lips.
“Cousin Jane died a month ago,” Mrs. Folger said. “So this is not a happy Christmas for my poor Milly.” Again that motherly touch on the dark hair; but there was no lighting or softening of the fretful face below it, and Erica, looking on, was conscious of a resentful sense of vicarious rebuff.
“Their father died more than two years ago,” Mrs. Folger wound up her explanation and introduction in one, “and Cousin Bernard here, being mate on a packet that sails out of New York next week, cannot, of course, take charge of Mildred and little Barbee. And Cousin Jane had asked him, before she died, to bring them to me. She knew her babies would be as welcome as my own.”
“You mean,” Tommy asked, startled into unconsidered speech, “that they’re going to—to live here, mother?”
Even as the words escaped him he realized their inhospitable import, and bit his lip, coloring miserably. But—a strange girl in the house—that cunning baby, Barbee, didn’t count, of course—eternally underfoot, making a fellow stay constantly on his company behavior!
The object of his uncomplimentary thoughts turned to stare at him around the back of her chair, her eyes looking enormously big and black in her white, sulky face, and the boy thought he saw in them a malicious enjoyment of his confusion.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, clearly and too sweetly. “Yes, I believe Barbee and I are going to live here. Your mother has very kindly asked us to stay.”
The black eyes passed on to Erica, and stared at her with a keenness that seemed to miss no smallest detail of her appearance.
“Do you live here, too?” the dark girl asked then, fretfully, tapping the toe of her black shoe on the brass andiron nearest her.
“No, I live next door, with Aunt Charity,” Erica said, politely, feeling inwardly guilty because she was so glad she was not to live in the same house with this sulky, unattractive stranger. Feeling, too, tremendously sorry for poor Tommy, who had exchanged the daily companionship of Lis for Milly Thorne.
She had a swift, dismayed vision of the change from the old, happy existence Lis, Tommy, and she had known, which the coming of Mildred and Barbee Thorne would mean. Then the sight of Milly’s black dress softened her to shamed remorse.
“And here I was thinking about Tommy’s and my Christmas being spoiled,” she scolded herself, silently. “Erica Folger, you deserve just no Christmas at all!”
It was a white Christmas day, after all. During the night it had snowed hard and steadily, but the snow ceased just before dawn, and Nantucketers woke to a Christmas morning of blue skies and golden sunshine over a white-carpeted island.
The two windows of Erica’s room faced toward the harbor below, and with the first slim fingers of sunlight poked in at all the small panes she was awake in her big mahogany bed with the pineapple posts. She lay there blinking drowsily at the light, until she noticed the thin rim of snow on the sill of her opened window. Then she sprang out of bed, shivering, for the room was bitterly cold, and pattered on bare feet across the wide, painted boards of the floor.
Shutting the window energetically, she stood there a moment looking out on a new and shining white world.
“It’s cold enough for skating, too,” she told herself, drawing her high-necked flannel night dress closer about her. The boys would clear some of the snow on Long Pond, or Hummock, as they did each year with the first snowfall, and that afternoon—She stopped, her breath quickening.
“Why—why, it’s Christmas morning!” she exclaimed, astonished that she could have forgotten even for that brief, half-waking interval. “A white Christmas, just like Lilla Joy said it would be.”
Her thoughts flew, by a natural kinship of ideas, from Christmas snow to Christmas trees and stockings. Every Christmas, as far back as she could remember, Erica had gathered up her unexplored and bulging stocking and an armful of packages, and gone across the garden to her cousins’ house, to have the added fun of sharing surprises with Tommy and Lis.
This year there would be only Tommy to open bundles with, but—— She stopped abruptly for the second time since waking that morning, as memory gave her another little reminding nudge. The bright face clouded. There wouldn’t be only Tommy this morning. She had completely forgotten Milly and Barbee Thorne.
“But I’m not going to start Christmas by taking silly dislikes and judging folks unkindly,” Erica decided, sturdily. “As Aunt Callie said last night, it’s not going to be a happy Christmas for Milly this year, without her mother.”
She began to pull on her clothes rapidly, still shivering a little, for she was in far too much of a hurry to stop and light the fire which was laid on the broad hearth, ready at the touch of a match to send a comforting golden flame chimneyward.
When she was dressed, she took her woolly red cape from the deep wardrobe and wrapped herself in it, drawing the gathered hood over her tumbled red curls. She looked, with her eager young head cocked alertly on one side, her bright eyes, and the red of her cloak, not unlike an energetic robin redbreast defying snow and cold, in search of an early breakfast worm.
Downstairs she paused in the parlor long enough to admire anew the glistening tree she and Aunt Charity had dressed late last night, and then snatching the fat white stocking hanging from the blackened oak mantel, she tucked it under her cape, with one arm, and with her other retrieved an exciting pile of various sized packages laid out on the end of the sofa, where her particular share of Christmas was always put. The next moment she was out the side door, the sharp wind stinging fresh roses into her already glowing cheeks, and turning the tip of her straight little nose a matching pink.
The snow had not been swept from the porch yet, as the elderly Portuguese, who did the numerous outdoor chores about the place, had not made his appearance at this hour. Fortunately the snow was powdery and dry, for Erica was far too excited to remember such practical things as rubber boots, and dashed across the white garden, arriving, bright-eyed and panting, at her aunt’s side door, just as Tommy, who had watched her approach, opened it to admit her.
The boy put a finger to his lips, grinning, and jerked his head stairward. “Nobody else is awake yet, I guess,” he explained. “Come on in where the tree is, and I’ll light the fire.”
“We picked two good trees yesterday,” Erica observed judicially, watching him light the paper under the kindling, and blow gently to keep the slender flame going. Then her eyes filled suddenly and quite unexpectedly, so that she turned to inspect the tree with great attention, until she had managed to wipe the tell-tale drops away with the back of her hand.
It had come upon her with a force that brought a choking lump into her throat, how much they missed Lis at this familiar Christmas-morning ceremony. It had always been Lis who waked early enough to have the fire roaring hotly before Erica and her stocking appeared. Tommy, struggling with cold and awkward fingers to repair his forgetfulness, was all at once a pathetic figure.
He fumbled so long about getting the fire burning that she wondered, unhappily, if perhaps he, too, were not trying to avoid her glance. She was sure of it a moment later, when he sat back on his heels, muttering under his breath something about smoke getting in his eyes.
But neither of them spoke of what both were feeling, and a moment later they were seated on the carpeted floor before the hearth, their filled stockings on their laps, and opened and unopened packages strewn about them.
But as swiftly as their fingers flew in unwrapping the presents, their unwonted mood of gravity slipped into the normal, joyous excitement of Christmas morning. At last, having examined everything and found it eminently satisfactory, they bundled the wrapping paper into the blaze, and sat contentedly silent for a while, munching sweets from the now empty stockings.
“Christmas must be sort of—funny at sea,” Erica declared, finally, out of that unusual silence.
“Yea-ah,” Tommy’s mouth was uncomfortably full for articulate speech. “Guess Lis’ll be thinking ‘bout us, right this minute.” He sighed. “Wish I could have gone, too, Rick.”
Erica made a face. “And left me here high and dry by myself. No thank you.”
Tommy grinned. “Oh, you’d have had Milly Thorne,” he consoled her wickedly.
Erica ignored this flippancy, and returned to her contemplation of the fire. “I think Christmas at sea might be—rather beautiful, too,” she said, slowly, not looking around. “I love the ocean, Tom. I guess maybe it’s because I was born at sea that I’ve always sort of felt I belong to it. You know,” she added more briskly, “how Sun Li always addresses the presents he sends me home by father, ‘To my Honorable God-daughter, the little Sea Girl’—I love that for a name.”
Tommy grunted. He privately thought it rather flowery and Oriental, but both Lis and he had been carefully respectful on the subject of Sun Li with Erica, ever since one memorable occasion when she had flashed into a towering rage at the age of five, over a bit of teasing on Tommy’s part, and, after flying at the twins like a small wild cat, scratching, biting, and kicking, had wound up with a burst of utterly heart-broken and most unwonted tears. It was the tears that had done more to prevent a repetition of the remarks she objected to, than the temper that had preceded them.
About fifteen minutes later, Aunt Callie and the two visitors arrived downstairs, and Barbee Thorne went into such ecstasies over the trimmed tree and her stuffed stocking, that the moment’s attention was centered entirely about her. Aunt Callie, with her sister-in-law’s help, had hurriedly gotten together some additional gifts for her two new charges at the last minute, so there was a doll for Barbee—a discarded one of Erica’s childish days, redressed by Aunt Charity before she went to bed on Christmas Eve.
The pair of new skates which were to have been Aunt Callie’s present to Erica she had given to Milly instead, and a little note, tucked into Erica’s stocking, explained the exchange, and substituted a string of rose coral beads which Milly Thorne could not have used with the sad little black dresses she was wearing.
Erica was delighted with the corals, though she could not help a small pang of regret for the loss of those beautiful, shining ice skates. Her old pair were almost past sharpening, after years of hard use.
It would have been easier if Milly had only appreciated the skates. She had thanked Mrs. Folger politely, but evinced no enthusiasm at the news, delivered eagerly by Tommy, that Erica and he would take her skating that afternoon on Long Pond.
“I can’t do much skating myself, on account of my leg not being strong enough yet,” he explained. “But we’ll all go out there, and Rick and the Joys will look after you.”
“I don’t know how to skate,” Milly said, in that fretful manner they had resented last evening. “You know, I’ve always lived in the city till now.”
“Oh, we’ll teach you in no time,” Tommy offered, confidentially, though some of that first sparkle of friendly generosity had gone out of his tone under the dampening effect of her lack of responsiveness.
“Mother always said I took cold so easily, she didn’t like me to go out in the snow,” Milly objected, shivering a little. “I think I’d rather stay in here by the fire, with Cousin Callie, if you please. Maybe some other time I’ll feel more like going.”
The words were civil enough, but Tommy and Erica looked at each other blankly. Afraid of taking cold in that brief, infrequent snow so eagerly waited for by the Nantucket children!
But they were too polite—and also too honestly amazed—to voice a further protest, and soon after the long-drawn-out, bountiful Christmas dinner was finished, they took up their skates, harnessed old Polly to the sleigh, and departed for Long Pond, stopping to pile in the young Joys and the Macys on the way.
“I should think,” Tommy observed to his cousin, as he saw her struggling with the worn straps of the old skates at the pond’s edge, “that Milly might have lent her new skates to you, as she won’t use them herself. You know, mother really bought them for you in the first place.”
Erica bit back a sigh, and answered with a heroic effort at absolute fairness: “Well, I was sort of hoping she’d say something about it. But, of course, she doesn’t know they were meant for me, or that my old ones are in such a state.” She surveyed her feet with a rueful air. “I can make these do another year,” she admitted. “It’s only the thought of her not using the others that makes me a little mad.”
“Mother wouldn’t like me to talk about a guest,” Tommy observed, grimly, “but it does seem to me it’s bad enough to have to miss Lis about the house, without——” He didn’t finish his sentence, but Erica put a swift hand on his arm understandingly.
“I know,” she agreed. “It’s going to be harder on you than on me, Tommy. I guess Lis’ll be in Canton in another month now, don’t you? D’you suppose he’ll really meet Sun Li?”
In the interest of the discussion that followed, Milly Thorne and her irritating qualities were forgotten for the time being. It was, therefore, almost as much of a shock to come home that afternoon, flushed with the cold and exercise, and find her sitting by the fire in her black frock, with her fretful young face and sharp, unfriendly black eyes, as it had been the night before when they had first seen her there.
And in the days that followed, neither Tommy nor Erica ever quite lost that first instinctive sense of her being a stranger. It was not that she often did or said anything actively quarrelsome; it was just that she failed utterly to fit into their little circle; so obviously preferring to sit aloof with a book on her lap, but with those strange, unchildlike eyes of hers fixed on the fire instead of the open page before her, that the young Folgers’ efforts to include her in their plans grew more and more half-hearted and perfunctory as time wore on.
Being kind-hearted youngsters, they were honestly sorry for her in her evident unhappiness, and a glance at her black dress was always sufficient to check a too-sharp retort whenever she proved unusually apathetic and aggravating. But friendly relations could not be said to advance appreciably in the household, and Mrs. Folger and Miss Charity, looking on, grew seriously troubled by the situation.
Fortunately, Barbee Thorne made up to everyone for her sister’s deficiencies. Such a rosy, sunny-tempered, affectionate baby was certainly never seen before, the family agreed unanimously. She was never sick or cross or unhappy. She adored everybody about her indiscriminately, and was as easy to amuse and take care of as a kitten or a puppy.
To Erica, who had clung to a large collection of dolls until she was almost twelve, Barbee Thorne was a live doll, to be played with, dressed, and mothered without the uncomfortable consciousness that she was doing something unfitting the new dignity of her teens. Barbee was a distinct addition to the combined Folger households, as far as Erica was concerned. But Milly was a problem to be faced afresh with each new day.
At school, whither she accompanied Erica and Tommy for the new term after Christmas, Milly speedily proved herself quick at her lessons and genuinely interested in the class work. During school hours she lost her sullen air, and seemed more content and like other children. She always had good marks in all her studies, and as a natural consequence soon found herself in high favor with Miss Minor, their teacher. With the rest of the pupils, however, she maintained that same unfriendly aloofness to which she clung so persistently at home. She made no friends, except Miss Minor, who often invited her home to tea after school was over, and occasionally, with Mrs. Folger’s permission, kept her overnight in her tiny, gray-shingled house on Pearl Street.
From these visits Milly returned with a new softness in her black eyes, and a noticeable lessening of that peevish discontent which so irritated Tommy and Erica and worried their elders. But the change never lasted more than a few hours at most, when some unfortunate remark of one or another of the family would, all unintentionally, send her back into her sullen unfriendliness once more.
“She’s like a clammy wet blanket round the house all the time,” Erica complained once, bitterly, to Tommy and Lilla Joy. “It doesn’t make a speck of difference whether you try to be nice to her or lose your temper and speak the truth about her manners. She’s just as disagreeable and anxious to get rid of your company and be alone, either way. Of course, I know she’s lost her mother and her home, and I’m sorry for her as I can be. I’d like to be friends, if she’d only let me. But when some one won’t meet you even a quarter of the way, what’s a person to do, anyhow?”
“Maybe she’ll get over it,” Lilla Joy suggested, hopefully. Lilla was no more prejudiced in the newcomer’s favor than Erica, but she adored the latter and was merely trying to be comforting on general principles.
“I wish Lis were at home,” Erica responded. “He’s not the kind that gets excited and flies off at a tangent as Tommy and I do. He’s sort of quiet, you know, and soothing. I guess perhaps he could find out what’s ailing Milly. Somehow I don’t believe it’s all grief for her mother. That would make her unhappy, but it needn’t make her sulky and hate folks as she seems to. Tommy says it’s just my imagination, but I really do think there’s something else—something quite different—that’s worrying her and making her act this way.”
“I suppose you couldn’t ask her,” Lilla said.
“I’ve tried once or twice,” Erica confessed. “Sort of roundabout, you know, so she wouldn’t think I was just curious. But you—you can’t seem to get at Milly at all.”
“Well, old Lis ought to be home in another month, now,” Tommy said. “We counted up, Rick, you remember, that April at the latest would bring the Spray back. Maybe sooner.”
His listeners both brightened. “I’d forgotten it was quite so near,” Lilla declared. “My, Tommy, I’ll be glad to see Lis round here again! He’s quieter than you, but he leaves a—a sort of hole when he’s away.”
“I know,” Erica confirmed, gloomily. “I don’t see why I couldn’t have been born a boy, and then Tommy and Lis and I could have all shipped together.”
The 1st of April came and went, but no news of Lister Folger came to Nantucket. By the end of the first week in that month the whole Folger family showed the strain of suspense by a most novel abstraction and a tendency to start nervously at sounds.
The Spray would not, of course, put in at Nantucket, on her return voyage, but there had already been more than ample time for her to have reached Boston, her home port, and for Lis to have either made the trip from there to the island, or to have written, if, for some reason, Captain Bartlet had not wished him to leave the ship.
The first two weeks in April came and went without news of Lis. Then, on a rainy afternoon in the middle of the month Erica and Tommy, sitting on the floor before the grate fire in Miss Charity’s sitting room reading out of the same book of old sea tales, heard a knock on the front door. Erica rose, yawning, and crossed the passage to answer it, urging Tommy vehemently not to turn a page until her return.
The afternoon light had almost gone now, and with the glow of the fire still in her eyes she blinked unrecognizingly at the bulky figure standing on the porch in the dusk.
“Doesn’t thee remember me, missy?” a deep voice asked in the familiar Quaker speech that more than half the island used.
Erica gave a little gasp, and one hand flew instinctively to her throat as if breathing had all at once become difficult.
“Captain—Bartlet,” she whispered. She had no reason—yet—for the swift fear that raced along her nerves; but without stopping to reason what prompted her action, she stepped hurriedly out on the little porch and drew the front door softly to behind her. Then, her hands clenched at her sides to control their trembling, she lifted her head gallantly and looked the big captain in the face. “Did—didn’t Lis come with you?” she asked in a shaky little voice.
Captain Bartlet cleared his throat twice before he answered her. “No, missy,” he said at last. “That’s why I came here to see Miss Charity first, before I see Lister’s mother.” He put a huge hand on Erica’s shoulder. “My dear, thee is going to be a brave little woman, isn’t thee, and help me?”
Erica didn’t recognize her own voice when it came, it sounded so strained and lifeless, but she held it perfectly steady with all her young strength. “Please talk softly,” she said, and motioned over her shoulder to the house behind her. “Tommy’s in there, waiting for me. Tell me what’s happened—first. Lis isn’t—isn’t—dead?” She brought out the terrible word with an effort.
The captain’s hand tightened comfortingly on her shoulder.
“I hope not, my dear child. I trust not,” he said, hesitating, as if he were trying to pick and choose his words carefully. “But the truth is, missy, that I know nothing at all. Lis went ashore, our last night in Canton. I didn’t see him go, but Myrick, the first mate, told me later he’d gone ashore in the same boat with him. Then they parted. Lister wanted a final look at the city, and the mate had some business about the cargo to see to.”
He paused, and Erica said, breathlessly, “Yes. And then——”
“That’s the last we know,” Captain Bartlet replied, sorrowfully. “He didn’t come back to the ship that night, nor the next morning. He’d never stayed away like that before. It was strictly against the rules, and Lister was a good boy, steady as a clock.”
“But——” Erica almost screamed it at him, forgetting Tommy for the moment—”you never sailed, and—and left Lis alone, lost, in China? You—oh, you must have searched for him, Captain Bartlet!”
“Of course we searched, missy,” he said, quickly. “We put off our departure for the best part of a week and pretty near turned that bloomin’ old Chinese city upside down with our hunting. But there wasn’t a trace—not so much as a whisper. I even remembered that tale thee told me about a Chinese godfather who sent thee presents and whose seal thee drew for me in the flower pot that day. Doesn’t thee remember? I had seen that seal before, though the man it belonged to wasn’t named Sun Li.”
“But—but he is,” Erica protested. “Why, my father knows him—oh, very well!”
“That may all be,” the other assented, gravely. “I found thy godfather, little Erica. He gave me an audience when I used thy name and thy father’s.”
Erica caught her breath. “You—you saw Sun Li? Oh, Captain Bartlet, who is he?”
“A very great man in his own land,” the captain declared. “Governor of the province. Also a man high in favor at the imperial court, it is whispered. Where thy father got the name of Sun Li, I know not. Perchance it is some little name of friendship by which he chooses to be known to thee, to hide his true rank. But for Captain Eric’s sake he was exceedingly gracious to me and heard all my tale of Lister’s disappearance with much interest. At its conclusion he promised to have search made for the lad and to send word if he were found. He bade me return to America, since, after all, even for thy cousin’s sake, I could not hold up the Spray and her cargo indefinitely. A captain’s duty is first of all to his owners. And I had exhausted all my resources in the search. If the governor could not find him, surely I could do nothing.”
The door at their backs was suddenly flung open violently, and Tommy, his blue eyes wide with a kind of startled horror, stood on the threshold, staring at the two outside.
“What’s that you’re saying about Lis?” he cried. “I heard Rick call out his name and something about not leaving him behind. What’s the matter?”
Erica ran to him and clasped his arm with two strong, nervous young hands. “Tommy, don’t look like that, please, dear,” she begged, her voice thick with the tears she was trying so hard to hold back. “And it isn’t sure yet that he—— Sun Li is having a search made for him, and—and Sun Li’s governor of Canton, Tommy, so you see, he can do——”
Tommy cut her short, “Where is Lis?” he demanded, his glance going from Erica to the big figure of Captain Bartlet on the porch.
The captain shook his head helplessly, tried for words, and choked ignominiously. There was something heart-breaking about the tense questioning of Tommy’s blue eyes, before which the bluff, kindly old sailor felt all the sympathetic attempts at reassurance he wanted to utter seem useless. He looked pleadingly at the girl between them.
“Tommy, we don’t know,” Erica said, bravely, tightening her grasp on her cousin’s arm. “You’ll have to help us, dear, because we’ve got somehow to tell your mother.”
“All right,” the boy said, briefly. “Tell me first.” And he added, just as Erica herself had done, “He isn’t—dead, Rick?”
“We don’t know, dear,” Erica repeated, and for a little moment her red head went down on Tommy’s arm and one big, uncontrollable sob shook her. But almost instantly she had herself in hand once more, and, lifting her head, repeated in a steady voice the story Captain Bartlet had just told her.
Tommy listened quietly, only wincing once, when she came to the departure of the Spray, leaving Lis behind her. “What did Sun Li think, sir?” he said of Captain Bartlet when Erica was done. “Was he—at all hopeful, sir?”
“I can’t tell a thing about what a Chinaman thinks,” the captain said, ruefully. “Their faces never seem to change, no matter what they’re feeling inside them. But as I told missy here, he was very courteous as soon as Captain Eric’s name was mentioned, and promised to do all that lay in his power to find the lad.” He broke off with an exclamation and thrust a hand into the inner pocket of his coat in search of something.
Presently, after much rummaging among several pockets, he produced a small package, done up in gilt paper, and sealed with huge gold seals showing the strange Chinese characters both children were already familiar with on other, similarly wrapped parcels that had come home with Captain Eric Folger in the Sea Gull.
Captain Bartlet handed it to Erica. “The governor sent this to thee, missy,” he explained.
“Oh, what do I care about presents at a time like this!” Erica cried, impatiently.
“I’d open it,” Tommy advised. “There may be some sort of message inside to tell what he’s going to do about Lis.”
“Of course. I never thought of that,” Erica agreed, and tore at the gorgeous wrappings with trembling fingers.
Inside was a small square box of carved teakwood, ornamented with curious clasps of hammered brass that looked like dragons’ wings. A tiny brass key was tied to one of the clasps with a knot of orange cord, and when this had unlocked the little box, it proved to contain a pair of long, beautifully carved earrings of deep green jade, with pear-shaped drops at the ends, of delicately tinted pink pearls. They were lovely, graceful things, and by the look of them extremely valuable, though wholly unsuited to a child of Erica’s age. But at the moment Erica hardly gave them a glance, since all her attention was concentrated on the few lines of heavy, flourishing writing on a small orange card that was inclosed with the earrings.
To the little Sea Blossom, my very dear and honorable Goddaughter [ran the writing], with the assurance that Sun Li will either return her cousin to her in safety or terribly punish those who have harmed him. Let the little Sea Girl believe that nothing shall be left undone and that word shall be sent speedily by the first ship, when there is news.
Box, note, and the jade-and-pearl earrings slipped from Erica’s hands, to fall with a little tinkle on the wooden floor of the porch. “Oh, Tommy, as if his punishing the men who hurt Lis will do us any good!” she choked. “That may be the Oriental way of looking at things. I want Lis back, well and safe. Sun Li’s just an old Chinese heathen,” she wailed. “What does he know of how Americans feel about things?”
“I don’t know that it’s such a heathen point of view,” Tommy put in, in a new, grim voice. “If anybody’s hurt Lis, I want ‘em punished as much as Sun Li does. Rick,” he said, his tone changing suddenly and piteously, “why did I have to break my leg that time and give Lis a chance to go in my place? Then he’d be here safe and sound right this minute.”
“And you’d be over there in China,” Erica reminded him, quickly. “No, that wouldn’t be a bit better, Tommy dear.”
“That doesn’t follow necessarily,” Tommy insisted. “I might not have gone ashore that last night. Or—or—oh, it might have been different lots of ways. But that does no good to think of now,” he added, soberly. “We’ve got to tell mother next, I guess. You—— Please come with us, Captain Bartlet. Mother will want to ask you questions, I know.”
They crossed the garden without further words, the three walking abreast, their faces grave and anxious. Mrs. Folger, opening the door at Erica’s knock, scarcely needed the captain’s kind, stumbling explanation, to know that trouble of some sort had come to Lister.
She heard him out quietly, for she came of a race that had been well and early trained in self-control.
“Please come into the sitting room, Captain,” she said then, closing the front door behind them—for the four had been standing in the narrow entry hall. “There’s a fire in there, and the evening’s turned cool. I would take it kindly of you if you could sit a while and let me ask you all the details, so I can know better how to shape my plans.” Her face worked suddenly, but no tears came, and Erica, knowing how hard her aunt was struggling not to give way, thought better of her own eager impulse to run to her and fling comforting arms about her neck.
They sat down before the bright grate fire, with Tommy standing behind his mother’s chair, as if he could not bear to watch her face that was so quiet and so very white.
Milly Thorne, who had been curled up in a corner of the sofa at the right of the hearth, with a book on her lap, rose silently and crept nearer, till she crouched like a small thin black kitten at Mrs. Folger’s feet, her big, straining black eyes lifted with a new softness and pity in them, to the older woman’s face.
Erica fought down a swift, unworthy little pang when she saw her aunt’s hand go almost unconsciously to Milly’s tumbled black hair and rest there as if she found some small comfort in the contact.
And then Milly said a thing that surprised both her young cousins, her voice quite unlike the querulous voice of Milly Thorne as they had heard it since her arrival in the household. “I know what it’s like, Cousin Callie,” she whispered, fiercely, and laid her cheek against Mrs. Folger’s knee with a gentle, caressing touch that was as un-Milly-like as her voice. “I know. I—adored my mother.”
Erica, with a big lump in her throat, glanced quickly and remorsefully at Tommy. Had they really been unkind all this past winter when they thought they were merely paying a spoiled and ungrateful girl back in her own coin? It was not a pleasant thought, particularly at a moment like this. Erica was inclined to resent the realization unreasonably. They had enough to bear with all this dreadful news about Lis, without having their feelings further harrowed up with remorse for past treatment of Milly. Why couldn’t Milly have been normal, and cried and showed her grief so ordinary folks could understand? She’d certainly acted, most of the time, as if she hated them all and was in Nantucket under compulsion only.
“When do you sail again for Canton, Captain?” Aunt Callie was asking, steadily, when Erica pulled herself out of the rather morbid reflections she was so unwontedly entertaining.
“In another week, ma’am,” he said. “Just time to unload cargo and take on another we’ve got, consigned to Hong Kong. We sail to Hong Kong first, and then to Canton, this trip. There’ll surely be good news waiting when we reach there. Thee must keep up a good heart, Mrs. Folger. Thy boy will come sailing back to thee yet, strong and hale, or my name’s not Judson Bartlet. Thee must hope and pray, and have faith in the Lord’s goodness.” He spoke quite simply, and with such evident conviction that Mrs. Folger stretched out her hand to him in swift and wordless gratitude, faintly touched with a new hope.
“And perhaps Erica’s father will bring good news, even before Captain Bartlet’s ship has time to go and return,” Milly Thorne reminded them, her cheek still against Mrs. Folger’s knee like a snuggling kitten. “The governor is a friend of his and will surely have done his utmost to get word to him, if there were news before the Sea Gull sailed. And——” she hesitated, and looked from Mrs. Folger up to Tommy, standing white-faced and tense behind her chair—”why shouldn’t Tommy go back with Captain Bartlet on this next trip?” she asked, unexpectedly. “He still needs a cabin boy, now that Lister——” She stopped and smiled a little, obviously pleased at the glow of eagerness that flashed across Tommy’s face like a crimson flame. “Then he would be on the spot if there is any news waiting when the ship arrives. He wanted very much to go in the first place, I know, and perhaps he can talk to this Sun Li more—more personally, as Lister’s brother and Captain Folger’s nephew. And Barbee and I will be here to look after you,” she wound up, touching the hand that still rested affectionately on her head.
“Oh, mother!” Tommy burst out in a voice of such desperate pleading as needed no other explanations of how he felt in the matter. “Milly, you—you’re——” He choked audibly and turned very red at such a frank betrayal of sentiment. “Mother, I’ve just got to go,” he finished.
“If we could only wait until your Uncle Eric’s ship returns,” Mrs. Folger began, uncertainly. “We’re expecting him back almost any time, you know. He may have news, dear.”
“But I—want to go to sea,” Tommy said, vehemently. “I’ve wanted it all my life. I only gave it up so Lis could have my chance. Now—now when it means I can be on the spot, as Milly says, to help search for him, I——Mother, I just can’t stay at home and wait. Please, please don’t ask me to!” He had his hands on her shoulders and was bending over the low chair back, to look earnestly into her troubled face. “Mother, we—we can’t just leave Lis over there without one of us going——”
Mrs. Folger glanced at Captain Bartlet inquiringly, and he met her eyes with a little nod of reassurance. “I think it a good plan, if thee will trust him to me, ma’am,” he confirmed his nod, gravely.
Erica turned to the fire and stared into its glowing depths with eyes so blinded by tears all they could see was a dull red blur. First Lis and now Tommy! Men and boys had all the chances in this world. Girls and women had just to stay at home and suffer and wait and wait. She rumpled her short red curls, bitterness in her heart, and listened to the slow voices of Captain Bartlet and her aunt, and the eager, young voice of Tommy, discussing the new plan.
Tommy returned with Captain Bartlet to Boston the following day. His going left a great gap in the family, that was made still more apparent by the cloud of anxiety on Lister’s behalf which hung over the two Folger households. But it was agreed, before he left, that his mother and Erica should go to Boston two days before he was to sail, and stay with a cousin of Mrs. Folger’s, so they could see the _Spray_ for themselves--this had been the captain’s kindly suggestion--and have another opportunity to say good-by to Tommy before his long voyage began.
Miss Charity promised to keep an eye on Milly and little Barbee for the short time the others should be gone, and the prospect of the trip, and the hurried preparations for it—the Spray was to sail in a week—helped everybody through that first almost unbearable period of suspense while they waited for news from China, which could not possibly reach them before the arrival of the next tea clipper from the other side of the world.
The Nantucket Steamship Company, which ran boats between New Bedford and the island, had, the summer before, put on a new big boat, the Massachusetts, and it was arranged that Mrs. Folger and Erica should go by that to the mainland, and from New Bedford to Boston by train. The trip, counting the waits and changes, would occupy the best part of a day, and Erica, who had never been off the island since she had been brought there as a six-months-old baby to be placed in Miss Charity’s care, was faintly ashamed of the eager excitement with which she found herself contemplating this entrancing chance to see new worlds—even if they were no farther away and no stranger than New Bedford and Boston. She told herself severely that with this dreadful uncertainty about Lis making her heart ache, and her breath catch sharply in terror whenever she stopped to realize the news Captain Bartlet had brought, she oughtn’t to be able to feel happy and excited over anything, no matter how novel and alluring. How could one feel frightened and sad and thrilled and adventurous and sort of—palpitating—all at the same time?
She said something, shyly, about it to Aunt Charity once, and the latter proved unwontedly understanding.
“It’s the prospect of doing something, dearie, that’ll take your mind off our fears for a time,” her aunt said, gently, putting a tender hand on the girl’s shoulder. “And unconsciously, too, perhaps you have a hope that news—good news—will be waiting in Boston with some ship just back from China. And you’re young, Erica. Youth swings quickly from mood to mood. It doesn’t mean you’re any the less worried over poor Lis’s fate. Take this little trip and enjoy it all you can. Seeing you hopeful will be the best way to help Aunt Callie.”
The Spray was to sail with the early morning tide on Saturday, so on Thursday Mrs. Folger and Erica embarked on the new Massachusetts, of which the islanders were so proud, and were borne over a blue and almost rippleless sea toward the far-away mainland which Erica, at least, had never seen before. For one cannot, as the girl pointed out very earnestly to the friendly, gray-bearded captain when he stopped beside their chairs on deck, to chat a moment—one cannot be said really to have seen a place one has only been carried through at the age of six months.
The gray captain twinkled at the eager young face with its shining eyes, and the bobbed red curls dancing alively against each smooth cheek flushed with the sharp little sea wind.
“Pity you ain’t a lad like Tommy, now, Miss Ricky, ‘stid o’ a pretty gal,” he murmured, gallantly. “Ye’d ha’ been a rare one to run away to sea adventures now, wouldn’t ye? I mind your father when he wasn’t no older than ye be, an’ he had the same hungry li’l’ imp o’ excitement in his eyes.”
He passed on with a chuckle, and Erica leaned her chin on the iron rail and stared dreamily at the slowly heaving, lazy blue water. Suppose she were really a boy—suppose she were sailing day after tomorrow with Tommy, on the Spray! They’d see China together—Canton, Foochow, Hangchow, Cochin-China—all those myriad names of pure romance that had sung in her listening ears ever since she first heard them in her sea-faring father’s tales of his voyages. They’d visit Sun Li, too, and there’d be splendid news of Lis waiting for them in her Chinese godfather’s gorgeous palace. Perhaps Lis himself would be there and they’d all three go sight-seeing, and—and——
She rubbed her eyes like a person just waking out of a deep sleep, at the sound of Aunt Callie’s gentle voice asking her a question. Erica sighed heavily as she turned to answer. What was the use of imagining impossibilities? One had always to wake again and remember one was only a stay-at-home girl. And there wasn’t any good news yet. Lis wasn’t waiting for them in Sun Li’s Cantonese palace. Perhaps—perhaps they’d never—no, no use imagining that way, either. She’d only end by crying, and making Aunt Callie cry with her.
They arrived at Cousin Kate Kingsley’s house on Mount Vernon Street in time for supper, and found Tommy there ahead of them, busily describing to Cousin Kate the many superior advantages of the Spray above all other China-bound clippers.
Captain Bartlet had given him the evening ashore, but he had to report back on board by nine o’clock. Erica was as eager to hear as Tommy to tell, so supper was largely taken up with animated talk between the two young people. Now and then some mention of Lis, or China, brought a swift cloud to both the girl’s and boy’s faces; but, after all, they were at an age when hope is easier to believe in than despair; and since there was as yet no positive proof of harm having come to Lister, it was natural enough they should cling to an optimistic confidence in the eventual happy outcome of all their fears and troubles.
Meantime, here was adventure ahead for Tommy, and present new scenes and wonders for both in the mere fact of being off familiar Nantucket and in big, busy Boston, about which so much talk at home centered among the fisher folk.
Mrs. Folger, while not daring to let herself share their optimism, was faintly conscious of a little stirring of courage in her thoughts of the future. Perhaps, after all, there would be some explanation of her boy’s strange disappearance. Perhaps her brother-in-law’s ship, the Sea Gull, now supposed to be well on its homeward course, would bring good news. Or perhaps Tommy himself would find Lis, safe and sound, in Sun Li’s palace when the Spray reached Canton.
Cousin Kate smiled on them all, and plied them hospitably with tempting dishes of her own concocting, to which Erica and Tommy, at least, did ample, and appreciative justice.
The following morning Tommy came ashore bright and early, and, with Cousin Kate to play guide, the three Folgers spent the time up to the midday dinner hour in seeing as much of Boston as the limits of time and space permitted.
In the afternoon Tommy personally conducted them all aboard the Spray, where Captain Bartlet was waiting, bluff and genial and anxious to please, to show them alow and aloft over his slim and graceful clipper now lying at anchor on the gently ruffled waters of the harbor.
She had finished taking her cargo on board, and had moved out to a roomier anchorage offshore where she could the more easily spread her white gulls’ wings with the next morning’s early tide, and slip away on the first tack of her voyage to the East.
Captain Bartlet had sent one of her boats in to the wharf to transfer his expected visitors to the ship, and they spent—for Erica, at all events—an enchanted three hours thereafter, exploring the marvelous intricacies and surprises which a ship of that size, and especially a sailing-ship, invariably possesses for the inexperienced landsman.
The last tearful good-bys to Tommy, which must be said on board, rather obscured the earlier happiness of the afternoon, though the boy kept saying, rather jerkily and with an over-emphatic cheerfulness: “It’s only for six months or so, mother. Why, Rick, you know you’d give your eyes to be going, too!” He did not materially deceive any of his feminine relatives, and was finally forced to desist, by a most unmanly and uncomfortable lump in his own throat.
But they got through the bad moment without actually breaking down, and were rowed back to the wharf, waving a whole sheaf of handkerchiefs with pretended gayety to a madly-waving, long-legged Tommy perched precariously on the Spray’s port rail. However, as things turned out, they might have postponed the farewells until later, for, just as they were sitting down—rather silent, and inclined to avoid each other’s eyes—at Cousin Kate’s lavishly spread supper table that evening, the heavy knocker on the front door clanged and Tommy himself appeared in the dining-room door, in Cousin Kate’s wake. He announced that the captain had sent him ashore with a message to be delivered, and had added permission for a final visit to his family.
The Spray carried a few cabin passengers, all of whom, but one, had come aboard with their possessions that afternoon. One, however, a widow traveling out to Canton to join a merchant brother engaged in the tea trade, had been detained by some unexpected emergency and could not go out to the ship until morning. Captain Bartlet had, therefore, sent Tommy ashore to tell her that the Spray would sail by seven o’clock and that a boat would be waiting at the wharf for her promptly at six.
“I’ll have some supper, too, if I may, Cousin Kate,” he added, with his cheerful grin at sight of the array of food under which the table groaned. “Then I’ll go to see Mrs. Haven—she’s only a block or two from here—and give her the captain’s message.”
“Oh, Tommy, let me walk around with you!” Erica pleaded. “You can bring me back to the steps. We’ll walk fast to make up time.”
To this Tommy agreed, and when the meal was over and a second round of farewells said all over again, Erica followed him out to the hall. Here, out of sight of Mrs. Folger and Cousin Kate, Tommy produced an awkwardly wrapped bundle from a chair where it had been hidden from view by his heavy seacoat.
“Rick, I brought back that extra suit mother insisted on my taking,” he said, hurriedly. “It’s really too small for me now, and, anyhow, I haven’t room for a lot of shore clothes that I shan’t need. You saw for yourself what a little bit of a cubbyhole I have to sleep and keep my things in. I’ve got one good suit already for going ashore. Don’t show this to mother till I get off in the morning, and then just explain I don’t need it.”
“All right. I’ll take it upstairs to my room,” Erica assented. “I’ll only be a moment getting my bonnet and cape.”
It was scarcely more than a minute when she ran eagerly down the stairs again, wrapped in her woolly red cloak, and the cousins let themselves out the front door into the warm, late April dusk.
High up overhead a pale little evening star was winking at them cheerfully over the chimney pots of the houses across the way. The lamp-posts, too, had already sprung into cheerful winking pin-points of light down the street ahead of them, and a general air of peacefulness and hope seemed abroad on the soft evening air.
Erica, swinging along briskly at Tommy’s side, felt her courage—which had wilted a bit after supper, when faced by those second, final good-bys—revive sturdily. She slipped her fingers through his arm and spoke hesitantly.
“Tommy, somehow—I can’t tell you why, and maybe you’ll only say I’m silly—but I do feel that it’s going to be—all right with Lis, when you get to Canton.”
“Well, mostly I feel that way myself,” Tommy responded, gravely. “Seems as if there’s just got to be good news when the Spray arrives. Only——” he turned about suddenly, and Erica saw that the boy’s face was working in a piteous effort not to show his feelings. “Only—suppose there—there isn’t—anything?”
Erica’s optimism of a moment before died, in a flash, to a sick kind of fear such as, even when Captain Bartlet first told her Lis was missing, she had not known in quite such intensity.
To know that Tommy, gay, light-hearted, unimaginative Tommy, felt this way about his quest, on the very eve of his departure, knocked the carefully-built-up supports of Erica’s own belief from under it.
But she couldn’t send him away with any added doubts to trouble the several months’ voyage during which no news of any sort could reach him, and in which he would have no one from his old life to say a cheerful word.
“You mustn’t let your mind dwell on that possibility, Tom,” she said, earnestly. “Sun Li will have something good to tell you. I—I just feel he will. You know how powerful a governor is, in China.” Neither she nor Tommy knew a thing about his powers, but it sounded likely, and she saw with satisfaction that the boy’s set face had relaxed a little at her words.
There was no time to say more then, for they were at the door of Mrs. Haven’s imposing red-brick house on the corner, and Erica bade Tommy leave her there at the steps while he went up to deliver his message. She was in no mood, just then, for meeting strangers.
Evidently the lady herself came to the door at his knock, for Erica, below in the shadows, heard a brisk duet of voices asking and answering questions—Tommy’s and a soft, rich, jolly sort of voice that must be that of the Spray’s belated passenger. Then Tommy came running down again, and the jolly, chuckly voice called after him gayly:
“If I had only known there was to be a nice boy like you on board, I vow I’d have brought my nephew along for company. He fair pestered the life out of me last vacation to take him to Canton.”
“I suppose it’s too late now?” Tommy paused halfway down to suggest. The idea of another boy of his own age evidently appealed to him.
The lady said she was afraid it was too late, and went back into the house, calling out that she’d see him in the morning, only that six o’clock was a heathenish hour to expect anyone to be packed and down at the wharf ready for a journey.
“She seems a good-natured sort of person, but silly,” Tommy observed, sagely, to Erica, as they retraced their steps to Cousin Kate’s door. “She’s the kind that gushes over everything a body says, and squeaks ‘oh!’ and ‘la!’ and talks about the sea being romantic. Huh!”
Tommy, used to the New England control and measured speech of his mother and aunt, was divided between disgust and amusement over this very different type. “She’s a funny one,” he decided. “Rich and spoiled, I guess. Used to having her own way and carrying out any old whim that strikes her. There wasn’t a real reason in the world why she needed to have a special boat sent for her in the morning instead of coming on board tonight like the others.”
Afterward Erica always insisted that she went to sleep that night without a conscious thought, at least, of the impulsive, crazy plan she was to plunge into before sunrise the next morning. As far as she could trace it, it began with a singularly vivid dream.
She dreamed the romantic lady passenger with the jolly voice came to her, offering her a suit of boy’s clothing and saying, persuasively, “My nephew couldn’t go, after all. Can’t you wear these clothes of his and go in his place? Then Tommy won’t be so lonely.”
In addition, the lady had pointed at Erica’s red bob, and had asked, triumphantly: “Isn’t this really what you cut off your curls for? Remember that Captain Bartlet himself told you once you’d probably want to run away to sea in his ship one day?”
Erica found herself sitting bolt upright in bed, her heart pounding in her breast until it was almost a pain. A broad path of moonlight was shining in the windows and fell on an awkwardly wrapped bundle lying on the floor near the foot of her bed.
“Tommy will be unhappy without some one to keep him cheered up,” Erica said aloud, wildly, in a scarey little voice that didn’t sound a bit like her own. “And maybe Sun Li would do more for me, if I were there in Canton—than for Tommy or Captain Bartlet.”
She kept on staring at Tommy’s pathetic bundle as if it fascinated her. She tried to pull her eyes away, and couldn’t.
“If I—dressed up—in those clothes,” Erica whispered, slowly, her mouth dry, “and went to Mrs. Haven, pretending to be a boy who wanted to stow away and go to China, to—to my godfather who lives there—Tommy said she’s silly and—and romantic. I bet she’d think it exciting, and take me on board as her nephew. I wouldn’t tell a lie—anyhow not in words. I wouldn’t have to say I was a boy—and—and after the ship sailed, Captain Bartlet could only scold. He wouldn’t turn back.”
Slowly Erica got out of bed and went over to the bundle Tommy had left with her earlier that evening. Her hands were cold and shook a little, so that she bungled the knots clumsily as she untied the string, but her mind was firmly made up to attempt the reckless plan which had come to her with her first waking from that very vivid dream. She was going to China on the _Spray_, if the thing could be contrived, to have a share in the search for Lis.
She took Tommy’s discarded suit out of the bundle and held it up in the moonlight. It was too small for Tommy and would probably be too big for her, but it would have to do.
Fifteen minutes later a slim, red-headed boy, wearing a rather battered old cap and Tommy’s coat and trousers, and carrying a bundle under one arm which contained a girl’s frock, a red, woolly cape, and a bonnet, stole on tiptoe out of the room, down the front stairs, and out of Cousin Kate Kingsley’s front door into the raw, penetrating chill of five o’clock of an April morning.
It was still quite dark in the street—darker, as a matter of fact, than last evening, because the street lamps were out now. Erica shivered, partly with cold—for Tommy had left her no overcoat—and partly with sheer nervous excitement at the rash adventure to which she was committed.
She had hidden under her pillow a hasty, much-blotted note to Aunt Callie, telling of her undertaking. Some one would find it when they made her bed, but not soon enough to stop Erica herself from boarding the Spray—that is, supposing she succeeded in prevailing upon Mrs. Haven to stand sponsor for her.
It was only a five-minute walk from Cousin Kate’s to the big, red-brick house she remembered so vividly from last evening. Lights were burning brightly in all the front windows, upstairs and down, as Erica turned the corner, and a handsome carriage and pair stood before the door, already well laden with various sized and shaped bags and boxes.
For a long moment Erica debated, standing irresolutely on the corner, whether to go up boldly, ring the bell and proffer her astounding request, or to wait until the lady came out on her way to the carriage.
While she still argued with herself, Erica saw a portly coachman descend from the box and mount the house steps, probably for a final load of luggage. Opportunity beckoned, and without stopping to debate further, she impulsively answered the summons.
Hurrying down the street, she cast one last frightened glance over her shoulder at the lighted house behind her, and, opening the carriage door with a quick jerk, popped into the darkness inside like a terrified rabbit scuttling into its burrow.
The carriage was pretty well filled with bags, save for a corner of the back seat which had been left free for the traveler. But Erica was a slender girl, and she managed, by pulling and pushing the boxes a bit, to slip into a sort of niche on the floor between a huge dressing-case and what felt like a small-sized trunk standing on one end.
For a few seconds after she had gained this temporary hiding-place Erica was quite unable to make out sounds around her because of the loud pounding of her own heart in her ears. But after a while this quieted down and she could hear two people coming down the stone steps of the house toward her.
One of these must be the portly coachman, she decided, for she heard a man’s voice; then still another box or bag was piled up on the driver’s seat, and some one opened the carriage door and put a foot on the step.
“Pretty crowded in here, Jeffreys,” Erica heard the rich, chuckly voice of Mrs. Haven remark, and a hand came into the darkness exploringly.
“Want I should move them bags round a little, ma’am?” the man Jeffreys asked, and Erica’s heart fell to pounding again, lest his offer be accepted and her own inevitable discovery result.
“No, never mind,” she heard the traveler say. “It’s not far to the wharf. I can squeeze in somewhere.”
Jeffreys, judging by the way the carriage rocked, thereupon mounted to the box, and Mrs. Haven climbed gingerly into the crowded darkness inside and sat down rather heavily in the vacant corner of the seat, which was, fortunately, the one farthest from Erica. There was a crack of Jeffreys’ whip, a creaking of protesting springs, and they were off.
Erica tried to marshal her jumbled thoughts into coherence and decide how best to make her presence and her position known. That matter, however, was taken out of her hands and decided for her by an unexpectedly severe jolt over uneven cobblestones, which flung her out of her hiding-place and across the intervening bags, bringing her up with her startled red head against her no less startled traveling companion’s knee.
Mrs. Haven screamed shrilly, clutching at her heart with one hand and Erica’s curls with the other. Luckily the noise of the creaking springs, the jouncing bags, and the clatter of their wheels over the cobblestones prevented old Jeffreys up in front from hearing his mistress’s shriek, and Erica spoke desperately before she could utter another.
“Please, ma’am, it’s—it’s all right. Only let me explain!” she implored.
The carriage was now crossing a wider thoroughfare, and the first gray light of dawn was brighter here than in the narrower streets hemmed in by houses. Not only outlines now, but some of the details of objects near at hand could be made out.
Mrs. Haven, her fingers still buried in Erica’s hair, pulled the latter’s head nearer the carriage window and stared at her piercingly. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, she began to laugh. Of a truth there was nothing very alarming in the slim boyish figure crouched among the bags at her feet, or in the frightened face with its wide-open sea-blue eyes and mop of tangled red curls.
“Boy,” she said, trying to make her tone severe and not succeeding very noticeably, “how did you come in my carriage? And what on earth do you want? I am just starting off on a long journey to China and have no time to waste.”
“I—I want you to take me to China with you,” Erica gasped. “I knew you were going. I overheard you talking to that ship’s boy last evening in front of your house. I—heard you speak of wishing you had decided to take your nephew. Couldn’t—couldn’t you just get me on board the ship by pretending I’m in your charge, and keep me with you till the ship’s under way? The captain won’t turn back then to put me ashore and if I can only get to Canton I’ve got a godfather out there who will take care of me. Oh, please, please, ma’am, do help me! I somehow must get to China!”
The lady continued to stare at Erica in amazement—as well she might—at having a strange boy tumbled so suddenly into her carriage among her traveling-boxes, to utter a wild request like this, with lips and voice that trembled, and frank, unmistakably honest eyes that pleaded for him.
“Look here, boy,” Mrs. Haven asked, finally, weakening in spite of herself at the sight. “I suppose you’re in trouble of some kind, that you want to run away. But if you’ll give me your word it’s nothing—nothing dishonest or—bad you’ve done——” She paused uncertainly, and Erica took heart.
“I give you my word,” she said, solemnly, “I haven’t done anything wrong—not in the way you mean it,” she added, hurriedly, for her conscience was already beginning to prick her a little as to how Aunt Charity and her father would view her action when they came to learn of it.
“Where’s your mother?” Mrs. Haven demanded next. But this time her hand patted Erica’s hair relentingly.
“She died when I was born,” Erica said. “Wait—maybe I’d better tell you why I have to go.” And as they jolted noisily along, she poured out the tale of Lister’s mysterious disappearance and of her Chinese godfather who was their only hope now of getting news of the boy. She kept back prudently the fact that Tommy was already sailing on the self-same errand; that her father was captain of a clipper ship plying back and forth to China, who might be supposed entirely capable of handling any search necessary; and, last and most vital of all, she gave no hint that should correct Mrs. Haven’s belief in the genuineness of her masquerading.
“You look awfully young to go to sea,” the other said, doubtfully, at the end of the tale, but her black eyes had quickened into eager interest as the various Arabian Nights aspects of the situation were skillfully set forth by Erica’s nimble tongue. A lost cousin, a mysterious Chinese godfather, the seal ring with the strange Chinese characters Lis had worn away—it sounded to kindly, foolish Mrs. Haven like something from one of the romantic and always highly improbable novels she reveled in.
“I’m fifteen,” Erica informed her truthfully. “And I’m quite strong. I always have been.”
“Well, you don’t look much more than eleven or twelve,” Mrs. Haven demurred. “But I’ll do my best to get you on board. I’ll say you’re a young friend I’m responsible for taking out to his relatives in Canton. That’ll be literally true. I couldn’t tell a lie, of course. Here we are now, at the wharf. You let me do the talking, and we’ll come through right enough.”
The carriage drew to a stop and Jeffreys, descending from his box, opened the door. The sight of a pretty red-headed boy sitting on the boxes inside, where apparently no boy had been at the start of the short ride, caused the rather prominent eyes of Jeffreys to appear to be trying suddenly to leap from their sockets. He looked from Erica to his mistress, blinked, attempted to speak, and choked instead.
“Oh, Jeffreys, I believe I did not tell you this young gentleman was coming with us,” Mrs. Haven had the presence of mind to say quickly. Jeffreys blinked again.
“No—eh—no, ma’am,” he agreed, meekly.
It was indubitably a true statement of facts, although it explained nothing of his very natural bewilderment. Still, Mrs. Haven was not a lady who was much given to explaining, so Jeffreys, after a third stare at the calm-faced Erica, turned rather red and began taking out the bags and boxes in silence.
It was quite light on the wharf now, and Mrs. Haven stood by the carriage, her eyes scanning the dark harbor water anxiously, for she was not a good sailor and was mortally afraid of trusting herself in small boats.
Then with a little cry of delight she caught at Erica’s arm, pointing. “There’s that nice young man the captain sent ashore last night to tell me what time to be at the wharf,” she exclaimed. “How polite of him to come to meet me this morning.”
Erica, following the plump, pointing finger, half shrank behind the rotund figure of her benefactress, and felt her heart go—flop—down into the regions of her boots at one plunge.
This was the very worst luck that could have met her at the outset of her adventure. No possible chance of deceiving Tommy either as to her identity or as to his own cast-off garments she was wearing. If the Spray had been moored to the wharf she might have succeeded in slipping by him and up a gangplank unnoticed. But with a trip in the Spray’s boat, with all of them huddled together in the closest of quarters, she had just no chance at all. And very well she knew how Tommy would look upon her present expedition, and what he would do. If only she could have avoided meeting him until the Spray was heading out to sea, he would have had, perforce, to make the best of the situation.
Her glance went huntedly behind her for an avenue of escape. If Tommy need never know! But if she pulled away from Mrs. Haven’s hand on her arm and ran, there might be a regular hue and cry after her. That red-faced Jeffreys would be certain to put the worst possible construction on her flight. She was sure he was a little suspicious of her presence there, as it was.
Despairingly she heard Mrs. Haven hail Tommy in friendly fashion, and saw the boy jump briskly to his feet from the piece of timbering on which he had been sitting, talking to another boy in sea-going garb, whose back was turned to Erica.
Wave after wave of burning red swept across the girl’s face. Another instant now, and Tommy would recognize her, would take in at a glance the meaning of her masquerade. Suddenly she seemed to see the whole silly, impulsive plan as not only Tommy, but Aunt Charity, Aunt Callie, and her own father would view it. The kind of reckless, troublesome, unconsidered plan a child makes, and rushes into headlong, without a thought for the consequences. And at fifteen one was not supposed to be that sort of child any more.
Tears of humiliation and disappointment blurred the blue eyes abruptly, so for a moment she could not see what was making Mrs. Haven, beside her, exclaim again in an astonished voice.
“La! my dear! and mercy me! Which on earth is which?” the plump good-natured widow was gasping excitedly. “Look, boy! Did you ever see two such peas in a pod before?”
Erica shook two big tears off her lashes impatiently, and looked inquiringly ahead of her as she was bid.
Then every bit of color went out of her face. She took an unsteady step forward, staring wildly at the two tall, long-legged youths in seafaring clothes who were striding jauntily down the wharf toward Mrs. Haven’s carriage, their arms flung across each other’s shoulders, their brisk feet keeping step.
Incredulously Erica continued to stare, wordlessly, as they came nearer; came as she had so often watched them cross the garden to Aunt Charity’s gate or come charging up Orange Street joyously, arms across each other’s shoulders as now, gay feet keeping step to some old familiar march whistled in an undertone; two young faces, flung back cockily, fresh and untroubled as the morning, and so exactly alike that at a distance even Erica herself sometimes couldn’t tell—Lis and Tommy! Lis—alive, safe, well—arm in arm with Tommy swinging up the Boston wharf here before her unbelieving eyes in the mellowing dawn of that April morning.
No wonder Erica, panting, a little dizzy between incredulity and sudden joy, dropped cap and bundle and, wrenching her arm from Mrs. Haven’s grasp, went running to meet the approaching pair as if she had suddenly donned the famous seven-leagued boots of the old fairy stories.
The astonished Mrs. Haven beheld the three figures—the two young sailors and her slim little red-headed protegé—meet like a whirling sandstorm, swing madly about in a circle, arms linked, feet executing a war-dance of fantastic steps, while three voices—two deep boyish ones and a surprisingly shrill treble—rose in a regular pæan of jubilee. The deep voices cried, “Ricky!” in varying tones of joyous amazement, and the shrill little treble soared above them both, with “Lis! Lis! It’s Lis!”
Then the whirling circle broke, and the three, their hands still clasped, stood back and surveyed one another with a dozen eager questions plainly burning the tips of their eager tongues.
“Lis, how did you get here?” Erica begged, earnestly. “Surely Tommy didn’t know yesterday——”
“Of course I didn’t,” Tommy broke in, quickly. “You can’t imagine I wouldn’t have told mother if I had known.”
He broke off in his turn, and the twins stared hard at their strangely metamorphosed young cousin. Lis’s eyes were curious and a trifle amused, but Tommy’s mouth set in a new grim line.
“Rick,” the latter said with abruptness, “what are you doing down here at this hour, in those old clothes of mine?”
Erica crimsoned. So it had come at last, only now she must face both twins instead of just Tommy. She would never hear the end of this rash escapade; she knew that.
“Won’t you please tell me about Lis first?” she begged, trying to stave off confession.
“No,” Tommy declared, bluntly, “we won’t. This other matter comes first.” His eyes narrowed with a swift suspicion. “Rick, you were never thinking of such a fool trick as trying to stow away on the Spray!” he cried, accusingly.
Erica sighed resignedly. “Yes, I was, if you must know it,” she assented. “I see now it was a crazy idea, and I vow, Tommy, I never really planned it. I first dreamed I was doing it, and I woke up and—and all at once there was the plan in my head, and the next thing I knew I was doing it——”
Mrs. Haven, full of curiosity and interest, had drawn nearer, and now her eyes widened and her mouth fell slightly open in her astonishment as the supposed red-headed boy she had intended taking under her wing on the voyage to China burst half coherently into the utterly dumfounding narrative of the past events of the morning hours.
“So—so you’re a girl!” she ejaculated. “Mercy on us! Whatever is the world coming to when nice, well-brought-up girls cut off their hair, put on boy’s clothes, and run away to sea! I think it was very naughty and deceitful of you to take me in so,” she concluded, indignantly. “What would your family have thought of me, when they found it out?”
But that was more than Lis’s soft heart could bear, directed at Erica. It was all well enough for Tommy and himself to scold and tease her when they saw fit, but no outsider and stranger could call Ricky deceitful while either Tommy or he stood by. Ricky’d been silly again—she was always getting into trouble by following her impulses too blindly—but she’d never told a lie or been intentionally deceitful in her life.
This, stammering a little in his earnestness, he endeavored to make clear to the chagrined Mrs. Haven, and at last, by convincing her that Erica’s story was entirely correct as far as it went and that he himself was the lost cousin, just returned from China safe and sound, he made her forget entirely her disapproval in a quick and generous delight at this happy ending of the tale.
“I won’t say another word,” she promised, “if you’ll let me hear how you got lost and then came to be found again. Haven’t we time before going on board?” She appealed wistfully to Tommy, who nodded assent.
“Well,” Lis began, “it’s really all due to Ricky, here, that they found out who I was, in the end. Yes”—he turned to Erica, whose face was glowing—”it was that seal ring of Sun Li’s you hung round my neck before I sailed. Remember? And by the way,” he added, explanatorily, “Sun Li’s not his real name at all. I suppose Captain Bartlet has told you he’s governor of Canton?” Erica and Tommy both nodded, and Lis resumed his story.
“It seems Uncle Eric once did a favor of some kind for Sun Li when they were both young men. That was before he was governor, of course. I don’t know what it was—the favor, I mean—but Sun Li’s never forgotten. Uncle Eric was trying to learn some Chinese at the time, and in his efforts to pronounce his new friend’s long and very unpronounceable name—I’ve heard it, of course, myself, but I can’t say it, either; it takes a Chinese tongue—well, as I was saying, ‘Sun Li’ was the nearest Uncle Eric could twist his own tongue to it, and they kept the name going as a sort of friendly joke between them. Then came that time when you, Ricky, were born at sea and Aunt Cecily died just as Uncle Eric’s ship was nearing Canton. Sun Li’s own little son died the same day, and he sent the child’s nurse to take care of you on the voyage home. But you and Tommy know that part of the story. Only, of course, all that made the friendship closer than ever between the two men.”
“Yes. Oh, Lis, go on, quick!” Erica breathed, her eyes shining. Mrs. Haven, her own face alight with interest, drew nearer and slipped a forgiving arm about Erica’s shoulders.
“Well, to skip ahead to the night I went ashore from the Spray to have a last look-see at the city of Canton,” Lis continued. “I had been paid that morning, and foolishly I took the money ashore with me in my pocket. Not that it was a big sum, of course, but any money looks big to those Chinese bandits. I had father’s gold watch on, too. I’ll know better another time. You can guess the rest. I wandered into a lonely-looking side street, quite far into the heart of the city, and that’s all I remember about it. Some thief, or thieves—I don’t know how many there were—must have jumped me from behind, out of one of those dark compound gateways. They got away with my money and the watch, but, luckily for me, they didn’t find Sun Li’s seal ring. It began to rain about that time, and I must have lain there in the street in the wet for maybe two hours, when a kind old, absent-minded Chinese scholar, jogging home in his sedan with his coolie bearers, found me and took me to his own house and nursed me like a Christian gentleman. I was out of my wits for days, what with the blow on my head the bandits had given me and a cold and fever I’d caught lying so long out in the rain.”
Both Erica and Mrs. Haven uttered little cries of horror and pity, and Tommy clenched both fists fiercely, but made no other comment.
“At first,” Lis took up his tale again, trying to laugh off the tragic air of the other three, “they didn’t find the ring, because the cord round my neck had broken and the ring itself was caught in the lining of my coat. The Professor—that’s what I called him, he really was a quite famous authority on Chinese history—lived so much by himself, he never heard of all the inquiries that were being made for me in the city. But one of the servants, in cleaning my coat, found the ring and brought it to him. The Professor recognized Sun Li’s seal and was quite frightened. So he sent it off in a hurry to the governor, relating how and where he had found it—and me. And of course after that it was all plain sailing. Sun Li sent for me when I was able to be up and about, and gave me an audience in the most gorgeous old hall, hung with silks and banners and smoking torches, that you’ve ever dreamed of. As the Spray had sailed the day before, he sent me home by the Lightning, Captain Culverson, you know—which was also sailing for Boston, luckily for us all, that same week. And here I am.”
“But—but”—Erica was stammering in her excitement—”but how did you come here this morning with Tommy?”
Lis pointed out into the harbor, past the Spray at her anchorage, to where a new clipper, her white wings furled and her tall masts raking the blue sky, lay at anchor.
“We got in late last evening,” he explained, “and it wasn’t till it was light this morning that I saw my own ship, the Spray, was right in the next berth, so to speak. So I got permission from Captain Culverson to be rowed over to the Spray bright and early, and, to my astonishment, found Tommy preparing to come ashore to meet a passenger, and came with him.”
”W-well!” Erica sighed. She was quite exhausted with emotion and the morning’s excitement. “It’s the most wonderful thing I ever heard of, Lis. But”—her forehead puckered suddenly—”but, Lis, which of you is sailing in the Spray this morning—you or Tommy? For I suppose one of you must go.”
“I am,” Tommy put in, quickly. “Lis has had one voyage, you know, and, besides, I was the one who was to have shipped in her originally.”
“And I guess Aunt Callie needs to have Lis near her for a while,” Erica put in, happily. “We all do. Oh, Lis, it’s been such a—a terrible time!”
Ten minutes later, a third and final good-by having been said to Tommy, he piloted his passenger into the Spray’s boat, and Lis and Erica, hand in hand like two children, walked back to Cousin Kate’s through Boston’s early-morning streets, now beginning to be astir with the traffic of the day.
“And sometime,” Lis was saying to an eagerly attentive Erica, “Sun Li wants your father to bring you out to Canton, to visit in the governor’s palace, Rick.”
Erica merely sighed blissfully. Words were beyond her. All her worries and troubles had broken like the early-morning mists about them, and the sun of a happy present and a joyously beckoning future was shining through.
As they turned the corner into Mount Vernon Street, a new problem occurred to Erica. She stopped short and faced Lister ruefully.
“How are we going to get in without waking them?” she demanded. “Of course, when I slipped out this morning, I didn’t know I was coming back, so I never thought of leaving the door on the latch. If Cousin Kate and your mother have to know I tried to run away to sea, they’ll think I’m more hopeless than ever.” She caught at Lister’s coat sleeve beseechingly. “You don’t think I ought to tell them, as long as I didn’t? You see, they’d never understand. I’ll tell father when the Sea Gull gets back, and even if he doesn’t approve—and of course he won’t—he’ll understand I wasn’t just being naughty. That’s the beautiful thing about father, he sees into people’s real thoughts.”
Lis looked thoughtful for a moment. “No, I guess if you tell Uncle Eric, that’s enough,” he conceded. “There’s no sense in worrying the others. Now let’s put our heads together and try to think up a way to break in without rousing the house.”
They had reached Cousin Kate’s steps by this time, and stood there in the street, gazing up at the white-painted, closed door. The sun was almost up now, and the grey twilight of early morning was already shot with cheerful color. In a very little while the household would be astir. They had to think quickly if Erica’s escapade was to remain a secret.
Luck, however, was with them. A stronger puff of wind swept about the corner and the white door rattled under its onslaught, widened a crack, and then gently swung open before the astonished eyes of the girl and boy.
Erica uttered a little cry. “I don’t believe I pulled it quite to, after all,” she whispered, jubilantly. “Hurry and let’s slip in before anyone wakes. My! what a piece of good fortune! Only, I didn’t really deserve it,” she added, honestly, as they mounted the steps on tiptoe.
Standing in the dim hallway, Erica closed the door cautiously behind them, and motioned Lis toward the still darker parlor.
“Go in there and wait till they come down,” she commanded under her breath. “I’ll run up and get rid of these,” touching Tommy’s discarded suit rather shamefacedly.
She had scarcely gained her own room when she heard footsteps moving about on the floor below, where her aunt’s and Cousin Kate’s bedrooms were. Then some one, she was not sure which of the two it was, started down the stairs. Standing at her door, Erica listened breathlessly, and an instant later she heard a startled, incredulous cry from Aunt Callie.
”Lister! My darling boy!”
She heard Lis say, “Mother!” in a choked voice, and then there was silence for so long that Erica began to be frightened. Had Aunt Callie fainted, perhaps? She had been thoughtless not to have realized Lis’s mother should have been prepared for such a surprise. Aunt Callie had always been delicate.
She began to pull on her own clothes with hurried, shaky fingers, and made a clumsy bundle of Tommy’s suit, which she stuffed into the dim back of the big wardrobe. Then, still nervous and apprehensive of what she might find, she ran down the two flights of stairs to the first floor.
But she need not have been anxious. They say joy never kills, and Aunt Callie certainly looked very much alive and very happy, seated in the deep armchair before the grate fire, with Lister kneeling on the hearth beside her, blowing the coals gently with a huge bellows. Both heads turned at the sound of Erica’s footsteps, and Mrs. Folger held out her arms to the girl with a motherly gesture.
“Come and see the mercy the good Lord has vouchsafed us this day, my dear,” she said, tremulously. “Lister has been telling me the marvelous story of his escape, and of his ship getting in this morning in time for him to meet Tommy, before the Spray set sail.” She was so excited that she had not even thought of questioning how he had gained access to Cousin Kate’s house, Erica noted with deep thankfulness. But in the light of the greater interest of his story, it was no wonder lesser details seemed unimportant.
Before Erica had a chance to ask any of the questions Aunt Callie would be sure to expect of her, a happy diversion was caused by Cousin Kate’s entrance, and the whole thrilling tale had to be told over again for her benefit. Erica’s heart stopped thumping guiltily, and she and Lis exchanged glances of relief behind their elders’ backs.
“Isn’t it too bad Tommy couldn’t be here, too?” Cousin Kate said, regretfully. “But it was fortunate he had at least a few moments with his brother before sailing. He will go away with a mind at ease, at any rate. Now, who is ready for breakfast? There ought to be some heartier appetites this morning than we’ve seen so far.”
It was in the middle of an energetic attack on his fourth hot biscuit that Lis uttered an exclamation and laid down his knife.
“I’m forgetting all about old Sun Li’s message to Rick, here,” he declared. “And there’s a package, too. But the message comes first.”
He delved into several of his numerous pockets in turn before locating what he was in search of, but finally brought to light a slim oblong box, done up in the familiar orange paper and sealed with the queer gold seals they all knew.
Instead of handing it over to Erica’s eager, outstretched fingers, Lis grinned teasingly and shook his head. “I said the message came first,” he reminded her.
Erica made a face and then laughed. “All right,” she said. “What is it?”
“Well, I don’t believe I could repeat it word for word, for the life of me,” Lis confessed. “It was too high-flown and Chinese—not a word less than three syllables, and most of ‘em more. But the gist of the matter is that he’s longing to see his goddaughter, ‘The little Sea Girl,’ as he always refers to you. I’ve got a sort of idea, though he didn’t put this into actual words, that he associates you with his little dead son. You remember you were born on the same day. Anyhow, he even hinted that he might be induced to take a sea voyage himself—though the Chinese aren’t much on that, by custom. But he’s been in poor health for some time, and his doctors have done the unusual thing—from a Chinese viewpoint—of recommending a journey. However, that’s not the message. What he did ask me to tell you is that he begs your father will bring you to China in the Sea Gull, and that you will both visit him in his palace.”
A prolonged, ecstatic “Ah-h-h!” from Erica interrupted him here.
Lis nodded, his grin broadening. “Yes, ma’am, that’s the message. Also, that your rooms in the palace have been waiting for you for years, never occupied by anyone else, since his son died. And in the package I’m now about to hand you is the confirmation of this invitation.”
With a dramatic flourish Lis now handed over the gaudy, gold-sealed box, and Erica, snatching it, tore the coverings off with trembling fingers. Inside the orange paper was a tiny teak-wood box, about three inches long by an inch and a half wide. And inside that, on a bed of golden satin embroidered with lotus flowers, lay a thin silver key, banded with carved jade.
Erica lifted it out of the box with little cries of admiration and delight.
“You mean,” she gasped, “that this is the key of the rooms——”
”Your rooms, he told me to tell you,” Lis said, quite gravely, his teasing forgotten. “He showed them to me while I was there. The most utterly gorgeous place you ever dreamed of, Rick. Straight out of the Arabian Nights, I give you my word!”
Erica was staring at the lovely little key with dreaming eyes.
“This is the very nicest present he’s sent me yet,” she said with conviction. “Aunt Callie, do you suppose father will—Oh, he’s just got to! It would be something to remember and think about all the rest of my life, even when I’m an old, old lady.” She held the key out to her aunt. “Look at that exquisite flower pattern cut into the jade!” she exclaimed. “I believe I’ll wear it like a locket, on a black ribbon round my neck. It’s much too lovely to put away in a box.”
In a vague way Erica had dreamed of China and the possibility of her one day actually going there, ever since she could remember. But from the moment of her receiving Sun Li’s silver-and-jade key, her dreaming took on more definite form. Perhaps one reason for this was the fact of Lister’s having actually met her Chinese godfather and seen his wonderful old palace. Lis had done all the things she, Erica, had longed to do. He could describe them, too, and make every last, smallest detail vivid—for Lis was an observant boy, not like helter-skelter Tommy who could have given her none of the descriptions she clamored for.
Of course, for the first few days after they all returned to Nantucket, Erica did not have much time for planning for the future. It was enough just to have Lis back again, to hear him tell of his adventures by land and sea, and to realize that the past terrible weeks of suspense and fear were over forever.
There was so much to tell of what had happened during the months he had been gone. First and foremost, of course, he must be introduced to his two new adopted sisters, Milly and little Barbee Thorne.
It was no surprise to Erica that Lis should promptly lose his heart to Baby Barbee—everyone else in the family and the neighborhood had already done the same thing. But it did surprise, and perhaps—such being the way we erring humans seem to be inclined—disappoint her a little, too, when she found he did not share Tommy’s and her own dislike of the sullen-eyed, decidedly unfriendly Milly.
Of course at the time Captain Bartlet had brought the dreadful news of Lis’s disappearance, Milly had unexpectedly risen to new, sympathetic comprehension of other people’s sorrows and feelings. Both Tommy and Erica had experienced a sudden swift remorse for what they then began to regard as their unfair judgment of the girl. But the mood—since it seemed nothing more on Milly’s part—gradually wore away, and even in the few days that had elapsed before Erica and Aunt Callie had left for Boston to see Tommy off, Milly had slipped back into her usual black-browed, unsmiling aloofness whenever she was with her younger cousins. True, her new gentleness had persisted where Aunt Callie was concerned; but then, no one, not absolutely stony-hearted, could have seen delicate little Mrs. Folger in her repressed, uncomplaining agony over her missing son, and not at once have lost himself or herself in considering her.
“Look here, Rick, what’s all this nonsense between you and Milly?” Lis asked this direct question a trifle impatiently, about a week after his return to Nantucket. Up to then he had made no comments, sought for no information on a situation that unfortunately could not fail to be obvious to anyone thrown much with the two girls.
According to his usual quiet, self-contained fashion, Lis had looked on for a time, until he felt fairly certain of the correctness of his observations, and had then made an opportunity to have a talk with Erica alone. He had suggested a walk across the commons to the South shore—their favorite tramp that led through the stretch of stunted pine woods Erica had long ago christened the Owls’ Country.
It was a wonderful spring morning, the wind fresh and bracing from the north, the air crisp with sea salt and that indescribable early-spring smell of wakening green things, and sweet, sun-warmed earth. The cousins had talked of every-day matters on the walk to the shore, but when they emerged on the wide, yellow stretch of beach that rose into dunes on one hand and sloped down to green, white-topped breakers on the other, Lis fell silent. He stood still, staring out to sea rather wistfully for a moment—as if, Erica thought, he were remembering his brief clipper voyagings. Then, swinging about, he asked his question regarding Milly Thorne abruptly.
The suddenness of it took Erica by surprise, and the unwonted impatience of his tone astonished her even more. It sounded a little—incredible notion—as if Lis were actually put out about something; as if it mattered to him whether Erica and Milly got on well together, or didn’t.
Erica’s own temper, never too securely in leash, slipped into view in a quick little flash of indignation peeping out of her blue eyes. Her red head lifted a half inch or so, and her chin took on the squarer, stubborn look that presaged an argument.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she retorted. “If you’ve noticed that we’re not bosom friends, well—that’s perfectly true. But I don’t see why you should call it nonsense. We’ll never be awfully fond of each other, I guess. We’re—we’re too different. Milly’s so bored and uninterested in things all the time, I lose my patience with her entirely. I—I just can’t understand her a bit.”
“Do you try to?” Lis asked, bluntly.
Erica bit her lip to keep back the sharp words that rushed to her tongue’s tip. She loved her cousin dearly, and up to a very few days ago she had feared never to see him again, so she was resolved not to let herself be angry with him now, no matter how unreasonable he might choose to be. Still, it was a shock—and a highly unpleasant one—to find Lis undertaking to champion Milly, who had brought all her present unpopularity on her own head, as Tommy, or any of their special little group of boys and girls, could have told him.
“I did try, Lis,” she said, after those two or three seconds of struggle with herself. “So did Tommy. When Milly first came last winter, I mean. But she showed us all pretty plainly that she didn’t care for our company, or our fun or our friends. At school she doesn’t make friends, either—only with teacher. It’s a pity I know, but—you can’t keep on forcing yourself on somebody; you’ll have to admit that.”
“I—see,” Lis said, slowly. “I guess there’s a big misunderstanding somewhere, Ricky. You’re not the sort to be unfair to a strange girl, particularly when she’s in trouble over losing her mother and her home like poor Milly. Neither is Tommy. Too bad, though. She seems to me a—kind of a sweet girl, if she’d only open up and talk a little about what’s worrying her, instead of moping round in corners, thinking of it, whatever it is, all the time. Say, look at that wave coming in!” he added, changing the subject without waiting for Erica’s reply. “Be ready to run, Rick; she’s sure coming clear up the beach to the dunes.”
In the breathless, laughing dash for higher ground that followed—for the wave did wash far up the beach as Lis had predicted—there was no chance for words of any sort, and when the two had scrambled up to the dune-top they had both forgotten, temporarily at least, their short-lived irritation with each other.
They tramped for several miles down the beach after that, discussing China now, for the most part, and the absorbing possibility of Sun Li’s really coming to Nantucket one day in the future, or the still more exciting one of Captain Eric’s taking Erica to visit in those closed, palace rooms to which she wore the little silver-and-jade key about her neck.
That evening after supper, while Mrs. Folger was upstairs putting little Barbee Thorne to bed, Lis from his deep chair at one side of the hearth (spring evenings on Nantucket are quite cold enough for open fires), looked over with troubled eyes at a slight, black-frocked little figure curled up in the big chair just across from him, apparently absorbed in a book. It came over the boy that he seldom saw Milly in the house without a book for company—for her sole company; that was the pitiful part of it.
Safe in her evident unawareness of his very presence in the room, Lis studied the bent head with its smooth, thick braids of hair that looked in the firelight like lustrous black satin. Milly’s big, rather sulky dark eyes—her only real claim to beauty—were hidden by her lashes as she read, and the un-childish, thin young face seemed thinner and whiter than ever in the alternate play across it of fireshine and shadow. Lis felt his heart contract a little at the sight. She looked, he thought suddenly, like a lost and miserable black kitten; one that had been starved, as well as frightened pretty badly about something.
Of course Milly wasn’t physically starved in his mother’s hospitable house and at her bountiful table. And surely, since coming to the island at least, nothing could have actually frightened the girl. It must be some experience that had happened before Milly came to them, Lis decided, knitting his brows indignantly at the notion. Some one had been unkind—not just that foolishness of Erica’s and Tommy’s, of course. No, this was something big and real that was hanging about Milly’s poor little thin neck like a veritable Pilgrim’s pack. Well, then, if that were so, since no one else appeared to be trying to do anything about it, he was going to have a crack at it himself. She couldn’t do any more than snap at him as he’d heard her do to Ricky.
He put down his own book quietly, and leaned back in his chair.
“Milly,” he said as casually as he could, for he was suddenly a bit shy over what he was doing, now that he’d made up his mind. Suppose she thought him just plain impertinent, instead of friendly.
Milly’s dark eyes came up from her reading and regarded him with an unmistakable impatience, waiting for him to continue.
Lis felt his face grow red, and hoped the glow of the flames would account for it, if the girl across the hearth noticed. But he went on with his self-appointed task bravely.
“I’ve been doing some thinking.” Lis had a nice smile that very few people failed to respond to. He smiled now, and almost reluctantly a little flicker of answering friendliness softened the sharp black eyes watching him. “I wasn’t home when you and Barbee came to us,” he went on, encouraged by the change in her expression, slight as it was. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here then. But it was certainly mighty jolly to come home and find myself with two brand-new sisters. I’ve been wanting to tell you that I appreciate the company and help you’ve been to mother. She tells me you’ve taken over all the mending, and that you’ve even made over one of her dresses so it looks like new. That—that was real good of you, Milly. Mother hasn’t ever had much money for clothes, and she was as pleased as could be the way you made that black silk look.”
He didn’t think it was only the firelight that caused that warm sweep of color across Milly Thorne’s pinched little face. Her book slid off her lap unnoticed, and she sat up straighter in the big chair.
“I like to sew,” was all she said, however. “My—mother taught me when I was so little I could hardly hold a needle. I—kind of enjoy making over things—making them pretty, you know. It’s nothing to thank me for.”
“Say, you’re all off your reckoning there,” Lis said, his smile broadening. “Don’t you really know that’s the nicest way folks can do favors for you—as if it was something they enjoyed?”
Milly considered this in silence for a moment or two; then her grave face lighted with a smile so quick and brilliant that it was transfiguring.
“Why, I never thought of it like that,” she said. “But I guess you’re right.” She looked at Lis thoughtfully, that new, warm smile still curling up the corners of her lips. “I’m glad you are going to be here instead of Tommy,” she announced, unexpectedly. “He and Erica don’t like me, but I sort of think maybe—maybe you might let me be your friend.” That last was said so humbly and wistfully, without any of her usual sharpness and discontent, that the boy was genuinely touched.
“You bet I’ll let you be my friend, Milly,” he said, decidedly. “You just count on me, and when you feel homesick, or things—go kind of wrong, you come and tell me about it. See? It always helps a lot if you can talk your worries over with some one. And I know,” he added, more awkwardly, “that Ricky and Tom will want to be your friends, too, if you’d only give ‘em an idea you’d meet them halfway. I guess they think you don’t like them, either.”
To this Milly made no answer, but as she did not argue the point Lis felt encouraged.
“I know what homesickness is,” he volunteered after a second little silence had fallen between them. “I would have given most anything at times, on that voyage to China, to be back here on Orange Street. You see, I’d never been away from home before, and I missed everyone—specially Tom.”
“It isn’t all homesickness with me,” Milly said, honestly. “I haven’t a nice disposition, really. If I know people round me love me and want me with them, why I—I’d do just anything for them. I always thought of my mother first, and I do now of Barbee, and—and I’m fond of Cousin Callie. But—it’s a horrid feeling,” she burst out, vehemently, her face flushing hotly, “to know you’re not wanted—that you’re only in the way, and—and that you’re—dependent on—on charity for your food and home and—and clothes. Mother didn’t leave any money for Barbee and me. Poor little mother, she worked hard at dress-making up to the very last, to keep a roof over our heads. I used to wish so hard I was a few years older, so I could earn money, too—somehow. Of course, uncle helped as much as he could, but he has only his pay as mate on a packet, you know, and there are others in the family to call on him, too.”
Lis’s face was very grave and sympathetic.
“Yes, that was hard—seeing your mother troubled about money, I mean,” he agreed. “We haven’t much ourselves, but we’re—not poor. We’ve got our home, and mother has a small income, and some day Tom and I’ll be earning more, of course. So you mustn’t ever feel you and Barbee are any burden. It doesn’t cost us anything to have you two sleep in the house—now, does it? Be sensible,” he urged, anxiously. “And you more than pay for the little you eat, by helping mother as you do with the housework and the sewing. You’re not—not dependent at all, Milly Thorne. I think that’s an unkind word to use between relations—truly I do.”
“Well, all the same,” Milly said, stubbornly, though she smiled at him again with a flash of gratitude in the big, troubled eyes, “I do wish there was some way I could earn even a little bit, so at least I’d know I was paying for part of what we cost Cousin Callie.”
“Mother wouldn’t like to have you feel that way, if she knew,” Lis reminded her.
Milly appeared to hesitate as if deliberating her next words. Then suddenly she pulled the big armchair nearer, and leaned toward the boy.
“Lis, I—I do know of a way I—could earn something—not much, but—something,” she breathed, her thin hands clasping and unclasping each other in her lap as she talked. “If I told you—asked you to help me and—and keep it a secret from—everyone—even Cousin Callie, and—Erica—would you promise?”
Lis looked a little doubtful. “But I don’t know what it is, you see,” he pointed out, coloring. “Maybe——”
“There’s nothing wrong in it—you’ll agree when you hear,” Milly broke in, feverishly. “But I—don’t want anyone to know till I’ve proved I can do it—successfully. If you think it’s something your mother would really mind, of course you can tell her. But will you promise not to, otherwise?”
“Sure, that sounds fair enough,” Lis assented, heartily. “Go ahead; I’m all ears.”
But in spite of his flippant words his tone was kind, and the friendly sympathy in his face not to be mistaken. Milly drew a long, relieved breath, and put her hand impulsively on his coat sleeve.
“I guess we—we are going to be friends, Lis,” she said, gratefully, and turned her head at the sound of footsteps behind her.
Lis, following with his own glance the direction of hers, swung about in his chair as Erica burst into the sitting room in her usual headlong hurry.
“Aunt Charity’s sick,” the latter announced in a tone that shook slightly from running and alarm combined. “Where’s Aunt Callie, Lis? I think she’d better come over, if she can.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Lis said, jumping up, his expression full of concern. “What’s the matter, Rick? She was all right this afternoon, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, she seemed to be,” Erica agreed, dubiously. “But I guess she wasn’t letting on how she felt. Right after supper she had a funny sort of faint turn—took me most ten minutes to bring her to. I was awfully scared, I can tell you. But she’s in bed now, and doesn’t want me to send for the doctor. So I thought I’d better come over and tell your mother.”
“I’ll call her,” Lis offered, and pulled his chair closer to the hearth. “Sit down here, Rick; you’re all worked up and excited. I’m sure there’s nothing really to worry about,” he added. “Don’t most women faint?” he asked, naïvely.
Erica laughed scornfully. “Not Aunt Charity. That’s what scared me. I don’t believe she ever did such a thing before in her whole life. You ask Aunt Callie to hurry down, please. I don’t want to leave her alone over there longer than I can help.”
Milly had tried valiantly to feel a proper anxiety, but she was sharply disappointed at having her talk with Lis interrupted just at the crucial point when he had seemed ready to pledge his aid to her still unexplained plan. Her own mother had often fainted, so it did not strike her as particularly alarming to hear of Miss Charity’s sudden collapse. Of course she’d be all right in the morning, after a good night’s sleep. But if only—only it hadn’t had to happen at just this special moment!
She directed a pleading glance at Lis as he passed her chair, and spoke in a half whisper.
“May I tell you my plan when you come back, Lis? After your mother and Erica go, I mean? I do need advice awfully, and—there doesn’t seem to be anyone else who cares what I do.”
Lis nodded, smiling down into the raised, tense young face with his gentlest expression. Milly looked particularly like a forlorn and lost black kitten at that moment, and all that was chivalrous and kindly in the boy responded to the appeal.
“‘Course you can,” he said. “But we all care, really, Milly, and want to help. You’ll find that out some day.”
Erica’s quick ears had caught every word of Milly’s whispered plea and Lister’s low-toned, emphatic rejoinder, and her own eyes opened a little wider with a touch of curiosity, that was swiftly followed by resentment. So Milly Thorne was having secrets with Lis already. Probably telling him long tales of how Tommy and she and the rest of their little group left her out, and abused her. And that very afternoon when she—Erica—had tried to tell him the real version of the difference between them, he hadn’t agreed with a word she’d said; had tried to talk about Milly being a “sweet girl” and misunderstood, and similar ridiculous nonsense. It was really too bad of old Lis. Stupid, too. If Tommy were only at home, they’d be able to make him see, together, that Milly had actually started in repelling all friendly advances from the very start.
Erica looked rather defiantly over at Milly, still curled up comfortably in her chair, and debated whether or not to come right out with a straightforward question or two. It might clear the air a bit, if she did. But the swift thought of Aunt Charity alone at home, sick, and needing her, decided her to postpone the discussion she foresaw any opening of the subject would be sure to entail.
She hesitated, bit her lip, and began, half-heartedly, “Milly—I——”
Milly had bent over to pick up her dropped book, and she did not trouble to look up at the sound of her name.
“Well?” she asked, coolly, sitting up at last, a trifle flushed, and apparently more absorbed in straightening some crumpled page corners than in anything Erica might choose to say.
“Oh—nothing,” Erica returned in a flat tone, and sprang to her feet in relief as her aunt entered the room, followed by Lis. She was suddenly and vehemently surer than ever that never had she met so disagreeable and utterly aggravating a girl as this dark, silent, aloof young person with whom she was expected to live on terms of close intimacy for perhaps years and years to come.
And then, swiftly, she remembered Aunt Charity again, and catching at Mrs. Folger’s arm with cold, frightened fingers, hurried her out of the house and across the lawn next door. The petty annoyance of Milly’s unfriendliness was completely swallowed up for the time being in the larger worry.
Much against Miss Charity Folger’s will, her sister-in-law insisted on sending Lis for the doctor.
“Maybe it’s nothing but being overtired, as you say, sister,” she observed, wisely, “but it won’t do a speck of harm to hear what the doctor thinks. You run on over to Doc Spencer’s, Lister, and fetch him back with you.”
Dr. Spencer, who had known the whole Folger family since the elder members of it were the ages of Erica and Lis themselves, arrived promptly a few minutes later, and proceeded to make a careful examination of Miss Charity. At the end of it he sat back in the straight chair by the bed, and looked gravely from his patient to Mrs. Callie Folger.
“There’s nothing to be scared about, if we take care,” he said at length, in reply to the two pairs of inquiring eyes fastened on his face. “But ye’ve got to make up your mind to take a good rest, Miss Charity, and there’s the long and short of it. I was never one to mince matters with my patients. Better tell the truth plainly, and then everybody knows where they stand.”
“It’s—my heart, Doctor?” Miss Charity asked, steadily.
He nodded kindly. “It’s not acting just like I’d prefer to have it,” he admitted. “Still, there’s nothing so serious rest an’ care can’t set it right. But no more housework, or runnin’ upstairs and down—for the present at any rate. Let Ricky, here, take the helm. She’s ‘most a woman now. Ain’t ye, young lady?” he demanded, swiftly, of Erica, with a smile. She was a great favorite of his, and he invariably took her side when her aunts deplored, in his hearing, her tomboy ways, which were so unlike what was considered fitting and ladylike in that day and generation, for a girl.
“Of course I’ll take care of her, Doctor,” Erica spoke up, sturdily. “I can dust and sweep well enough, if I have to, and I love to cook—so I’ll be all right there, in any case.”
“Oh, but Erica must go to school till the term ends,” Miss Charity said with all her old firmness, half raising herself from the pillow. “Callie and I’ll talk things over—make other arrangements—” Her voice grew less steady and sure of itself, and with the last word trailed off into a rather breathless murmur.
“There—that’s just what I won’t have, Miss Charity,” Dr. Spencer said, quickly and decidedly, leaning forward to force her gently back on the pillows. “You’re to keep still, and not worry. There’ll be somebody in the village we can get to come and stay here while Ricky’s at school. Just wait a bit till I mull over the list of lone females of my acquaintance.” He grinned cheerfully, but both ladies were too troubled to meet his humor, and made no reply.
Silence descended on the room for a moment, and then Mrs. Folger leaned toward her sister-in-law, her face full of a half-pleading, half-eager triumph.
“I’ve got it, sister,” she declared. “You must rent this house to Sally Gardiner’s daughter. You know she’s been hunting high and low for something here on Orange Street near her mother. And she’s well fixed, since her marriage, to pay a good price for it, too. Then you and Erica can come to me.”
“Hooray!” burst out Lis, irrepressibly, flashing his mother an approving glance. “That’s the best notion I ever heard! Now, then, Doctor, tell Aunt Charity that’s your prescription, and that she’s to take it quietly, like a sensible woman.”
“It’s exactly what I will do, Lis,” Dr. Spencer concurred, in high delight. “Never heard of a better-worked-out plan, myself. And Sara’ll be as pleased as all the rest of us. I’ve heard her say, many’s the time, this was the homeiest, most comfortable house in the whole of town. So that’s settled, and I’ll—with your permission, Miss Charity—just drop in at old Mrs. Gardiner’s on my way home, and tell them both the house’s in the market. Sara’ll jump at it like a hungry trout at a fly.”
He got to his feet, and stood rocking back and forth on his flat-toed shoes, ponderously, surveying the little group before him with a beaming smile.
Miss Charity returned the smile doubtfully, her eyes going to Mrs. Folger questioningly. “Do you really think it wise, Callie?” she asked. “It will make so much extra work for you—and you not any too strong, either. But I’ll own I’d be easier in my mind.” She turned a little, and Mrs. Folger bent over, with rare demonstration, and laid her hand on the thin, bony one resting on the coverlet.
“Of course you would, and so would I—a hundred times easier,” she said. “Besides, with two strong girls like Milly Thorne and Erica in the house to help me, and Lis here for the heavy chores, there won’t be a mite of difference in the work, so far as I’m concerned. That’s a right clever idea of yours, Doctor, to stop in and tell Sara and her mother tonight, before they have a chance to decide on anything else. Sister and I’ll be much obliged to you. The quicker I get her over in the big four-poster in my front room, the happier I’ll be. I’ll have another bed moved into the east room, where Milly sleeps, for Erica. It’s plenty big enough for two girls, though I always hold with folk each having a bed to themselves, if it’s anyway possible.”
A look of startled dismay peeped out of Erica’s sea-blue eyes as she listened to these plans being made for her, and her lips parted involuntarily as if to protest. Then with a glance at Aunt Charity’s pale face on the pillow, with that new, relieved little smile hovering about her mouth, she resolutely swallowed the words she had been about to utter, and sat silent, staring at the carpeted floor unseeingly. This was no time to trouble poor Aunt Charity; and certainly Aunt Callie was doing the best she could in stretching her none-too-large house to accommodate all the extra guests who had unexpectedly descended upon it in the past year. And her plan seemed the only practicable solution.
“You—you’re awfully good to us, Aunt Callie,” she forced herself to say, though a bit tremulously. “I promise I’ll do all I can to make it up to you.”
And so, all in a minute, the new plan was decided on, and the old familiar life she had known up to now was changed beyond recall. Ordinarily, of course, Erica would have found nothing to regret or dread in the idea of living in the same house with Aunt Callie and Lis, but the presence of Milly as a member of that household, and to have to share her room with her—and Erica had never had a room-mate before—was not so pleasant a prospect.
Dr. Spencer’s prediction that Sara Gardiner would jump at the chance to acquire Miss Charity’s house was a true one. Indeed, so eager was she to move in as speedily as possible, that the end of the following week saw Miss Charity and Erica duly installed in their new home, and the old gray house next door occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Ned Wills—Mrs. Wills being the married name of Sara Gardiner.
Somewhat to Erica’s surprise, Milly was unusually gracious about the new plan. She did not show by so much as a look that she resented—if she did resent it—having a room-mate thrust upon her unexpectedly. She cleared out half of the big wardrobe, without being asked, for Erica’s clothes, and moved the deepest and most comfortable chair over to the latter’s side of the room. Altogether Milly seemed a changed girl, quite suddenly. She did not sulk in corners now, though she continued to be, as always, a voracious reader when not busy with the various household duties that were her share. Erica noticed, too, that Milly appeared to be rather mysteriously excited about something—she went about the house with a most novel air of importance, and Erica came on her whispering with Lis once or twice, both of them evidently highly elated, and so absorbed in their topic of conversation they didn’t notice Erica’s presence in the room.
It was the first time Erica had ever been shut out from a share in anything that interested the twins, and the experience was not a pleasant one. She had made all sorts of good resolutions with regard to Milly, on coming to live at Aunt Callie’s, and she heroically tried to carry them out now, even in the face of this latest provocation. But she wished a dozen times a day for Tommy’s hot-headed championship. Tommy would never have let her feel left out and lonely, as she was beginning to feel more and often as the days passed. It was not that Lis himself ever showed any difference in his usual brotherly manner toward her; it was the fact of his sharing a secret with Milly, especially when he knew how Erica felt toward the other girl. She had finally come to persuade herself that it was almost disloyal of Lis; and out of school hours, she made her duties as nurse for Aunt Charity the excuse for keeping more and more out of both Milly’s and Lister’s way whenever she could.
Milly certainly noticed Erica’s new course of action, even if Lis continued stupidly unobservant, and after a little while it seemed as if she were trying to retaliate in kind, for she began leaving more of the housework—the dusting, washing of dishes, and sweeping—to Erica, and slipping off with a book, or her sewing-box, to a certain corner of the big, raftered attic which had been given over to little Barbee for a playroom.
Of course it was part of Milly’s duties to keep a watchful eye on her baby sister, and see that she did not get into trouble or annoy any of the grown-ups in the household. Still, when Barbee was entertaining her small self peacefully in the attic, it didn’t seem as if it were actually necessary for Milly to sit up there idly, day after day, and play nurse. There was no way in which the child could hurt herself, and there was certainly nothing she could break or destroy among the heavy chests, trunks, and discarded furniture that crowded the old garret. No, Erica decided, with a flash of indignant self-pity—and this was an emotion as novel to the girl as the conditions which had called it forth—Milly was paying her back in her own coin, and with interest added. Life had suddenly become for Erica Folger a strange, unfamiliar, miserable affair.
Several weeks dragged by in this fashion, and then one evening Milly came in late for supper, her dark, fretful face so changed and softened by a sort of shy, triumphant happiness that everyone at the table involuntarily laid down spoons and forks and sat back to stare at her.
It was Lis who broke the second of silence by jumping to his feet and rushing round to thump Milly heartily on the back as if she had been Tommy himself.
“She liked ‘em?” he queried, unintelligibly to the rest of the household, who looked in amazement from Milly’s sparkling face to Lister’s, which had become, all of a sudden, equally radiant.
“She certainly did,” Milly responded, a faint dimple actually appearing beside her smiling mouth. It was a new Milly, a normal, happy, excited girl whom none of the family, except perhaps Lis, who seemed to be in her secrets, recognized. Milly almost danced up to the end of the supper table, and held out a shaking hand, palm upward, to Mrs. Folger.
“Look!” she demanded in a voice that shook too. “I earned it all myself. And I can make more. I’m going to pay for Barbee’s and my keep. I needn’t be a burden on even your kindness, dear Cousin Callie, though I know you’ve never felt it that, or—or made me feel it.” Stooping swiftly, she pressed her lips surprisingly to Mrs. Folger’s cheek, and then straightened in embarrassment, her own cheeks scarlet.
Lying on Milly’s outspread palm there was a new, shiny ten-dollar gold piece. Aunt Callie took off her spectacles, wiped them, and, replacing them on her nose, bent nearer to study this amazing sight more carefully.
“My dear child!” she ejaculated wonderingly. “Where did you come by that?”
“It’s all right, mother,” Lis broke in, hurriedly. “She earned it right enough, just as she told you. Here, let me tell ‘em, Milly! You’re so excited you can’t talk straight. Mother, Milly’s been fretting her head like a silly girl over the notion that she and Barbee are dependent on us, and maybe depriving you of things you would otherwise be able to buy. Such stuff! Imagine! the little those two eat!” Lis sniffed in high scorn, and Mrs. Folger, with a little cry of protest, reached up and impulsively gathered Milly into a motherly embrace.
“Well, anyhow,” Lis pursued, grinning approvingly at the two, “she did have that notion, and nothing I could do would talk her out of it. She said she simply had to make money somehow—at least enough to pay for their food and clothes. And she said she believed she could do that by sewing for folks. Seems several ladies here in town, who’ve seen the things she’s made for Barbee, have told her they’d give ‘most anything to have her do the same thing for their children. Mrs. Macy over on Pearl Street, for one, and Mrs. Hedley, and one or two others. Milly had some patterns, too, that her mother had had, of the latest styles for children this last year in Boston, and they wanted her to copy these for them. But Milly was afraid you wouldn’t let her, mother. Or that you’d be afraid she couldn’t do it well enough—or—well, that something would happen to stop her. So she asked me if I thought it would be very wrong if she did some little dresses for Mrs. Macy’s baby, without telling any of the family, till we saw how they turned out. And I urged her to go ahead.”
“Oh-h-h! so that’s what you were always slipping off up to the attic for!” Erica burst out, enlightenment coming to her. “You were doing the cutting out and sewing up there, where no one would see but Barbee, or ask questions.” Now that she knew the nature of the secret that had made her so miserable, she felt a sudden quick shame of her own grudging attitude during the last few weeks. Her cheeks were as red as Milly’s, now, though from a quite different emotion.
“Yes, and I’m so glad to be able to tell you all, at last, and explain,” Milly said, happily. “I made six dresses and little slips for the Macy baby—all wee tucks, and some fagoting and drawn-work. My! they were pretty, honestly! And I did two dresses, besides, for little Nettie Hedley. I got the money they paid me changed into this gold piece, because it seemed to me only gold was good enough to hand over to you, Cousin Callie, after all your goodness to Barbee and me!” Milly ended in a voice that broke on a strangled sob, and with a quick motion she turned, hiding her face on Mrs. Folger’s shoulder, much as Barbee herself might have done.
“Please say you don’t mind, Cousin Callie,” she whispered in a muffled voice. “I do love to sew, and it’s such fun knowing I’m making real money of my own! And I promise not to let it interfere with my lessons—you’ll find my marks are just as good as they used to be. I’ve only done the sewing in the times I read books in, before I took up making the dresses. And Mrs. Macy wants some sewing for herself, later, and there are two more baby outfits I’ve been asked to make this spring. Just think what riches!” she wound up blissfully. “I’ll have maybe as much as twenty dollars before summer comes if I get all the work that’s been offered me. You see, because the styles are new, and they like my ideas, and the way I sew, they’re willing to pay me well. I—I’m awfully happy, Cousin Callie.”
Erica spoke up, in a determined rush of shamed words. “If you are, I haven’t done much to help make you so, poor Milly. I’m feeling pretty sick at myself, and I want to say so right out.”
Erica had never been one for half measures. With the surprising revelation of Milly’s plucky and pathetic attempt to be at least partially self-supporting, her former opinion of the girl had been suddenly and dramatically revised, and she was honest enough to want to make a frank apology. Being Erica, none but a vehement, self-accusatory one seemed adequate, and when she burst out impulsively with that “I’m just about sick at myself,” she meant every word of it. Milly’s black eyes glowed at the friendly warmth of the speech, but she shook her head shyly at its extravagance.
“I guess I was twice as horrid as you were, if it comes to that, Erica,” she admitted. “Maybe none of you can quite understand how I feel about—about being dependent on anyone not my own mother or father, even when they make me welcome as generously as Cousin Callie did. Mother was the same way, too—I guess she gave me my love of independence. After my father died—Barbee was only a wee baby then—mother wouldn’t accept help from anyone, except a little bit from her brother—the one who brought Barbee and me here last Christmas, you know. She took in sewing; first for neighbors and friends, and later for quite a number of outside customers. That’s how I learned to sew. She taught me to help her, as I grew older, but she never would let it interfere with my going to school. In the afternoons and evenings, though, we sat and worked together—” Milly turned her head away abruptly, but not before Erica had seen the glitter of tears on her long lashes.
Mrs. Folger’s eyes were wet, too, as she gazed down at the gold piece Milly had pressed into her hand.
“Dear child, I understand and honor the feeling that prompted you,” she said, softly. “However, this is too much for you to give me. If you insist on paying something—if you will really feel happier that way—let us divide this. Half for me, and half for you to put away. If you can make some extra money now and then, and feel you want to do it, I have nothing to say against it. But part of all you earn must be saved for the future. You may need money for something important one day, my dear.”
“Some day,” Milly flashed, eagerly, “I want to have a big, very select dressmaking establishment in Boston or—or maybe even New York. With lots of girls under me, and fine ladies coming to me to have beautiful silks and velvets and satins made up. If you really won’t take all I can earn, Cousin Callie, I’ll put the rest away for that. Oh, it won’t be for years and years, of course,” she wound up, faltering a little in confusion at having so impulsively revealed her daring ambition. “But—well, wonderful things do happen if you stick at working and hoping,” she said, half defiantly. “And then I could take care of Barbee myself, and make a home for her.”
Eighty years ago, ten dollars had a purchasing power several times that of its present value, so it was no wonder that both Lis and Erica looked with respect at the glittering gold piece in Mrs. Folger’s hand. Particularly on Nantucket, where life was simple and wants few, did it represent a quite amazing achievement on the part of a fifteen-year-old girl.
“I don’t see how you ever thought of it, or stuck at it so patiently afterward,” Erica said in quite an awed voice.
Both Mrs. Folger and Lis laughed at that, for Erica’s clumsiness with her needle, and her rebellious dislike of all kinds of sewing and knitting, were a family joke—besides being a real trial to both her aunts.
“I’m afraid Erica will have to go lacking gold pieces and independence,” observed Mrs. Folger, sagely, “if her winning them depends on a needle and thimble.”
“I wish you’d let me teach you,” Milly offered. “I’m just sure I could make anybody love sewing. It’s—why, it’s such fun to see the thing you’re working on grow under your fingers!”
But Erica, rather alarmed, shook her red curls hastily. “You never could, Milly, but thank you just the same,” she refused. “It always seems such a wicked waste of time to me,” she confessed, “to sit indoors and stick a silly little piece of steel in and out of cloth, when you could be outdoors, walking over the commons, and along the beach. There’s so much that’s interesting to keep watching wherever you go, outdoors. You know, I really was meant to be a boy, Aunt Callie. There was some dreadful mistake made, somehow, about me.”
She joined, rather ruefully, in the laugh that went up, but continued to nod her head in emphatic insistence.
Yet the fact that Milly had thought far enough ahead to plan an independent future, improbable though its early realization might be, made a deep impression on Erica. She was far from being in sympathy with that particular ambition itself—”fancy planning to sew on dresses all the rest of your born days, and liking it!” she gasped in frank dismay to Lister. But she was slightly depressed that it had never occurred to her, also, to think of plans, of any kind, regarding that vague, far-off time when she herself should be “grown up.”
She supposed, when she considered the subject, that she expected things to go on indefinitely, more or less as they did now. Of course she was hoping desperately, since Lis had brought back the jade-and-silver key, that her father would consent to take her to China on one of his voyages, at a not-too-distant date. But that, she realized now in a new discouragement of spirit, was not a real plan for the future, in the sense that Milly’s was.
If she had been a boy, there’d have been no question at all. She would have followed the sea, as her father, and his father, and any number of uncles and great-uncles had done. But when you were only a stay-at-home girl, who, unfortunately, hated the quiet, stay-at-home duties that were the only ones open to you—
She sighed a deep, gusty little sigh, and decided that she would put the further consideration of the future off for a day when the early June sunshine was not so bright and beckoning, and the crisp sea wind did not sing so alluring an invitation beachward.
Milly was up in the attic, sewing as usual, and keeping an eye on Barbee and her dolls, but Lis was always ready for a beach walk.
So presently the two set out together along Orange Street to Main, and turned down the latter to the harbor.
It was a warm late-afternoon toward the end of the first week in June. The water was a still green, with patches of deep purple farther out, and the Monomoy shore across the harbor was green also, with purple shadow-patches sloping up to a pale blue sky line.
“I always think I like October best,” Erica murmured, thoughtfully, staring raptly at the panorama of color spread out before her, “but sometimes June—— Mercy me, Lis! Look out there!”
The boy turned sharply at the change in her tone, his eyes following her pointing finger seaward. And there, less than an eighth of a mile offshore, lay a great sailing-ship at anchor, her white canvas wings just being furled in a mighty bustle of activity on her decks that could be made out plainly by the excited boy and girl.
“Lis, it’s a tea clipper!” Erica gasped, breathlessly. “What’s she doing out there? They never put in here, that I’ve heard tell of.”
“Nor me,” Lis returned, ungrammatical in his own astonishment. “She’s lying out there, of course, ‘cause she can’t cross the bar at this tide. But why she’s here at all— Say, Rick”—he caught at her arm with suddenly tense fingers—”now I’ve got a real look at her—I was so excited I didn’t before—she’s—she’s not just a tea clipper. That’s the Sea Gull, as sure as we’re standing here!”
Erica uttered a little cry. “Lis—why—why, of course she was due in Salem some time ago, and we’ve all been wondering why father didn’t come. But—you actually think that’s father’s ship come to Nantucket?”
“I know it is,” Lis declared, confidently. “Remember, Uncle Eric took Tom and me to Salem two years ago and we stayed on board three days while she lay in port. That was the time you had chicken pox, and were quarantined.” He grinned reminiscently at the memory of her frantic rebellion over being done out of that trip.
But Erica’s attention was not to be diverted by even such tragic memories, from the thrilling present.
“Now they’re lowering a boat away,” she whispered. “In just a little minute we’ll know. Lis, don’t let’s stand here like two ninnies. They’ll land over at this nearest wharf. Hurry, so we can be out at the end, waiting to meet father. For if that’s truly the Sea Gull he’ll come ashore in the first boat.”
“Sure he will,” Lis conceded, breaking into a jog-trot at Erica’s flying heels. “But there’s no need of racing and getting all het up,” he added in remonstrance as he saw her quicken her pace. “We’ll be at the wharf long before that boat can get there.”
“All right, walk if you want to, slow-poke,” Erica flung over one slim, brown-plaid shoulder. “I’m going to be there waving as soon as father’s near enough to see. Likely he’s got his glasses with him, so he’ll recognize me while they’re still away out. ‘By, tortoise!”
Dignity forbade Lis to hurry at all after that final taunt, so he slowed his steps to a leisurely walk, suppressing a grin, however, at the girl’s sauciness. Lis never lost his temper at being teased, as Tommy sometimes did.
When he arrived, cool and unruffled, at the far end of the wharf, a few minutes later, the clipper’s boat was well in toward shore, and Erica, balanced precariously on a pile of lumber at the wharf’s side, was waving both arms like the big windmill on the hill behind the little gray town at her back.
“It is father,” she shouted to Lis in triumph. “Climb up here so he can see you, too!”
Five minutes later a tall, blue-coated figure with a shock of unruly red hair like Erica’s own came up the ladder-like steps of the wharf, and Erica had hurled herself into a pair of strong, welcoming arms that lifted her high off her tiptoes in a breath-taking sweep.
“Fa-ather!” she said in a voice that was half a sob. “Oh, what a glorious surprise! And is that honestly the Sea Gull out there? And did you—”
“Belay there, young woman, and let us both get our breath back,” Captain Eric chuckled, his sea-blue eyes—of which his daughter’s were an unmistakable copy, twinkle and all—beaming from the girl to his nephew. “Lis, my boy, I’m glad to see you. I’ve been hearing quite a lot about some Chinese adventures of yours.”
“Yes, sir,” Lis twinkled back. “But they turned out all right, as you see. I’m afraid I gave the family a bit of a scare, though.”
Instead of setting Erica down on her feet, her father turned with a quick move, and lifted her down the ladder-steps into the arms of a burly, middle-aged sailor standing in the little boat below.
“Come along, Lis,” he added, casually, as though this had been all part of a long-prepared plan. “I’ve got a surprise for the two of you on board that ship of mine out there. I had sort of a notion you’d both see her come in, and be down here, waiting.”
It did not take Lis long to accept the invitation, and scrambling down the steps in his uncle’s wake, he found a seat in the stern beside Erica. The boat was pushed off by one of the sailors, heading out toward the channel; and the even dip and pull of the dripping oar-blades began rhythmically.
But though Erica’s tongue wagged faster than the oars could move, as she begged her father excitedly for at least a hint regarding the kind of surprise that awaited them, not a word would the smiling captain say on the subject. Instead he demanded news of the family, and expressed much surprise at hearing of the unexpected plan which had brought both Folger households under the same roof. However, he agreed that it was an excellent arrangement, under the existing circumstances; though he added, rather mysteriously, that he had an idea he could suggest something that might be even a better rest for Aunt Charity.
However, before Erica could ask what he meant by that, they had come alongside the Sea Gull, and she forgot everything else in the thrill of climbing aboard.
“To think I was right here fifteen years ago, and can’t remember it,” she said, wistfully, when she stood on the spick-and-span deck, looking about her with eager eyes. “To think I actually sailed all the way from China in her!”
Several of the crew were on deck, grinning in respectful curiosity at the captain’s daughter, and Erica, her hand proudly through her father’s arm, smiled back at them in her friendliest fashion.
At the head of the companion stairs leading down to the saloon she stopped a moment, wrinkling her nose inquiringly.
“Father—do all tea ships smell of Chinese incense?” she asked. “Smell it, Lis! It’s as strong as if the Sea Gull had a hold full of joss sticks instead of tea.”
“Oh, don’t stand there blocking the gangway, Rick,” Lis said, good-naturedly. “Go on down.”
There was no doubt that the smell of incense grew stronger as they hurried down the steps. But before she reached the bottom the girl stopped short once more, staring about her with eyes whose pupils seemed to dilate visibly in the dimness.
Swiftly she stooped and felt the step on which she stood. It was. Incredible, unheard-of on even the most luxurious clipper, the companion stairs were covered with a carpet of such long and velvety pile that the feet sank into its silken depths as softly as if they had been treading on the ancient Iceland moss that grows on the Nantucket commons. And in the half-light, the warmth and brilliance of the carpet’s coloring glowed like sunset shining through old, stained-glass windows in church.
Erica’s startled gaze went to her father’s amused face, and then was instinctively drawn higher still, to the source of the dim half-light that illuminated the companionway. She saw that this came from a lantern hanging on a heavy, dull-green cord from some unseen hook above—a Chinese lantern of translucent, figured silk that repeated the old, stained-glass coloring of the carpet underfoot, and cast strange, swaying shadows on the stairs, and on her father’s and Lister’s faces, as it moved a little, regularly, back and forth with the almost imperceptible motion of the ship lifting to some incoming swell.
Slowly Erica straightened up, and—her eyes still on the lantern overhead—took an impetuous step backward. Either she had completely forgotten the fact that she was on a stairway, or she turned her ankle slightly, just enough to throw her off her balance. Both Captain Eric and Lis reached for her with exclamations of warning at the same moment, and both missed her by an infinitesimal fraction of an inch.
Erica, to her subsequent and intense mortification at such a clumsy marring of a dramatic moment, rolled headlong, bumpity-bump, down the softly carpeted steps, and landed in a small undignified heap at the bottom, striking the back of her head smartly on something that was neither velvety nor soft, but wooden and sharp-cornered. There was a flashing of myriads of colored stars before her eyes, and a violent ringing of bells in her ears for a brief second, before both were blotted out in a dizzy wave of blackness that rolled over her.
It was only a moment or two later when Erica opened her eyes again, but to the still dazed girl it seemed impossible that she was not asleep and dreaming what she saw about her.
Vaguely she recalled having had some kind of a fall and hearing her father and Lis cry out in alarm. She could even remember, quite too vividly for comfort, the following contact of her head with that sharp wooden corner at the stairfoot.
But this—certainly she had never seen this small but splendid room in which she was lying. There appeared to be no windows in it, or if there were they must be hidden by the heavy gold-embroidered curtains of a deep plum color that lined the walls on all sides. Light was supplied by several hanging lamps of what looked like beaten silver, with amber glass, and the room was full of that smell of incense she had noticed on the companion stairs. She herself was lying on a low divan, with a pile of softest silk and down pillows propping her up in a slightly raised position.
For an instant Erica thought she was alone in this strange, gorgeous room, but when she turned her head on its mound of pillows some one moved behind her and came around to stand at the side of the divan where she could see him.
This was the oddest, oldest, most leathery-faced and wrinkled little Chinaman Erica had ever imagined, who bent over her with a gentle air of solicitude, and taking one of her hands in his, felt her pulse, nodding his head slowly as if in time to its beat.
“All is well,” he announced after a moment or two of silence, replacing Erica’s hand on the couch and standing back a step to regard her solemnly. “The fall had no consequences of a serious nature, so rest assured.” His English was perfect in accent and pronunciation, but it was spoken in a curious sing-song that made it difficult to follow.
In spite of his apparent age, his hair, which he wore in a long queue, was quite black, and that with his piercing black eyes, and the stiff, coat-like garment of dark silk which he wore, gave Erica the impression of something rather severe and gloomy, though not exactly forbidding, for his glance at her was kindly enough.
Then she caught the sound of footsteps crossing soft carpets, evidently from some door beyond, and to her vast relief Captain Eric’s merry blue eyes looked over the solemn little Chinaman’s shoulder.
“All right, daughter?” he asked, quickly, and came over to sit on the side of the divan, holding both her cold little hands in his big warm ones. “That was a nasty tumble, my dear. Thank God it was no worse. But I was sure the good doctor, here, would know what should be done for you.”
“But where am I, father?” Erica asked, weakly. “And—and who is—he?” She essayed a smile at the wrinkled, yellow old face still staring kindly down at her, beside her father’s sunburnt and ruddy countenance.
“Why, you are on the Sea Gull, Rick,” Captain Eric said, reassuringly. “And this is the very wise and celebrated physician to His Excellency the Governor of Canton. The Governor, I ought to add, is otherwise known to you, my dear, as your Chinese godfather, Sun Li.” He patted the hands he held very tenderly, while he shook his bushy red head at her in mock reproof. “Still my tomboy Rick, I see,” he sighed. “A nice way to present yourself to so eminent a personage as His Excellency the Governor.”
“You mean, father,” Erica gasped, sitting up straight in the shock of those last words, “that Sun Li is actually on board the Sea Gull? That he came back with you from China?”
“Exactly that,” Captain Eric assured her, smiling at her breathless excitement. “As perhaps Lis told you, he has been in poor health for several years, and was finally persuaded by his physician to take a long sea voyage. He agreed at last, provided he could sail on the Sea Gull with his old friend—meaning your father, Rick. So after some discussion with the Canton office of our company it was arranged that His Excellency should charter the Sea Gull for the period of one year, and sail her whither he chose as his own private yacht. He offered a price, by the way, that was worth considerably more than the finest cargoes of tea we could have carried during the same time, and the company agreed to his doing over the saloon and cabins according to Chinese ideas of luxury and beauty. So behold the reason for all the gorgeousness that sent you head first down my companionway, poor little dazzled Ricky!”
Even the solemn Chinese doctor smiled at that; but Erica pushed her father’s hand aside and sprang determinedly to her feet.
“Where is Sun Li?” she cried, eagerly. “Oh, father, I just must see him, quick!”
The plum-colored hangings were pushed aside at the far end of the cabin, and Lis stood there, grinning at her with a comical mingling of real relief and teasing in his eyes.
“Trust Rick to make a graceful entrance,” he observed. “Say, Miss Folger, if you’re able to walk, His Excellency wants to see you in his cabin. He asked me to explain that he would have come to you, but he’s not allowed to leave his chair by the doctor, here. You know,” he added, taking a swift step into the room and letting the heavy portières drop into place behind him, “he’s been pretty seriously ill. This trip is a—a sort of forlorn hope. He looks a bit better, though, to me, than when I saw him in his palace in Canton.”
The little Chinese doctor looked up at the boy eagerly.
“You think so, young sir? That is of great encouragement to hear. To me, who am always with him, he seems to change but little. I cannot trust my own vision.”
Lis nodded emphatically.
“Looks much less tired to me, sir,” he declared. “His face seems a bit fuller, too. Shouldn’t be surprised if he’d gained a few pounds in this long sea trip.”
“That’s what I was telling you, Doctor,” Captain Eric corroborated his nephew cheerily. “And we’re not through with our rest cure yet, not by a jugful. Run along with Lis, Ricky, and don’t keep His Excellency waiting.”
“I—suppose he speaks English, too?” Erica whispered shyly to Lis, hesitating for a second with her hand on the curtain Lis was about to pull back for her entrance.
He nodded. “No trouble about that,” he said, and gave his cousin a little push forward, but gently, for Lis had an almost feminine knack of understanding, and he guessed how tremendous the moment seemed to her.
He had felt a good deal the same himself when he was first taken before Sun Li in the Governor’s palace in Canton.
Then he saw Erica draw a deep breath and lift her chin in the old familiar fashion. Without a word, Lis drew the curtain aside for her and gave her a little encouraging, approving smile, which Erica failed entirely to see. All her thoughts were concentrated on what she would see on the other side of the heavily embroidered portière.
She entered a second room almost as large as the main saloon, and hung with heavy silken curtains like the latter, only in this case the hangings were a warm orange with vividly colored embroidery. Later, Erica learned that the partitions between three of the passenger cabins had been removed, to make one fair-sized apartment.
This cabin, too, was lighted by hanging lamps instead of daylight, and in a deep, reclining chair beside a table heaped with books in rich bindings, Erica beheld for the first time her much-discussed Chinese godfather. At the first timid glance she sent him, he seemed to the girl to be all eyes—great, liquid, brilliant black eyes alive with kindness and a keen intelligence, looking out of a thin face with prominent cheek bones, and tautly drawn skin the color of old ivory.
“Enter, little Sea Blossom,” said a deep, not unmusical voice, and a finely modeled, but painfully thin hand was lifted from the gorgeous brocaded robes that enveloped him, and held out to her in welcome. Sun Li’s hand, like his face, was not yellow at all, but a warm cream, and on it the delicate veining stood out clearly.
Erica drew nearer, still timidly, and slipped a confiding hand into the one stretched toward her. She was conscious of a great rush of pity for anyone so obviously ill, and with it a most strange and pleasant sense of having known the owner of the hand long and affectionately. Meeting her Chinese godfather was like coming home to a near and dear member of her family. She entirely forgot to be afraid of his strangeness and his grandeur. But no words came to her for the moment, and she merely stood there holding the fragile ivory-colored hand in hers, and smiling rather wistfully down at the thin, tired old face that smiled so valiantly back at her.
But such unwonted shyness on Erica’s part did not last long, and by the time her father and Lis had joined them in the orange-hung cabin her tongue was wagging busily as she described, in answer to quiet, amused questions from the old Chinese, her home life, the various members of her family, and her bubbling gratitude for the accumulated gifts that had come to her during the past fifteen years, on each return voyage of the Sea Gull.
Sun Li—he quickly forbade all attempts at the formal Your Excellency, on either Lis’s or Erica’s part—seemed so well entertained by his new visitors, that the elderly physician, creeping in softly after half an hour’s time, to see how his master did, crept out as softly, his leathery old face wreathed in smiles, and allowed the racing chatter to proceed unchecked.
Lis sat silently listening, for the most part, and after a while Captain Eric followed the old doctor out of the cabin, and was gone for quite a time, on business of his own, leaving his daughter’s tongue still wagging in lively fashion, and Sun Li hearing her with obvious amusement and pleasure showing on his usually impassive countenance.
When the Captain did return, it was to announce that he had sent a boat ashore with a message to Mrs. Folger, stating that he was planning to keep both children on board all night and would bring them ashore with him early the following morning.
“I also told her that the Governor would accompany us, and that I hoped she would have a worthy Nantucket dinner ready for him,” he added, smiling at the intent group before him. “A change of cooking may tempt your appetite, my friend, and that is what we want to happen just now. Ricky, supper will be served in the saloon in twenty minutes. Better go to your cabin and wash your hands. I’ll show you where you are to bunk tonight. Lis is to share my quarters. By the way,” he added, his smile broadening, “I fancy, from something Sun Li told me before you arrived that you will find a chest in your cabin, with some things in it that may interest you. Only don’t lose track of time, you flighty child, and keep us waiting.”
Erica sprang eagerly to her feet, and flashed the invalid a glance of ecstatic delight. “You—you’re the most wonderful person, godfather,” she cried, clasping her hands over her heart with a gesture that set them all laughing. “Aunt Charity never would let me wear the beautiful gifts you sent me—not till I’m grown up. But while you’re here, I guess I can dress up all I want to. That’s only polite to Sun Li, father, isn’t it?” she questioned, anxiously, and went off to explore, much relieved, when Captain Eric nodded indulgent acquiescence.
The minute she was inside the tiny cabin that had been allotted to her, Erica saw that it must have been planned for her when Sun Li had refitted the Sea Gull for the present voyage, way on the other side of the world. The walls were hung with palest peach-blossom silk, heavily embroidered with wistaria and tender green leaves. The built-in bunk had been upholstered in cream and gold satin, and was heaped with pillows of all colors of the rainbow, most of them shaped like flowers. The carpet on the floor was pale gold, with cherry blossoms running riot across it, and there were two marvelous hanging lamps of silver and jade that matched the pattern of the key Sun Li had sent her by Lis months ago.
Erica stood in the middle of the room, and drew a breath of sheer unbelief and protest. She must be asleep. She was dreaming of some scene in the Arabian Nights, not standing in a cabin on her father’s ship anchored in Nantucket Harbor. Only—only, if it were actually a dream, that meant she would have to wake up.
She experienced an impulse to tiptoe softly, to avert such a catastrophe, and then her attention was switched rapidly to a fresh surprise, as her eye fell for the first time on a small oblong chest of carved teakwood, bound in hammered silver, that stood at the foot of the white-and-gold bunk. It was about two and a half feet long by a foot wide, and two feet high, and sticking out of its beaten silver padlock was a key so evidently the twin of the one she wore about her neck, that Erica gave a funny little squeak of astonishment and fell on her knees beside it, worshipfully.
Inside, when the heavy lid had been impatiently flung back, she found rolls of uncut silks, some in plain colors, some heavily embroidered in delicate blossom designs, and on top of these the full straight trousers of heavy silk, the knee-length tunic coat, and a pair of small silken, heel-less slippers, such as a Chinese girl would wear. The lovely, exotic garments were a cool jade-green in color, embroidered in silver and rose, and there were cunning green silk tassels on the slippers, with a string of jade beads tucked into one small slipper-toe, and a similar string of rose agate in the other.
Erica uttered a regular war whoop of ecstasy, and caught the slippers, necklaces and all, up in two suddenly trembling hands to cuddle them against her soft, flushed cheek. Then, her mood veering, without waiting for further exploration she began to undress with business-like haste.
Ten minutes later the door of her cabin opened rather hesitantly and a strange, slim little Chinese figure, with an incongruous crop of short red curls dancing excitedly above its jade-green silks, stepped out into the narrow passageway leading to the saloon. And at the same moment a startled cry broke from Lis, who had just emerged from the captain’s cabin, a door or two farther away.
”For Pete’s sake, Ricky!” Lis gasped, and fell silent for lack of adequate words.
Erica pirouetted slowly on her toes to show off her new splendor, and Lis, drawing nearer and emerging from his first amazement at the sight of her, began to laugh.
“But it’s mighty pretty, at that,” he conceded, generously. “I suppose that was in the chest Uncle Eric spoke of.”
“Yes, and pieces and pieces of the loveliest silks you ever saw,” Erica said. “And these two necklaces.” She touched the strings of jade and agate she was wearing, with a reverent finger tip.
They went into the saloon together, to find the long table in the center set for the evening meal, with Sun Li in his deep chair already seated at the head, smiling at his latest guests. Captain Eric was at the foot of the table, and Erica was placed between the little Chinese doctor and Sun Li, while Lis had the opposite side all to himself.
The Governor had brought with him in the Sea Gull not only his coolie bearers for the gorgeous sedan chair in which he went ashore on occasions, but his Chinese cook as well, so the supper was a curious but delicious mixture of Chinese and American dishes which set the young Nantucketers off into a prolonged series of “ohs” and “ahs” of appreciation and delight.
In spite of the exalted rank of their host, and the usual rigidity of Chinese etiquette, it was an informal meal, with much chattering on both Erica’s and Lister’s part, and a constant, amused plying them with questions on that of Sun Li. Erica, in her Chinese garments, evoked stately compliments from the Governor and his physician, though they smiled, too, at the obvious unfitness of the little red-headed, tomboy American to play a demure Chinese maiden.
“Am I like your Chinese girls at home, godfather?” she demanded, eagerly, seeing their quietly exchanged glances.
Sun Li spread out his hands in a regretful gesture, and bowed.
“I fear me you are all American, Blossom,” he admitted. “But I have seen many Chinese maidens. It is interesting now to study the ways of the daughters of my old friend’s race. Do they all wear their hair short like their brothers, over here?”
Captain Eric sat up suddenly, and stared at his daughter with a puzzled expression.
“I’ve been vaguely wondering what was different,” he declared. “Ricky, what on earth——”
“Oh, please, don’t say you don’t like it, like all the others,” Erica wailed, putting both hands consciously up to her bobbed head. “I cut it off last fall—all in a minute. I had so much hair, and it was so long and hot and hard to keep neat. So one day, without telling anyone, I cut it off. Aunt Charity almost wept over it, and the boys have teased, of course. But I’m not a bit sorry—that is, unless you are, father. But if you only knew how comfortable it feels——” She stopped with a choke, and studied his face anxiously.
“Well, I’m a bit taken aback,” her father confessed. “Still, the deed’s done, isn’t it, and as it’s your hair, my dear, I don’t see that I can have much to say. It looks rather—well, boyish, but I expect I’ll get used to it after a bit, and perhaps”—he looked at her again—”I may even end by approving it. It does seem a sensible idea, after all,” he concluded, unexpectedly.
Erica clapped her hands in vehement applause of this sentiment, and a laugh went round the table. Altogether it was a pleasant meal, and the evening they spent afterward in Sun Li’s orange-hung cabin was equally interesting, for then the Governor, at Erica’s pleading, undertook the rôle of answerer-of-questions, and under her endless catechism talked of China and its customs, both ancient and of his own day. It seemed to the absorbed boy and girl that scarcely half an hour had slipped away when the tales were brought to a close, regretfully but firmly, by the little Chinese doctor, who decreed that his master had talked all that his physical endurance permitted of for one evening.
They went ashore about the middle of the following morning, in the largest of the Sea Gull’s boats, Sun Li in his very gorgeous palanquin with two coolie bearers in native costume. The little doctor accompanied them, walking tranquilly up Main Street in his stiff, dark-colored Chinese robes, as interested in the novelty of the scenes about him as the Nantucketers they passed quite obviously were in him.
Erica walked beside Sun Li’s sedan chair, her expression demure, but her heart thumping riotously and proudly over the commotion the procession was causing. And it was causing a most unprecedented flutter in the quiet island streets.
People ran to windows to peer out curiously, and congregated on the corners to stare after them when they had gone by.
The clever, tired old eyes of the Governor read behind Erica’s forced quiet to the seething excitement she was valiantly trying to repress, and once or twice the stolidity of his own countenance was touched with the faint beginnings of a smile.
And so, in the due course of time, the procession arrived in front of Mrs. Folger’s gate on Orange Street, and turned in to the already open front door. In the hall, within, stood Mrs. Folger, with Milly close beside her, and Baby Barbee peering out timidly between their full skirts.
Sun Li’s sedan chair was got through the doorway with some difficulty, and carried into the parlor, where his bearers lifted him forth and sat him down carefully in one of the deep, comfortable chairs by the hearth. The little doctor was induced, with many bows on his part of deprecation, to accept the opposite armchair, and then the rest of the party found seats where and as they chose.
Mrs. Folger and Milly, after the first polite greetings were over, disappeared into the kitchen to finish the culinary labors already under way, and Erica—who had dutifully offered to help them—was reassured by being told she was to remain behind and play hostess.
On hearing that Sun Li’s physician was to be one of the dinner guests, Mrs. Folger dispatched Lis to Dr. Spencer’s house, farther up the street, to invite the latter to join them at the midday meal. And it was odd and rather amusing, yet very pleasant, too, to see how these two elderly doctors from such widely divergent races and schools took to one another, and at once plunged into an animated discussion—each exhibiting much amazement over what the other had to relate of his own practise and interpretation of their common profession. Before long they had the whole room interested, too, and had effectually broken up any possible stiffness that might have resulted from the strange assortment of guests gathered under Mrs. Callie Folger’s roof that day.
Aunt Charity, who had improved most encouragingly under her new rest cure, was carried downstairs by Captain Eric and Lis in time to sit in a big armchair at the table, between the Governor and Dr. Spencer, where she talked, ate, and smiled like her former hale and hearty self.
Altogether the dinner was a decided success. Mrs. Folger and Milly had fairly outdone themselves in the excellence and variety of the dishes they had prepared, and both Sun Li and Dr. Wu (which was the little Chinese physician’s name, they learned) seemed highly appreciative of their introduction to Western cookery. Sun Li, in fact, so far surpassed his former attempts at an appetite that both Captain Eric and the little doctor were openly delighted and triumphant.
It was not until the long, bountiful meal was nearly over that Erica’s father leaned back in his chair, and—with an inquiring glance at the Governor, who responded with a nod of approval—broached abruptly a most astounding and breath-taking plan.
“Before consenting to take this voyage in the Sea Gull,” Captain Eric began, smiling about the circle of intent faces, “His Excellency stipulated the present call at Nantucket and the delivery of a certain invitation to a number of people present. We have planned, on leaving here, to continue south and visit several of the southern coast cities, as well as the West Indian islands. In spite of the time of the year, and the greater heat in those latitudes, Sun Li is anxious to make the trip—and we can usually count on ocean breezes to keep us comfortable as long as we’re at sea. It’s only the ports that will be hot, and I guess we can bear that.” He stopped and looked teasingly from face to face fixed on him with such eager attention.
“Well, the upshot of a long preamble,” he went on then, “is that in the Governor’s name I am instructed to invite my sister, Miss Charity Folger (who will find a sea trip the final step in her rest cure, I feel sure); my sister-in-law, Mrs. Callie Folger; these two new nieces of mine, Miss Milly Thorne and little Barbee; my nephew, Lister Folger; and last but perhaps not least, my spoiled tomboy daughter, His Excellency’s ‘Little Sea Girl’—to join us on the southern cruise. We expect to be gone about two months in all, and will return to Nantucket to drop our guests before sailing for China. How many are going to accept, I wonder?”
A regular babel of voices answered him, in which the excited exclamations of the younger members of the party predominated. Mrs. Callie Folger demurred a little about being able to leave her home, and Miss Charity’s half-hearted protests that perhaps she was not strong enough yet, were cut decisively short by Dr. Spencer’s declaration that the trip was exactly what he would have ordered for her in the first place if he had supposed it at all possible.
Through all the laughing discussion Sun Li sat looking on, silent but evidently enjoying to the full the sensation his wholesale invitation had created. Several times his impassive Chinese calm was broken with a smile that broadened almost to a real laugh as he listened. It was evident that he was both highly entertained and pleased.
It was late in the afternoon when the party broke up, Sun Li, Dr. Wu, and the coolie bearers returning with Captain Eric to the Sea Gull, and the rest of the family plunging, immediately upon their departure, into a frenzy of planning and packing. There was but short time for either, since His Excellency wanted to be on his way to southern waters by the following afternoon, and under the circumstances, naturally, his wish was as effective as his commands were at home in his native province.
The rest of that day and the next were a sort of dreamlike confusion to Erica, who went about with her red head in the clouds, and her feet stumbling, in consequence, into all kinds of absurd blunders when she tried to help. She was so excited over the impending trip that she was quite as little to be counted on for practical assistance as Baby Barbee. Fortunately, however, Milly kept her head, and between Aunt Callie and herself, with some aid from Lis’s strong young arms, the necessary packing of clothes, and the removal of baggage and family on board the Sea Gull, were duly and efficiently accomplished before sundown of the second day.
Erica never was to forget, in all the years to come, the hushed, thrilling sense of expectancy that seemed to hang over the moment when the Sea Gull’s white wings were finally flung free to the winds and the soft slap of little waves against her graceful sides began, as the clipper drew away from her moorings and set her sharp nose toward the open sea.
The sun was sinking in a great red ball behind the little gray town, and a faint bluish mist hung over the roofs and the high church steeples. Here and there wisps of trailing clouds caught fire from the afterglow, and burned in a gold and scarlet flame against the blue of the sky. The quiet harbor waters in their turn reflected the bright tints, and as Erica leaned against the rail, gazing down, she saw in the red and gold reflections the white sails of the clipper also mirrored. It was so beautiful it made the breath catch in her throat, and a film of unshed tears softened everything about her like the dropping of a fine gauze curtain over the evening’s glory.
Then, as the town, and finally the island itself, faded more and more dimly into the gathering twilight behind them, Erica abruptly left her post on deck, and hurried below to her cabin—which she must share now with Milly Thorne.
When she came on deck half an hour later she was once more wearing her new Chinese costume of jade green, with the cunning betasseled silk slippers, and the jade and agate necklaces.
“This,” she informed her astonished aunts and Milly, bowing low in what she fondly imagined must be true Chinese style, “is my seagoing costume. Sun Li likes me in it, and it’s certainly heaps more comfortable than anything I’ve ever worn before. I feel so—so free and light, somehow—something the way cutting off my hair made me feel. Now, please don’t say I mustn’t, Aunt Charity,” she pleaded, coming over to the low deck chair where Miss Charity was reclining luxuriously. “Just look at the lovely silk, and see all the wee, tiny, patient stitches in the embroidery! And look at my beads! I’ll hurt Sun Li’s feelings if I don’t wear them—and, besides, here on board, who’s to see and disapprove, except just us?”
With a little laugh of mingled amusement and defeat, Miss Charity nodded acquiescence, glancing apologetically at her sister-in-law as she did so. But Mrs. Folger, too, was smiling indulgently, and made no protest.
“Oh, why not, sister?” she asked. “Let the child have her fun dressing up—all children love that. It will please the poor Governor, too, and there seems so little we can do to thank him properly for this fine trip he is giving us.”
“Besides, of course,” Miss Charity agreed, further, finding evident comfort in the thought, “this is his idea of what a proper, well-brought-up little Chinese girl ought to wear, so really I suppose Erica might as well be happy.”
Late that night, when she and Milly were getting ready for bed, Erica drew out the teakwood chest Sun Li had had placed in her cabin, and unlocking it, showed the other the dazzling array of silks, crêpes, and heavy embroidered materials that filled it.
“You sew so wonderfully, Milly,” she offered, “that if you would like to have a real Chinese costume like mine to wear on board, just pick out the silk you like and make it.”
But Milly, breathless with admiration of the lovely shimmering fabrics, only shook her head at the suggestion.
“I’m not——daring, like you, Ricky,” she said. (Since the night of the reconciliation between the two girls when Milly’s secret had come out, the latter had taken to using the twins’ name for her of “Ricky,” instead of the rather stately “Erica.”) “I couldn’t wear such clothes, though they’re awfully pretty. They look, somehow—well, just right on you. But”—she hesitated and drew a wistful sigh, her black eyes anxious and a little shy—”but, I’d love cutting into some of that beautiful silk and sewing on it. Oh-h, Ricky, I’ve never even handled such stuff before in my life! Couldn’t—couldn’t I make some of it up into a dress for you on this trip?”
Erica considered thoughtfully. “I don’t believe Aunt Charity would let me wear a dress of such gorgeous silk. I’m afraid it really wouldn’t—fit into Nantucket.” She, too, sighed wistfully. Then a quick glance at her jade-green trousers and long tunic-coat brought the smile back.
“But if you really want the fun of sewing on some of this—do you suppose you could copy this Chinese costume for me—so I can have two? I’d be crazy about this pale-gold color. Feel the silk—it’s so heavy, and yet so soft! Think you—could, Milly? I know it would please Sun Li, too.”
Milly’s face lighted with professional enthusiasm. She felt of the chosen piece of silk with critical, expert fingers, and then turned to study the jade-green model Erica was wearing.
“I know I could,” she said, with great earnestness, “if you’ll lend me those other things to cut the pattern by. And, oh, I’d rather do this than anything you could possibly offer!” she wound up in a great outburst of excitement. “Let’s—let’s start in right now, cutting out,” she pleaded. “Then I won’t have to have your clothes tomorrow, when you’ll want to be wearing them.”
Erica’s answer was to slip out of her long green coat with business-like promptness and lay it on the bunk, while Milly, wild with delight, her fingers actually trembling with excitement, unrolled the heavy bolt of silk.
When Aunt Callie opened the cabin door to see if they were safely in bed, an hour later, she was almost struck dumb with astonishment to see the two seated side by side on the soft golden carpet Sun Li had had laid in the cabin for his goddaughter, the black and red heads bent absorbedly over yards and yards of golden silk that swirled about them like a bit of leftover sunset from that evening.
“My stars!” she gasped, and then burst into a little, understanding chuckle. “We shall probably all be Chinese before the ship touches at Nantucket again, two months from now!”
Sun Li preferred the open sea to long calls at the various ports outlined on their itinerary, so they spent very little of the time on land, after all. They stopped at Charleston, down in South Carolina, and all went ashore to walk along the beautiful Battery, and later through the picturesque old city—creating not a little comment and excitement with their decidedly exotic procession, and the fact of the big tea clipper putting in at a port where clippers did not usually call. But they did not stay, returning on board within a few hours, and setting sail for Savannah that same afternoon.
The latter city, with its wide, tree-lined streets, and flower-filled parks delighted them all; it was here Erica saw her first great trees hung with the long, trailing gray moss. But His Excellency was restless to be back on the Sea Gull, and as they had done at their first stop, they sailed again the day of their arrival.
From Savannah, Captain Eric set a course for Cuba, and on the second day out from the Georgia coast, abruptly and out of a smiling summer sky, their first bad weather descended upon the voyagers.
Summer is the time in the West Indies for hurricanes, and at the sudden dropping of the barometer, Captain Eric became instantly anxious. As far as the rest of the party could see, though, there had been no visible change in the weather. The skies were still brightly and vividly blue, and the waves no higher than a long, lazy swell. Even the wind had not freshened. Instead it had dropped to an almost dead calm.
Then, little by little, the sky began to cloud over—clouds seeming to leap into sight quite suddenly, where only a short while before there had been nothing but blue. The Sea Gull, in spite of her enormous spread of canvas, designed for speed (for the tea clippers were racing ships, each seeking to outdistance all rivals in her hurry to land a cargo first in the market), could make little headway. But presently all on board were conscious that she was rolling noticeably. The swells were higher now, and seemed to increase in size endlessly; they were oily-looking, without crests or foam, and came on in regular undulations, lifting the ship with a queer, sinister effect of upheaval that grew to have more and more of a threat of violence behind it.
And then, all in a minute, the wind arrived—a mighty, moving wall of wind that had an impact like a solid substance when it struck the clipper. Accompanying it there came darkness, and a great pandemonium of sound: shriekings and moanings, and strange growling, hissing noises like nothing Erica had ever heard before, or imagined.
The crew were in a frenzy of ordered activity on deck, lowering the huge sails and making everything fast. Even Lis had duties, and Erica, finding no one of whom she could ask questions, retired disconsolately to her own little cabin, where she found Milly, pale as a little black-garbed ghost, on her knees before her bunk.
“Oh, Ricky,” the girl cried, thankfully, on her entrance, “if someone hadn’t come soon I guess I’d have died! Cousin Callie’s looking after Cousin Charity in their cabin, and they have Barbee with them. There wasn’t any room for me, so I—Do you think the ship can possibly stand up against such a wind? It’s—it’s like one of those dreadful things you dream in nightmares. Oooh! Listen to that awful shrieking! It sounds—Ricky, I’m—scared.” She whispered the last in a shamed little half-voice, but with obvious sincerity, and Erica, clinging to the door-jamb to keep her feet in the heavy rolling, tried to smile reassuringly.
“Trust father, Milly. He’s been in some pretty bad storms, and the Sea Gull and he have always come through safely,” she said, bravely. “Probably it seems worse to us because it’s our first experience with a hurricane.”
“Oh—is it that?” Poor Milly wailed, sliding across the small cabin with the next lurch of the ship, and clutching desperately at Erica’s outstretched hand just in time to save herself from a head-on collision with Sun Li’s teakwood chest.
“I—guess so,” Erica said, briefly. “I heard Mr. Peterson, the mate, call it that to Lis a moment ago.” She sat down on the floor, one arm about Milly, bracing both of them with her knees against the door-jamb and her back pressed against the low side of the bunk.
“Hold on to me,” she advised, “or we’ll both be black and blue tomorrow.”
“If we’re not at the bottom of the sea, you mean,” Milly said, bitterly.
They remained on the floor, clinging to each other for what seemed to both girls endless ages. The terrifying violence of the wind seemed to be increasing, and the plunging of the ship grew worse as the hours passed. They did not attempt to leave the cabin to go in search of any of the rest of their party, since it was all they could do to keep themselves from being knocked about, with the chance of serious injury, where they were. For the same reason, probably, no one else came to them.
There was no thought of the usual evening meal. No one had any appetite for it, even if it could have been prepared and served. To the unnatural darkness of the storm was gradually added the natural darkness of approaching night. In the tiny, redecorated cabin, neither Erica nor Milly could see their surroundings. Each knew that the other was there, close—comfortingly close—by the feel of their arms holding and bracing each other against the incessant rolling and pitching of the clipper.
And then, at the very height of the storm, there came a sudden lull, a mystifying dying down of the wind that was somehow even more alarming than its former violence. The Sea Gull still pitched on the huge waves, but it seemed as if the hurricane had blown itself out, with the uncanny instantaneousness of magic.
Erica released her protecting hold on Milly, and sat up, breathing unevenly, and stretching cramped arms and legs.
“Perhaps this is the storm center,” she offered, doubtfully. “I’ve heard there’s always a spot of dead calm, right at the heart of a hurricane or cyclone. It lasts only a little while, and then you come out into the opposite side, where the wind’s even worse than before.”
“Oh—oh, Ricky!” Milly said, in consternation. “You mean—all—that has to start right up again? Let’s see if we can’t get to Cousin Callie,” she suggested, eagerly, jumping to her feet, “before it begins.”
“All right,” Erica agreed, and was preparing to rise to her feet also, when there was a loud, grating, scraping noise that seemed to come from underneath the ship herself; a slithering, rumbling sound as if the keel were being forced across an uneven, rocky surface.
The two girls had time for no more than an instinctive clutch at each other, and two frightened gasps, before the grating underneath them was followed by a rending crash that rocked the Sea Gull more cruelly than either wind or waves had yet done.
The suddenness of it flung them back helplessly on the cabin floor.
It couldn’t have been much over five minutes before they heard hurrying steps in the corridor, and Lis, a lighted lantern in his hand, stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the blackness behind him.
He lifted his lantern so its light should shine farther into the cabin, and uttered an alarmed ejaculation at sight of the two girls huddled on the floor against the bunk.
”Rick!” he cried out sharply, then, “Milly! Are you hurt?”
The clipper was not rolling at all now—a fact which seemed suddenly more ominous than all that had gone before. The girls scrambled hurriedly to their feet and caught at Lister’s arm, one on each side of him.
“What’s happened?” Erica cried. “Did we hit something?”
Lis nodded soberly. “Ran on a reef, they say. We don’t know what the damage to the ship is yet, of course. Uncle Eric sent me down to get you all on deck. It’s too dark to see anything, but he seems to think we’ve hit on some outstanding coral reef of one of these islands.”
He had turned back along the corridor as he spoke, Erica and Milly following closely at his heels. The same thought was in both girls’ minds—did the summons to come at once on deck mean taking to the lifeboats? Was the Sea Gull in as bad a case as that?
Up on deck there was no confusion. Mrs. Folger was already there, standing by Captain Eric, with little Barbee hanging to her skirts. Miss Charity had been carried up by two of the sailors, and sat on a coil of rope, her face set and white in the light of a near-by lantern, but quite calm. Sun Li’s gorgeous sedan chair with its coolie bearers behind and before had been placed beside Miss Charity’s rope-seat, but the Governor himself was standing at the captain’s side, leaning on the arm of little Dr. Wu and observing placidly the scene about them.
Erica ran to her father and slipped her arm through his, grateful for the comforting strength of the big, whipcord muscles under his blue cloth sleeve.
“Are we—wrecked, father?” she asked in a small, not-too-steady voice, pressing closer.
“No, no,” he returned, quickly and reassuringly. “We’ve run on a reef, sure enough, but the old clipper’s not taking in any water—we’ve not even strained her seams, praise the Lord! We’ll just have to wait for morning to find out where we are and how we’re to get afloat again.”
The mate had come up on deck now, and drew near the captain to say something in a lowered voice. Captain Eric listened gravely, and then nodded.
“You can all go below and turn in with easy minds,” he addressed the anxious little group about him. “A second, more thorough examination shows no water coming in. We’ve escaped by a miracle, no less. We certainly drove aground hard enough to have ripped her open, by the feel of it.”
“But the wind—it’s beginning again,” Erica whispered, drawing his ear down to her lips, for she did not want the others to hear. “Aren’t we in the storm center of a hurricane, and won’t the wind be just as bad again in a few minutes?”
“Probably, my wise little daughter,” Captain Eric said, with a tender smile for her worried face. “But as well as we can make out in the darkness, we have been blown into some sort of harbor—where, I’ve no means of telling till daybreak. There are small, scattered islands all about us, and we’ve doubtless been driven aground on one of them—in the lee of some promontory, I should judge, or into a natural, protected harbor. We are safe enough for tonight. The hand of the Lord has piloted us, in our need, and it will become us all to give Him due thanks before we sleep.”
The wind was once more howling and shrieking in all its former violence, but evidently the Sea Gull had, as her captain declared, found sanctuary in some sheltered inlet or harbor, for the full force of the storm seemed to pass high overhead as if deflected from her by an intervening barrier. The waves washed over her decks from time to time, but did not succeed in dislodging her from the rocky ledge she had run on. She did not even rock or bump against the reef, but rested in her new-found berth as securely as if built on a strong and safe foundation.
After a little, rather anxious lingering on deck, ready for any new surprises that might come, the passengers of the Sea Gull finally accepted her captain’s verdict and retired below to their several cabins, reassured as to the immediate future.
The younger members of the party slept soundly, because even in the face of danger youth can sleep the clock around if left undisturbed. Erica’s last waking memory of that night was the continued shrilling whistle of the wind through her porthole, and the intermittent crash of waves along the ship’s side. The next thing she knew was a flood of early morning sunshine pouring in that same porthole and lying in a pool of bright gold on the golden Chinese carpet. The world outside was as peaceful and newly-washed and brilliant as if no noisy, murderous wind and battering waves had waged a losing battle the night before for the Sea Gull and her human cargo.
Milly Thorne was still asleep, and Erica, without waking her, slipped out of her bunk and padded across the soft, velvet pile of the carpet to the porthole and peered eagerly out. The sea had gone down in the night, and now lay spread out in gentle heaving bright-green swells from the porthole through which Erica was looking to the still greener shore of a low forest-clad hillside only a few hundred yards away.
Erica stared, fascinated by the suddenness of the land’s appearance, and the dense, strange jungle growth of trees, underbrush, and creepers that matted the hill almost to the water’s edge.
“Father was right,” Erica told herself, excitedly. “That must be an island—a real tropical island.” She stared a moment longer, then whirled on her bare heel, crossed the tiny cabin in two tomboy strides, and, snatching at her clothes, began to dress with fumbling, hurrying fingers.
Erica ran into Lis at the head of the companionway, just preparing to descend.
“I was looking for you, Ricky,” he said, excitedly. “Uncle Eric’s going ashore, and he told me we could go along if we wanted to. He says this island’s not on any of his charts, and he thinks it must be uninhabited. It seems there’s nothing we can do to get the Sea Gull off her reef till the tide’s high—and then maybe we can’t. Nice prospect, huh?”
“It’s—it’s gorgeous!” Erica retorted. “A real desert island—like those in the story books! I don’t care if the ship stays on the reef till next winter. Come on, Lis, let’s hurry so father won’t get away without us.”
They found one of the clipper’s boats already in the water, manned by several sailors. As soon as the two appeared on deck, Captain Eric spied them and beckoned them to him.
“So the early birds think they’ll catch a nice fat worm this morning,” he challenged them gayly. “What do you two youngsters expect to find, I wonder, on this pretty little green island we’ve bumped into in the night?”
Erica made a gesture, arms flung wide, and shining eyes laughing up into his twinkling blue ones. “Adventure,” she announced, dramatically.
Lis chuckled with his uncle, but by his eagerness to reach the boat, Erica knew his real thoughts were much the same as her own. A desert island sounded quite as thrilling to Lis as it did to her more impulsive self.
Neither of the children wasted any time in clambering into the boat and taking their places in the stern. The sailors bent to their oars, and the little craft drove across the gently heaving green water toward the near-by land.
The clipper had come to grief on a submerged reef in the very center of a small, partially landlocked bay. This natural harbor was long and narrow, widening at the ocean end, and with jungle-grown hillsides sloping down to the water’s edge on its other three sides. Evidently a strong current set inshore from the open sea beyond, and it was doubtless due to this that the Sea Gull had been able to ride in safely on the breast of the storm, without dashing herself on either of the high headlands at the bay’s mouth.
It was the hill on their right which had cut off the full force of the hurricane after they had entered the harbor. Even the waves in here were merely long, green, undulating swells that rolled gently against the narrow strip of beach and splashed a light pearly spray over the pinkish sand. There was no real surf, and the men had no difficulty in beaching the boat without shipping a drop of water.
Captain Eric stepped ashore, and lifted his daughter from the boat to a dry patch of sand. Lis climbed hurriedly after them, and the three stood there a moment, looking out at the stranded Sea Gull, before turning to their proposed exploring of the island. And it was just at this moment, with all the dramatic effect of a scene on the stage, that the jungle bushes at their right parted suddenly and a man stepped into view.
The little group of would-be explorers turned, as one, and stared in startled surprise at the newcomer. He was a white man undeniably by his features, but so sunburnt by a tropical sun, and so browned by sea winds, that he might otherwise have been mistaken for an Indian or native at first glance. His clothes were remarkable, too. Originally they must have been ordinary sea-going clothes, but they had been so patched and overlaid with extraneous substances such as bits of sailcloth, tarpaulin, and other unrecognizable materials that they presented a strange spectacle, to say the least. His feet were bare, and his hair and beard had grown long and matted, and were, in addition, bleached to a dull tow color. Yet, as he approached them, they could see that his eyes were a bright, piercing blue, and to Lis and Erica there was something puzzling and oddly familiar in his face that grew stronger the longer they stared at him.
Then Lis uttered a shout of, “Captain Joy!” and flung himself at the man, grasping both calloused, leathery hands in excited recognition.
Captain Eric was not a second behind his nephew. Putting Lis aside gently, he grasped, in his turn, the hands of this astonishing tatterdemalion creature from the jungle, and pumped them up and down in vigorous greeting. “Caleb Joy, as I live!” he fairly roared at the man. “What under the shining sun are you doing here, and in that get-up?”
Erica, too surprised to move or speak, stood at her father’s side, her breath coming faster, and her sea-blue eyes suddenly seeing another picture—a moonlight October night eight months ago, and Tommy, Lis, and herself dancing down Main Street, home in Nantucket, arms linked, whistling a gay tune for sheer, exuberant joy in the crisp night air, the sea smells the wind brought them from the ocean, and the general, thrilling exultation of being young and alive in a beautiful world. She saw them swing out on the wharf, and stop to gaze out at the sharp black and silver of the harbor water, and the masts of a whaler etched starkly against the rising moon. She remembered how they had stood and gazed, filled with the beauty of the scene, inarticulate as young things usually are, but deeply moved inwardly with an emotion they would have been ashamed to avow even to one another.
Then had come that cry for help from the dark waters off the wharf’s end, and Tommy’s reckless dive over the high wooden side, to rescue a drowning sailor. As was to be expected, Tommy had needed help himself, before he was safely ashore again with his unconscious burden, and the man who had come running at Lis’s and her frightened cries was the very man who now stood before them in his tattered garb, and bushy, matted hair and beard—Captain Caleb Joy of the Narwhal, who had set sail the following morning on a three-year whaling cruise to the Pacific. Yet now, here—Erica rubbed her eyes dazedly and looked again. Here was that same Captain Joy shaking hands fervently with her father, on this deserted, island beach, and certainly appearing quite as dumfounded as themselves over the unexpected meeting.
She moved nearer and held out her own small hand warmly.
“It took me two or three good long looks to know you,” she admitted, frankly. “But”—she broke off as a new thought struck her with a blaze of illumination. “Why—why, Captain Joy, I believe you’ve been shipwrecked, too!” she gasped.
Captain Joy closed his horny fingers very gently over the slim, eager ones thrust into them, and nodded emphatically.
“So it’s little Ricky Folger!” he said. “Well, well, missy! But you’ve hit it square on the head. Shipwrecked I’ve been here on this blessed island, with eight o’ my crew, these past eight months.” He turned back to Captain Eric and continued his tale, the rest of the group crowding nearer to listen. “We sailed, as Lister here and Ricky will remember, in October of last year, on a whalin’ v’yage that we cal’lated would last for ‘bout a three-year stretch. Well, we run head-on into a storm a hundred or so miles off this place—storms and hurricanes are plenty in these waters, as you found out for yourselves, sir, last night.” He nodded wisely toward the Sea Gull across the little bay, and Captain Eric nodded agreement.
“We had worse luck than what you had, howsomever, Captain,” Caleb Joy resumed his story, his great booming voice all at once a trifle unsteady, as though even after these months the memories it called up were hard to face. “I lost my ship, sir. We drove before the gale all night, and in the morning, just as light came, we discovered fire in the hold. You can guess the rest—she went like a tinder box. We took to the boats, but in that sea, and with the gale still blowin’, it was impossible to keep together. The other two boats I’ve never seen nor heard of from that mornin’ to this. My boat kept afloat, by some miracle, and when the sun come out I managed to lay a rough course, meaning to head for one of the West Indian islands—Cuba, by my reckonin’, was the nearest. O’ course, not havin’ means for takin’ a reg’lar sight, I had no sure way of knowin’ just how far off our course we’d driven. We rowed for two days and a night, and—well, to make a long story short—and it ain’t an easy tale, as you may imagine, to tell, sir—we finally sighted land. It warn’t Cuba, nor none o’ the islands I know by the charts, but it were land, at any rate, and mighty welcome to our eyes. We rowed halfway round her ‘fore we could find this little inlet, or bay as you might call it. We pulled in then, and landed right where you’ve come ashore today. And here we’ve remained ever since. The men are over on the other side o’ the island, where we’ve built ourselves some huts,” he added, explanatorily. “I just happened to walk over this way—I usually take a stroll ‘fore breakfast, like it’s always been my custom when ashore. And maybe I wasn’t struck all of a heap when I saw a clipper layin’ out in the bay, an’ a boat puttin’ into the beach. Naturally, I hurried as fast as I could, and come to meet you—not knowin’ I’d be meetin’ old friends,” he wound up, smiling.
Captain Eric had begun looking very grave as the other neared the end of his narrative, and his expression did not lighten when it was finished.
“I take it the island’s not inhabited,” he remarked. “But you never saw any ships passing in all these months?”
Captain Joy shook his grizzled head. “Never a one,” he said, quietly. “Oh, there’s no doubt but what we’re well off the reg’lar lane of ship’s travel. It’s a mighty little island—no more’n a half-mile across and maybe a mile in length. She’s not on any of the charts, either, I’m pretty sure.”
“No, you’re right about that,” Erica’s father agreed. “I looked this morning, before coming ashore, to make certain. Well-ll——” He frowned out at the Sea Gull, and fell silent.
Erica knew he was wondering whether—in the tragic event that high tide should not float the clipper from her reef, how long they, too, might stay here and search the blue horizon for passing ships, as Captain Joy and his men had done for eight long months.
Probably it was because of her youth and her romantic dreams of sea adventures that the prospect did not seem as appalling to Erica as it did to her elders. She had been born and brought up on one little sea island, and it could not be any great hardship, she reasoned, to spend even quite a long time on another more southern island, learning new ways of living, and the hitherto unknown thrill of exploring new country.
“Your ship’s aground on a reef out there,” Captain Joy was saying to her father, when she listened to their conversation once more. “It’s a narrow shelf of coral that runs parallelin’ this shore o’ the bay. I’ve traced its course. But if the tide rises high enough to float her she’s only got to move a few feet to be in deep water again. O’ course my men and I will do all we can to help. Count on us as if we were part of your crew. And if she didn’t float at high tide this noon,” he added, thoughtfully, “there’s always flood tide at full moon, which will be in about ten days. There’ll be a pretty good chance o’ makin’ it then.”
To all this Captain Eric could only assent, and keep his fears and worries to himself like the good seaman he was. He also accepted Captain Joy’s invitation to return to his camp on the other side of the island and share his breakfast. Erica and Lis, who pleaded anxiously to be allowed to go, too, were finally included in the party, while the sailors were sent back to the ship, to report to the mate, and to Sun Li, the morning’s astonishing discoveries.
The eight men who had been saved from the wreck of the Narwhal were all Nantucketers, most of them personally known to the Folgers, and their wondering delight and amazement when Captain Joy brought his guests through the jungle, by a path cleared from bay to ocean shore, can be more easily imagined than put into words.
These shipwrecked mariners had almost given up hope of ever seeing their own island far to the north again, and here were old neighbors and a ship dropped right into their deserted bay from out of last night’s storm; and even though that ship was temporarily in difficulties, too, hope blazed once more brightly in their hearts. In excited voices, interrupting one another and crowding about Captain Eric and the younger Folgers, they promised their utmost in service and willing hands to do all that was humanly possible toward getting the Sea Gull afloat.
It was certainly a regular Odyssey of adventure that Erica and Lis poured into Sun Li’s interested and attentive ear later in the day, when they had returned to the clipper. Whereupon, roused surprisingly from his former indolent acceptance of his semi-invalid state, Sun Li suddenly demanded to be rowed ashore and carried over the jungle trail in his gorgeous sedan chair to visit the little encampment of the marooned sailors, and see for himself all that the excited boy and girl had so vividly described.
Little Dr. Wu, after one startled glance at his august master’s smiling, newly alert countenance, smiled broadly himself, and hurried off to order the sedan chair to be in readiness as soon as the Sea Gull’s biggest boat could be manned.
“I have not seen His Excellency so like his old, healthful self in months,” he confided, beamingly, to Captain Eric, when proffering his request for the boat. “This sea voyage is surely doing for him all that we hoped—that, and his interest in your honorable daughter, sir. He is centering on her all that affection and pride he would have given his own son. My hopes are high that he will effect an entire recovery in the immediate future.” Bowing ceremoniously, he hurried away as fast as he had come, followed by the coolie bearers and the big, gold-and-crimson-lacquer sedan chair.
Both Lis and Erica accompanied this second expedition ashore, and experienced all the thrills of old explorers conducting a novice, in exhibiting the island and the camp of the Narwhal’s crew to the smiling appreciation of His Excellency Sun Li, Governor of Canton.
The astonishment of the sailors and Captain Joy himself at sight of their splendid procession fed the children’s inward satisfaction to the point where it could no longer be repressed, but simply had to break out in giggles, which in turn brought answering smiles from the older and more staid beholders. Altogether it was a highly satisfying and eventful day, and it is doubtful whether Erica could have slept at all that night, tucked snugly into her berth in the lovely little cabin Sun Li had had fitted up for her, if she hadn’t also been so utterly weary mentally and physically that sleep was upon her before she had had time to marshal her memories of the past hours for reconsideration.
Captain Eric, however, lay awake a longer time than his daughter, occupied with much less pleasant reflections. That noon’s high tide had not floated the Sea Gull, so now there was nothing for it but to settle down to a ten days’ wait for the flood tide at full moon. If that failed—— He turned over restlessly in his bunk and refused to allow his thoughts to dwell on that eventuality. There was no use in crossing bridges before one reached them.
Captain Eric’s philosophy about not crossing bridges ahead of time proved to have been well founded in this particular case. Full moon, when it came, not only ushered in a flood tide, but was accompanied with a heavy blow out of the northwest which drove a great volume of water before it through the narrow mouth of Shipwreck Bay—which was the name by which Erica and Lis had christened the harbor where the Sea Gull lay on her reef. This extra pressure of wind and water made that tide a memorable one in the island’s history, and the clipper floated clear, on its crest, to the deep side of the coral bar.
It was an anxious time for all on board, as well as for the little colony in the huts on the ocean shore of the islet. And when the tide had reached its height, and the great clipper, with all her canvas set to utilize the wind’s force as well as that of the sea, finally rose, literally inch by inch, until her keel rode the long swells without scraping or bumping, a rousing cheer burst from dozens of throats. Then, the reef well astern, there sounded the creaking of the capstan as the anchor chain was paid out, and the clipper came to rest again quietly, a hundred or more yards from the scene of her imprisonment.
All preparations had been made for leaving the island on the following day, if the ship should succeed in freeing herself from the reef, and by sunrise of the next morning her sails were once more set, and the capstan busily winding in the anchor.
Early as it was, Erica was up on deck, leaning against the rail on the port side, to watch the green jungle growth of the hillside slip smoothly and silently into their wake.
In the midst of all the jubilation about her, she was conscious of a vague regret. Of course she didn’t want to have to spend the rest of her life on this island, but she had only had ten days of it, and she had enjoyed to the full every moment of every one of those days. In all probability she would never see those steeply-sloping green shores again; never explore strange and beautiful jungle paths such as she had known till then only in the pages of story books; never swim in a brilliantly blue lagoon inside the reef, and watch, down—down—down through its clear depths, the antics of strange fish and other exotically colored little sea creatures for which she had no names, disporting themselves gayly in the routine of their every-day marine existences. It had been a very wonderful experience, that ten days’ stay on the island—Hurricane Island, they had unanimously decided to name it, for obvious reasons.
However, there would be exciting tales to tell her friends at home on Nantucket, which was, in a measure at least, consolatory. There was, also, the tragic story of the lost Narwhal, and the finding of those of her crew who had survived. All Nantucket would want to hear that tale over and over in the days to come.
And much good had come to the whole company on board the clipper. Sun Li was unmistakably better; so was Aunt Charity. As for the rest of them, their sunburnt, wind-tanned faces and glowing eyes fairly radiated health. The only cloud that overshadowed their skies in the week of their passage north was the realization of the sad news they carried to the families of the mate and those other sailors of the Narwhal who had not come home.
But they tried not to think of this any more than they could help. At least they had rescued Captain Joy and eight sailors, which would mean happiness in nine island families. That was pleasanter to consider than the other side of the picture.
As if to make up for the storm which had so nearly stolen their ship, the weather all the way from Hurricane Island to Nantucket was as perfect as the most timid of ocean travelers could desire. Blue skies smiled down on a calm blue sea day after day; and a well-behaved sailing wind blew them steadily on their way, without the interference of gales or calms.
The Sea Gull skimmed the waters like a wild thing in flight, graceful as the bird for which she had been named, and as tireless. The white cutwater churning up before her slim, sharp prow was a never-ending delight to Erica perched in the bow, with the up-flung spray wetting her flushed face and leaving the taste of salt on her parted lips. Or, just before twilight fell, when the afterglow still painted the ocean rose and purple and gold, the stern was an equally wonderful place to lean against the rail and stare at the rainbow-tinted wake they left behind them, as they raced gallantly to meet the oncoming, misty dusk and the star-pointed darkness that came after.
The call of the sea was in Erica Folger’s blood; always, in each generation, some of the men in her family had been sea captains. It was her earliest grievance against life that she had not been a boy and free to follow in their footsteps. It had been the one, certain, enraging taunt with which the twins could retaliate in their recurrent differences of opinion as children—their superiority in this respect.
But anyhow, Erica told herself, this was the next best thing. A passenger may be an insignificant person when compared with a captain of one of these stately clippers; but a passenger can at least feel the beauty and the wonder of the sea just as keenly. Never, no matter if she lived to be an old, old lady, would the memory of this voyage in the Sea Gull be dimmed by the passing years. Besides, if fate were kind, there would be other voyages. For instance, there was China, and a vague half-promise she had already wrung from her father on the subject. Erica’s fingers stole to a knotted Chinese cord she wore around her neck, on which hung a small, exquisitely carved jade-and-silver key….
She begrudged each shining day as it went by, and yet as the time arrived when any minute the low, gray outline of her native island would loom over the horizon line where sky and water met, she found herself watching for it as eagerly as Miss Charity, or the shipwrecked sailors from the lost Narwhal. After all, home was home; and no matter how beautiful and romantic desert islands might be to explore, Nantucket was the nicest place in the world to come back to.
She was up in the bow with Lis when they first caught sight of the dim, far-off speck—a mere gray smudge on the low sky line—for which they were waiting. It was Lis who spied it first and touched her arm, pointing.
”Nantucket!” he said.
They sent word below to Sun Li, who had asked to be notified as soon as the island was in sight, and he came up on deck, carried as usual in his sedan chair by the stolid coolie bearers. Erica ran to him at once, and directed his eyes to the little gray smudge which as yet required super-eyesight to discern against the equally gray water.
It was not one of those brilliant days of blue skies and sunshine which are never more beautiful than on Nantucket, but overcast and sunless. Mists drove in ahead of them from the sea, occasionally blotting out even that tiny speck Lis’s quick eyes had been the first to see.
The wind had died to a faint breeze that was scarcely strong enough to fill the clipper’s big sails. She moved through the gray water lazily, as if she, like Erica, regretted the end of the voyage.
Later the mists parted, and with a change in the wind’s direction, eddied off to the south of the island. The ship was near enough now for the watchers on deck to make out a hint of slender church steeples, a vague outline of roofs, and the higher ground behind them.
They rounded Great Point and stood in toward the harbor. Miss Charity and Mrs. Folger came on deck, bringing Milly and little Barbee with them, and they all grouped against the rail, straining eager eyes to catch sight of familiar landmarks.
Yet, queerly enough, there seemed to be nothing familiar in the long gray shore line; only the steeples and the higher ground behind the town. Something was strange and different here which they could not quite make out. They might have been approaching a totally unknown port for all they were able to recognize. They turned and eyed each other with a questioning, half-formed apprehension, but no one spoke until Lis broke out in a shaken voice:
“Ricky, look! There—isn’t—any—town—”
And then the others saw too. Down by the water’s edge, and as far inland as they could see, there were no houses standing; only a blackened and twisted tangle of charred wood, fantastically leaning chimneys, and sagging roof-beams….
Miss Charity, unlike her usually calm self, cried out in a frightened whisper, a soft little protesting ghost of a cry, “No—no——” and fell silent again, one thin hand clutching at her heart. Captain Eric, who had come up unnoticed behind them, slipped his arm about her shoulders, and held her up, strongly, offering neither comfort nor attempted explanations. As a matter of fact, he was as stunned and bewildered as she. What terrible catastrophe had overtaken the old gray town during their absence? It was incredible, like something seen in a nightmare from which one confidently expects to wake. Only—there it was before their eyes. Blackened wood, torn and twisted roofs, fallen chimneys—— Not the aftermath of a fire, but of a holocaust.
The nearer they came, the more plainly did the desolation show. In the few weeks they had been gone, the whole town had been swept out of existence by fire; that much they were aware of. But how, when, and why this thing had happened they had of course no possible means as yet of knowing.
The Sea Gull anchored in the harbor entrance, for once again, as on her former visit, the tide was wrong for a ship of her size to clear the bar. The largest of her boats was lowered and manned, and Captain Eric, Miss Charity, Mrs. Folger, Milly, Baby Barbee, Erica, and Lis crowded into it. No matter if they overloaded it a bit; the harbor was calm, and the need to learn the extent of the catastrophe at once made them all reckless.
The approach of the clipper had drawn a little crowd to the burnt and blackened wreck of the wharf. The sailors had to beach the boat, and help the two ladies and Milly ashore, lifting them over the wet sand. Erica tumbled over the side in Lister’s wake, heedless of wet feet and bedraggled dress hem.
The thrilling tale of their sea adventures which she had looked forward to relating was forgotten. It was she who fell eagerly into the rôle of listener now, as, grouped together on the sand, the passengers from the Sea Gull heard the story of the tragedy as related by old friends and neighbors who had come down to welcome them home.
Bad as the news was, however, it was not quite so hopeless as a first glimpse of the wreckage alongshore had led them to believe. More than half the town had been saved, owing to a blessed veering of the wind, and the heroic work of the fire-fighters who had not stopped even at dynamiting untouched buildings in the fire’s path, and checking its progress. Trinity Church had gone in the flames, as had the Atheneum, the fine library of which the townspeople were so justly proud. The museum had been destroyed, too, and every store in the town but one. In all, about four hundred houses had been demolished, so ran the appalling summing-up.
Miss Charity, white-faced, her eyes full of tears, touched the arm of one of the men in the crowd, a retired sea captain who had been a friend of her father’s.
“Captain Jem, no one has said—our houses—Callie’s and mine——” she managed to ask between dry lips.
The old man put a fatherly hand on her arm.
“Untouched, thank the good Lord, Miss Charity,” he said, quickly. “The fire didn’t get to Orange Street—turned off and went north just a few hundred feet from there. But I’m afraid you’ll find uninvited guests crowding both houses, my dear. We had to find shelter for so many, we took the liberty of putting two families in your closed house,” he spoke to Mrs. Folger, across her sister-in-law. “Mrs. Joy, next door, said you’d left the key with her, and it didn’t seem any time to hesitate——”
“Of course not, of course not!” Both Miss Charity and Mrs. Folger cried, together. Tears were streaming down their cheeks, and Milly was frankly sobbing, her face buried on Mrs. Callie Folger’s shoulder.
“When did it happen—and how?” Captain Eric demanded, as soon as he could trust his voice.
Several of those about him shook their heads. “No one knows exactly. It broke out in the night—two weeks ago. They had to fight it for three days, a’most.” The confused chorus of answers blurred together in a many-keyed humming. “But we’re already clearing away the wreckage. We’ll be rebuilding soon——”
Not beaten, not even faint-hearted in the face of the tragedy that had overtaken them! Erica felt a sudden surge of pride in her island and its people that was like nothing she had ever known before. This—not desert islands or strange jungles or Chinese palaces—was romance, the high adventure of life. Meeting defeat, heads up and courage steady, and turning it into victory! She felt very humble and young; a little ashamed, too, of her own childish ambitions.
They picked their way up Main Street, and turned south into Orange, leaving here the wreckage and débris behind them. Orange Street was the first familiar thing they had found on the island. Erica would have liked to fall down and kiss the gray-painted shabby front steps of Aunt Charity’s house. Even the blue and adventurous sea she loved was not so beautiful as home.
The homeless neighbors who were crowded into the two houses crowded themselves still more closely and made room for the rightful owners. Miss Charity and Erica went back to their own home—there was more room there than in Mrs. Folger’s, when Lis, Milly, Barbee, and Mrs. Folger herself had all to find corners in which to stow themselves and their belongings.
Still, crowding seemed a small price to pay for having one’s own roof, untouched by the general calamity, over one’s head again.
Captain Eric returned to the Sea Gull, and promised to keep Sun Li and his retinue aboard, where they would be comfortable. But the following day the Governor, in his sedan chair, accompanied by Dr. Wu, made a pilgrimage through the ruined town to Orange Street, and spent an hour with Mrs. Folger and Miss Charity in the former’s sitting room. When he departed, he left behind, in the joint custody of these two stunned and feebly protesting ladies, a sum of money that frightened them both rather badly, to be used as they saw fit toward relieving the suffering of those rendered so suddenly homeless. His was among the first, and certainly one of the largest, contributions toward this cause that soon flowed in from all parts of the country and abroad.
On the second day after their arrival in the harbor, the Sea Gull sailed again, carrying Sun Li, Dr. Wu, His Excellency’s gorgeous lacquer sedan chair, and the coolie bearers back to their native China. Erica, who had cherished up to the last minute a faint spark of hope that she might be included in the party, was partially consoled by a definite promise from her father that two years hence, when she should have finished her schooling, he would take her with him on one of his voyages. With that she had to be content.
She went down to the shore, at the hour the clipper was to sail, and—as she had done on that long-ago occasion of Lister’s departure for his first cruise—she walked up the beach beyond the farthest edge of the town, and stood there, very silent, waving her handkerchief as long as the Sea Gull’s white wings could be seen.
Then, her eyes rather blurred, it must be confessed, by the tears she was gallantly winking back, but her lips quite steady, she turned back toward home.
As she tramped sturdily along the beach she glanced over her shoulder just once, at the now empty ocean.
“Still, two years aren’t such a very long time to wait,” Erica told herself in a determinedly-cheerful tone, and her fingers went up to touch a small, silver-and-jade key that hung on a knotted Chinese cord about her neck. She even managed a determinedly-cheerful smile to match the tone.
After all—at sixteen—two years really aren’t.