Time Out of Mind E-Book

Rachel Field

• Herausgeber: Raanan Editeur
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Time Out of Mind | I was never one to begrudge people their memories. From a child I would listen when they spoke of the past. Mother often remarked upon it as strange in one so young. But I think I must have guessed, even then, at what is now clear to me, though I have not skill enough with words to make it plain. For I know that nothing can be so sweet as remembered joy, and nothing so bitter as despair that no longer has the power to hurt us. And to me the past seems like nothing so much as one of those shells that used to be on every mantelpiece of sea-faring families years ago along the coast of Maine. There were two such shells in the parlor of Fortune's Folly. Rissa and Nat and I were never tired of pressing one or the other to our ears to hear how a dwindled thunder of sea still beat in each fluted pink hollow. So I say again, that is how the past seems to me—a hollow shell out of the mighty sea of Time, which each one of us may press to the ear to drown out the louder clamor of the present. Perhaps it is too childish and fanciful a notion for people to believe in, in these times. Perhaps it only comes of my being so much alone with memories that make both sweet and bitter company...|

Leseprobe

SOMMMAIRE

PART I

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

PART II

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

PART III

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

PART IV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

PART V

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER XXXIV

CHAPTER XXXV

RACHEL FIELD

TIME OUT OF MIND

1935

Raanan Editeur

Digital book998| Publishing 1

Dedication and Epigraph

To A. S. P. *"The heavens are the heavens of the Lord; but the earth has he given to the children of men." —PSALM 115.

PART I

CHAPTER I

I was never one to begrudge people their memories. From a child I would listen when they spoke of the past. Mother often remarked upon it as strange in one so young. But I think I must have guessed, even then, at what is now clear to me, though I have not skill enough with words to make it plain. For I know that nothing can be so sweet as remembered joy, and nothing so bitter as despair that no longer has the power to hurt us. And to me the past seems like nothing so much as one of those shells that used to be on every mantelpiece of sea-faring families years ago along the coast of Maine.

There were two such shells in the parlor of Fortune's Folly. Rissa and Nat and I were never tired of pressing one or the other to our ears to hear how a dwindled thunder of sea still beat in each fluted pink hollow. So I say again, that is how the past seems to me—a hollow shell out of the mighty sea of Time, which each one of us may press to the ear to drown out the louder clamor of the present. Perhaps it is too childish and fanciful a notion for people to believe in, in these times. Perhaps it only comes of my being so much alone with memories that make both sweet and bitter company.

Except for the Fortune family I should have had another story to set down. Like as not I should not be putting it to paper at all, but telling it to children, and maybe grandchildren, about my own fire. For no one living, I think, but must sometimes wonder at the working out of his life, or who does not say:—"If my mother had not come knocking at such and such a door—If my father had taken the right hand road instead of the left—If the tin peddler had waited another hour to come by—If I had not worn the sprigged muslin and sash to the strawberry festival, what another sort of creature might I find myself today?" I doubt if any are too stupid or too clever as not to have wasted a thought or so in such useless pastimes. Of late years the habit has grown on me and I often go back over the events, trivial enough in themselves, that brought me here to Little Prospect and bound me from a child to the Fortunes and their proud and difficult ways.

I know what they say of them in the village, and of me as well. But they will say less and less as the years go by and new faces crowd out the old, as the houses of summer people are crowding the farms and homesteads about Little Prospect. For this reason, and because I alone am left of the three who grew up together in Fortune's Folly on the hill, I must set down the true pattern of our lives here on the blank pages of Major Fortune's half-filled ledgers and log-books. It would have angered him, maybe, to know they were put to such use all these years after he entered the names there with such high hope in his heart and pen. Well, he is over his tempers now, and the long pages he left empty are perhaps as good a legacy as any other. Who will read my words in these busy times I do not know. Certainly not the children of Little Prospect who may have heard dark whispers from their mothers and aunts of Kate Fernald and how she has come down in the world, Even Sadie Berry, who took me in and got me work in the post-office, does not guess what I do here alone in my upper room night after night. She seldom climbs her steep stairs and so she does not see how the table is drawn close to the northwest window that I may have the last glow of light that lingers over Nobble Head Narrows for my scribbling. She does not know that once the door is shut behind me my mind takes twenty, thirty, and even forty years in a single stride and I am young again. So we walk backwards to meet the horizons we passed long ago. So we are re-born, and so we live and lean upon ourselves as the honeysuckle shoot climbs down its own stalk when there is nothing higher for it to lay hold on.

The gilt and marble clock that looks like royalty visiting a poor relation will strike in a moment from my pine dresser. Presently a hidden door will swing open in the middle of the gold face and two little enameled figures of woodsmen will come out with a cross-saw and go through the motions of sawing an invisible log.

"Father says they're killing time," Nat told me once as we watched them together in the east parlor. I could not begin to write without mention of the clock, for it must always mark the beginning of time for me, though I was ten years old before I saw its precise small figures and heard its faint chime that seemed to come from the bottom of a deep well.

Before then I lived inland in a sheltered hilly country where I might be yet if it had not been for father's forgetting his jacket the day he drove his last load of apples to the cider-mill nine miles from our farm. He left it behind him by the merest chance. When mother found it over the hitching post he was too far away for me to run after him, and by noon rain was coming down in steady white streamers. It was nearly dark before he drove into the yard again, soaked through and chilled to the bone. Nothing mother could do warmed him—not mustard, or soapstone, or steaming toddy. The doctor came and the neighbors, but there was no helping him. By another week he was in his grave and mother and I alone in the farmhouse with winter coming on and the livestock more than one woman and a ten year old girl could manage.

He'd had poor crops that year and the one before, and burying him had swallowed up about all there was saved. Neighbors took the horse and cows and pigs off our hands, but what they brought wasn't enough to see us through the winter. So when word came from mother's cousin in Little Prospect that he'd found a place for her as housekeeper at the big place they called "Fortune's Folly" it seemed nothing short of providential. All the neighbors told her so and turned to, to help us go. In spite of her sadness mother was glad of the chance. She'd never liked the lonely farm that father set such store by, and though she shed some tears when it came to selling the furniture to anyone who would have it, once we were off in the puffing black train with our bags about us and two old trunks stowed in the baggage car, she began to take heart again.

Being housekeeper in a great house like Major Fortune's wouldn't be like coming down in the world. He had sent us money for our fare on the train that would set us within ten miles of our goal, and Cousin Sam had written he wasn't the interfering kind. He wouldn't be likely to take another wife and mother could have things her own way up at the Folly. There'd be a better chance for me there, mother figured, with a district school to go to nearby. Then there were the two Fortune children, a boy and a girl about my own age. It stood to reason I'd pick up genteel ways from them as I wouldn't back on the farm along with dumb beasts and no advantages to mention.

I remember she talked to me about it the better part of the journey as I watched brown fields and frosty ponds and November woods going by the train window. I didn't feel so sure I'd like having advantages, and I dreaded meeting those two young Fortunes. I wasn't easy with other children, being shy and awkward on account of having no playmates but the hens and pigs and the calves that came with the Spring and went off in the Butcher's cart as soon as I'd begun making soft-eyed pets of them. It was a jolting way-train, for in those days there were no fast expresses thundering through the countryside, and a long journey with stops at every sort of a one-horse station. I sat pressed close to the chill pane of glass while mother dozed or woke to tell me all over again that I mustn't hang back and keep to myself now that I was to have two playmates. According to her Fortune's Folly was the largest and most elegant house east of Portland and a landmark up and down the coast. She used to go to Little Prospect when she was a girl and she had never forgotten its white columns and cupola above the spruce woods on the high bluff.

"Fortune's and yeast can't be kept at the bottom," was a saying they had about them, she told me. It is years now since I have heard it from any lips and soon there will be none left to remember it. "There's no port too far for Fortune pines to cast their shadows," was another she told me that day. It puzzled me at first till she explained that it meant the tall masts of Fortune built vessels which had become a by-word the globe around. But even she spoke darkly of changing times and of how there were more steamboats every year. Steam was well enough on land, she added, but it would never crowd out canvas, no matter what people said. For it stood to reason it was cheaper to make the wind serve you for nothing instead of this dirty coal. I did not bother my head much with what she said, though it is strange to remember her words all these years after as I sit at my window and see the harbor crowded with sail-less vessels and the yellow funnels of yachts going by and the smoke of the steamer from Boston on its morning and evening trips. But that day I was too occupied with new sights to pay proper heed.

We were hungry from our early start and tired with the excitement of goodbyes and all the rumble and jolting. After we had eaten our lunch I fell asleep and so lost my first chance of seeing salt water. It was mid-afternoon when mother roused me. The brakeman was calling "Rockland", and all about us people were reaching for their bags and bundles. I felt stiff and cold from sitting cramped so long beside the window and near to crying as we filed out with the rest. Wagons and men and horses and heaped baggage were all about the platform, and though I could not see beyond the wooden station a keen wind met us at the steps and I felt a sudden sense of the sea against my cheek and lips.

Cousin Sam Jordan had come to meet us in the Fortunes' high black wagon with yellow wheels. But he did not drive the great bay horses harnessed to it. The first black man I had ever set eyes upon stood beside them, holding their tossing heads, reassuring them against the noise of the engine. Later I was to know him well and to call him Bo, as Nat and Rissa did. But that afternoon I hung back in fear of his dark skin, thick lips and flattened nose. He was a great curiosity in the whole region and had been so since the Major brought him back from the South. That was when he had returned just before the end of the Civil War with his military title; the dusky Bo, and a wife from Philadelphia whose delicate airs and the number of trunks full of finery she brought with her were still a wonder to Little Prospect.

It took considerable manoeuvring on the part of Cousin Sam and the station master to get all our belongings into the wagon, and then it looked as if there would not be room for us beside, certainly not for me and a freckled boy a year or two older. His name was Jake Bullard, and it appeared that he belonged in the Jordan household, for he was younger brother to Cousin Sam's wife, Martha. His unabashed scrutiny increased my shyness, so that I could only cling, speechless to mother's hand as we stood there about the wagon.

"Young ones'll have to ride behind with the things," Cousin Sam decided at last. "Cheer up, Kate, Jake won't eat you!"

He laughed and winked at the boy and before I could protest I was swung up into the back among our familiar pieces of baggage. Jake climbed in beside me with a grin that only added to my dread. But it was growing colder, and there was nothing to do but share the buffalo robe between us. So many things were piled at our backs that I could not see mother or Cousin Sam no matter how I twisted. It made me feel frightened and far away when the horses set off at a smart clip and their hoof beats and the grinding of the wheels drowned out even the sound of voices. There was straw on the floor of the wagon that stuck into my legs and my companion took far more than his share of room. It was a bad beginning and I felt like crying.

But for all that, I shall not soon forget that ride or my first sight of the sea. It came to me without warning for I had been hiding under the buffalo robe to avoid meeting the eyes of the boy named Jake. Some extra freshness of air must have roused me to peer out. As I did so a moist salty wind closed round me. I felt as if I were plunging into space and suddenly my eyes widened to meet a vast and shimmering waste. It was a sea of tossing quicksilver that I saw, limitless and lonely, in the light of a late afternoon in Fall. Though I have seen it in every mood and color since that day it must always seem most miraculous to me so, stirring with that clear colorlessness which is most truly its own.

Presently the road swerved away from shore and for a mile or two woods closed us in. I had never seen such tall trees of pine and fir and spruce before and I marvelled to see how their ranks of thick-set green could suddenly make twilight all about us. I thought of my mother's words and how she had said there was no port too far for Fortune pines to cast their shadows. In that moment I knew what the saying meant, but I did not know, as I do now, that their shadow had already fallen upon me.

Jake unbent a little on our journey. In spite of our shyness we sat close together under the buffalo robe, and in the growing cold of dusk we were each comforted by the warmth of the other's body. My ignorance of the most commonplace sights, such as anchored ships, wharfs and the black sticks of herring weirs in sheltered coves stirred him to conversation. He grew swaggering as he told me the names of these and of towns and harbors that we passed. As the light dwindled and brightness left the sea I found my eyes straining to fix the outlines of bold headlands and islands on my mind. I listened as Jake named them over, pointing out each darkly humped shape with a superior forefinger. Turnip and Heron islands; the Sisters; Fiddler's Reach and Old Horse Ledges—it seems impossible that there was ever a time in my life when they were unfamiliar to me.

The Fortune Ship Yard lay halfway to Little Prospect, and we stopped there to water the horses and stretch our legs. By then it was almost dark and the enormous bulk of a vessel on the ways loomed at the water's edge like the gigantic skeleton of some stranded sea-monster. It put me in mind of Jonah and the Whale in our big Bible, but I was much too shy to mention this to Jake even if he had not hurried off to join the men who were busy about the yard. We went in to the brick office to warm ourselves by the fire in a pot-bellied black iron stove. I had never seen a place so full of books and desks and high stools and the pictures of ships on the walls.

As mother and I stood warming our hands a small, rather stooped man, who then seemed old to me but who could not have been much beyond fifty came forward with a kindly word of greeting. This was my first sight of Henry Willis, the Major's right hand man at the ship-yard. Later I was to understand why the men referred to him as "Fortune's Ballust" because only his steady head and shrewd judgment kept the business prospering under the Major's less practical schemes. But on that afternoon I only knew that the gentleman wore drooping moustaches of faded brown and gold rimmed spectacles which he pushed back on his forehead as he smiled at us in a slow pleasant way. He stood talking to mother in an undertone, so that only half his words came to me. Still I remember he said he was glad that mother had come and that she had brought me along.

"They'll need her," he said, staring at me with near sighted brown eyes. "Too much Fortune in the girl, and not enough of it in the boy. Not that they're a bad pair, Mrs. Fernald, in fact I'd like to see them up to more healthy mischief."

He turned to me again and inquired my age.

"Ten and a half," I managed to stammer, shifting under his gaze.

"About a year older than Nat," he said, "and you'd make two of him. Rissa's eleven and smart's a whip. Yes, she's quite a craft."

I liked Henry Willis then and there though I had not the remotest idea what he meant by that last word. In those days along the coast of Maine and other sea-faring communities scarcely a man, woman or child spoke without some sea-faring phrase creeping in. In a few months' time it came as naturally to me, but on that first evening it was all strange and a little frightening. The peppermint stick he brought from a drawer of his desk proved, however, as sweet as those I had had inland. I was hungry enough to eat it all down, but it seemed wiser to divide with Jake who scrambled back beside me in the straw.

Jake gobbled his half down in no time, and was less short with me the rest of the way. There was no light now except the queer, wavering gleams from the lantern hung under the wagon, and a faint, wide glimmer on the seaward side of the road. Above the creaking and grinding of wheels and the clop-clop of four pair of hoofs, I could hear the sea on the ledges, like no sound I had ever known before. Was it always like that, I asked Jake timidly?

"Wait till you hear it in the line storm." He told me. "Can't hardly hear yourself holler sometimes. 'Bout half way to flood now. Look," he added, "there's Whale Back Light over beyond the Narrows."

I did not know what the Narrows were then, but I looked where he pointed and saw a speck of brightness, like a nearer star shining across the water. Even now as I look up from the half-written page before me, I can see it through my window. In all these fifty odd years since that November evening I have never been out of sight of its beam, except for spells of fog and storm and the week I traveled to New York for Nat's night of triumph. To me it is as much a part of the night sky as the Great and Little Dipper and the steadfast prick of the North Star.

I remember little more of the journey, for the numbness of my fingers and toes and the soreness of my body braced against the joltings drove other matters from my mind. But at last we made a tremendous clatter going over the boards of a wooden bridge. Dark water gleamed for a moment below and squares of lighted window pane showed high above us before more trees closed in and swallowed them up. The next thing I knew the horses had stopped and someone set me down on my own half frozen feet.

Presently I was in the largest kitchen I had ever seen, thawing out by a tremendous stove. Mother and a plump woman named Annie talked on and on while another younger one they called Rose brought us food that had been warming in the oven. I drowsed over my plate, too tired from the cold and my long journey to eat with my usual good appetite. Perhaps I slept before the sound of a distant bell roused me.

"There," the woman named Annie exclaimed, "that means he's ready to see you."

Mother started up in a great fluster, brushing off crumbs and smoothing her hair in a way that always filled me with alarm. I hoped she would go alone and I made myself as small as I could beside her. But she jerked me up and polishing my face with her handkerchief hurried me with her out of the kitchen.

We stood in a long room full of heavy dark furniture and books that climbed to the high ceiling. Oil lamps with shades like flowers and a brightly blazing fire filled it with light and warmth. A tall man stood warming himself before the fire, his feet wide apart in polished boots. I heard his deep voice greeting mother and then I hung back knowing that his eyes were upon me.

"So you're Kate Fernald," I heard him saying. "A square-rigged girl and no mistake!"

I was not naturally concerned with my looks, but his words went through me like a splinter of ice. Not that they were so much in themselves. It was the amused mockery of his voice that chilled me. In that fraction of time it took for him to say them and for his eyes to find me, I was suddenly aware of my stockiness under the new blue woolen dress that was too long at the hem and sleeves. To save time and trouble mother had had my mop of sandy hair cropped close only a few days before. I could feel my ears turning scarlet without so much as a wisp to cover them. My heart pounded in furious misery as I stood silent and flushed before him.

"Major Fortune wants to shake hands with you, Kate," I heard mother whispering to me. "Don't stand there like a ninny."

She shoved me forward and I felt a large hand close over mine. Another hand tilted my chin up and I saw for the first time the face that I was to know and dread for the next dozen years of my life. A handsome face it was, even then in his middle age; the cheek bones high and prominent; the nose sharp as the bowsprit of one of his own ships; and the eyes steely gray under heavy brows. He wore the moustache and side whiskers that were the fashion then in the mid-seventies, and these were still light brown though his hair showed plenty of gray. I know now that he treated mother with generosity and consideration that night. It was only the sight of my sturdy body in such contrast to Nat's frailness that made him resent me as he did. But the memory persists. Even after all these years I can still turn hot and cold remembering his look and voice.

"Clarissa! Nathaniel!" He spoke shortly, dropping my hand and dismissing me as if I had been a sack of potatoes.

Two figures rose from the other end of the room and came towards me. We met by the rosewood piano, the first I had ever set eyes on, and the harp catching glints of firelight on its gilded frame and strings. Not by mere chance, it seems to me now, did we meet by those two instruments that were to have so strange a part in our three lives. The little tin-type that the photographer in Portland took that winter stands on my dresser, but I need not cross the room to refresh my memory of the way they looked that night. I can see each sprig of Rissa's patterned green challis, and the half anxious, half amused pucker on Nat's forehead as we stood in shy silence together. Clarissa was eleven then, a year and some months older than I, and as the Major liked to point out with pride, "clipper built". Her slimness and grace were marked even in the bunched and draped dress which was then in style. I had never seen its like and that and her grave beauty filled me with awe. She was fair, like her father, with a cloud of crinkled, light brown hair that grew down in a deep point on her forehead. This gave her face the shape of a violet leaf, for her chin was tapering and her eyes, gray as the Major's but softer, were set wide apart. A narrow band of black velvet tied her hair and her cheeks were faintly colored like the outer petals of a white rose.

But it is Nat and his impish delicacy that I remember best. It was true as Henry Willis had said that afternoon, I would have made two of him though he was not a full year younger. Over the fireplace hung the portrait of a lady in an oval gilt frame and I knew without being told that this was his dead mother whose very image he bore. Everything was peaked and startled about his face—brows like two black feathers above brown, merry eyes; tumbled spikes of dark hair, and a small triangular chin.

"Hello," he said abruptly in a curiously deep voice, and put out his hand to me. I took it without answering and as we touched our fingers together the clock began to strike on the mantelpiece. I saw the little figures of the woodsmen come out and begin to saw away at their unseen log. To my excited, overtaxed mind the notes of the chime and his voice became one, as if he and time were to be somehow bound forever to me.

But what he said next was a very childish and simple question.

"How old are you?"

One other incident of that evening which is clear in my mind, came about through my awkward shyness. We three still stood round the piano, ill at ease as children will be at first meeting. I could see that mother was nearly through her talk with the Major, and I turned to join her. As I did so my hand brushed the nearest ivory and black keys. The sound twanged in the firelit room and I saw Nat go white and dart one of those looks at his sister that I was to know so well later on. She made no sign save for a widening of her eyes. I saw Major Fortune look our way with a slightly annoyed expression, but beyond that he took no notice. I could feel an unnamed dread gradually fading out of the room as he went on talking to mother. But I knew without a word being spoken that it had been a close shave, and that in some way it had to do with the piano.

CHAPTER II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's final, Nathaniel?"

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

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

CHAPTER III

On the shelf beside my bed are some half dozen books that I have kept close to my hand for many years, and one of them is the green and gold book of fairy tales Henry Willis brought to Rissa from that trip to Boston. I have only to open it again to summon up the delight of those long, still afternoons when we read it from cover to cover in the dimness of the old boathouse by the salt inlet. "And it was summer, warm, delightful summer"—so ends the story of Kay and Gerda and the Snow Queen, and so it must always be for me as I turn the pages.

We each had our favorites, but Rissa loved best "The Wild Swans". She always chose to read that one aloud, and her face would grow flushed under her falling hair as she read of that young Princess whose love for her brothers was so great that she suffered muteness and sentence of death to weave the nettle coats to free them of the spell that had turned them into wild swans. But for Nat it was always "The Nightingale" that he must hear over and over again. I can see his eyes now, dark and enormous, as Rissa read about the poor Emperor dying in his palace of a strange malady, and his courtiers jabbering about his bed.

"'Music! Music! the great Chinese drum!' he cried, 'so that I may not hear all they say!'

"'And they continued speaking, and Death nodded like a Chinaman to all they said.'

"'Music! Music!' cried the Emperor. 'You little precious golden bird, sing, sing!'"

But it was not the golden bird who had compassion on him. It was the little, live nightingale on a spray outside the window come back to save the Emperor.

Once long after we were grown, Nat and I had reason to remember that tale and take it to our hearts again.

But we did not sit cooped up in the boathouse always. We saved that for sultry afternoons or days of rain and fog. Late June was wild strawberry time and mother saw to it that I picked plenty for preserving. There were fine large strawberries in the garden, but the wild ones were held a special delicacy and I was good at finding and picking. Sometimes we persuaded mother to put us up a lunch and Rissa and Nat spent the day with me roaming the half cleared pastures and the fields on either side of Fortune's Creek. A twelve foot tide filled and emptied itself there twice a day, and at the highest flood-tides when the moon was at its full in June and September, the water almost came over the wooden bridge that crossed it just below The Folly. It was a proper place for digging clams when the tide was out and the water shrunk to a narrow channel between brown mud flats. Some of the Major's cattle grazed thereabouts, but for the most part it was deserted, being too far for village boys to venture except by dory. Such wild strawberries grew in those tidewater meadows as I have never seen the like of before or since. Till well into July my fingers were stained rosy and smelled delicious.

Rissa and Nat liked to go with me on these long expeditions, though they were more fitful berry pickers than I. Rissa was always upsetting her basket and losing the best she had gathered, and Nat often forgot and put them into his mouth instead of into my pail. I had learned to strip the hulls as I picked and I tried to show them how, but somehow they would leave them on and I would have theirs to hull all over again. Still, I did not mind that, being glad of their company. It was seldom that we met anyone on these jaunts, and Nat could sing and hum to his heart's content. Jake Bullard had made me a willow whistle that spring, one he had cut himself from the old tree in the schoolhouse yard. I had given it to Nat and he always carried it in his pocket when we went off berrying. As soon as we were out of ear shot of the house he would have it to his lips, trying to imitate the birds and making queer little tunes that sounded like brook water going over pebbles and rushy places. He could take even that home made thing and make it give out sweet, queer snatches of music. But it drove him wild sometimes because he couldn't get all the notes he wanted out of it, no matter how he fluttered those thin fingers of his over the little holes.

One day towards the end of June we decided to take the dory and go higher up the inlet than we had been before. We had picked the best of the strawberries in the nearby fields and the tide was right for just such an expedition. It was half-way to flood and running strong from the sea, so we would have it with us going up, and by mid-afternoon it would carry us back without much rowing. Rissa and Nat were better at handling oars than I, but I made up for lack of skill by having more strength and endurance. We said nothing of our plan at the house, for though we were allowed to paddle near shore in the dory, the two young Fortunes were not supposed to go far by themselves. Their father was busy in his study, going over a lot of papers and letters that Bo had brought up from the village the night before, and mother luckily made no objections to putting up our lunch. She did, though, notice Nat's high spirits, for he would burst out singing and skipped about like something possessed. I thought surely she'd suspect us of mischief, but she only shook her head and told him not to wear himself out before the dew was off the grass.

"The little bird that sings in the morning the old cat will eat before night," was all she said as she spread our bread and butter and gave us a pail of milk and three tin cups.

That was a morning to remember. It was one of those days they call a dry-easter, when the sun is stronger than the wind that brings fog, and all the islands and far headlands stand out clear enough to touch with your forefinger. Clumps of delphinium were blue as driftwood blaze round the heathen Buddha in the garden and cinnamon roses were pink and lilies golden all round the house. The hum of bees in them sounded like the sea in the mantelpiece shells, and a hummingbird was there, too, its wings spinning a tremulous rainbow wheel. Everything shone with summer and sun. The sea was polished like a wide blue dancing floor, and the resin on the spruce cones high overhead glittered like Christmas tinsel. Pure joy ran through me, swifter than the tide under the wooden bridge. We caught each other by the hand and ran together down the long driveway to the water's edge.

We got ourselves and the lunch and baskets into the old pumpkin colored dory and pushed off. Nat was in the bow, hie face pointing upstream like a small, eager figurehead. That was the way I knew he looked though I could not see him, my back being bent over the oars in the middle seat. Rissa sat astern, holding the ropes of a sort of rudder that Annie's husband, George Button, had rigged there. She looked like a picture, I thought, in a lilac chambray dress and white sunbonnet. Under its frilled edge I could see soft rings of pale brown hair that was golden where the sun struck across it. She did not grow tan as Nat did after long days in the sun and wind, and though I had as many freckles as there are stars on the milky way, try as I would I couldn't find even one on the bridge of her straight nose. The girls from Little Prospect made remarks about her at school. They said she was proud and stuck up; but I would never listen to them. Proud she was, and set in her ways, yet I couldn't call her vain. It was the way she was fashioned, like a fine piece of china or some ship that wears the look of proud hands that have made it. If she had gone barefoot in my old checked gingham made over from mother's, she would have contrived to give herself an air. It was her right to be lovely and to move with grace. It came as naturally to her as breathing.

"Put up the oars and let the tide serve us, Kate," Nat begged me. "We've gone miles already."

That was hardly true, but having the tide with us was a help and before long we were in country altogether new to me. Sometimes the woods grew close to the water on either side and then there would be more marshes and open fields. Nat played on his whistle and presently we were all startled by a tremendous splashing from some low, weedy ledges.

"Seals!" Rissa cried and motioned me to pull in the oars.

Several sleek brown heads were bobbing in the water only a few yards from the dory, and at least half a dozen other wet shapes were moving on the ledge. I could scarcely tell wet fur and smooth flippers from low-tide kelp, but I held my breath to see them go plopping and splashing into the water so near us. Now that the oars no longer dipped they seemed untroubled by our presence. We even talked together in whispers without disturbing them at their wallowings.

"They're not really seals?" I asked.

Rissa nodded.

"Not like the kind Miss Ada Joy has for her Sunday jacket?"

"Yes," Rissa was sure. "They come here in summer. There used to be lots round Fiddler's Reach, and Seal Rocks, too, before they killed them off there."

A round shining head with two startled eyes rose beside us only to go under again. I felt suddenly frightened and turned to Nat.

"They'll never find them here," he whispered back to me, "if we don't tell George and Bo, and we won't."