The City Transfer bill was paid; so were the other bills. Ken, on his way out from Asquam, stopped with a sudden light in his dogged face and turned back. He sought out the harbor-master, who was engaged in painting a dory behind his shop.
"Wal, boy, want to get a fish-hook?" he queried, squinting toward Ken with a preoccupied eye. (He sold hardware and fishing-tackle, as well as attending to the duties of his post.)
Ken disclaimed any desire for the fish-hook, and said he wanted to ask about a boat.
"Ain't got none for sale ner hire, just now," the harbor-master replied.
Ken said, so he had heard, but that wasn't it. And he told the man about the abandoned power-boat in the inlet. The harbor-master stood up straight and looked at Ken, at last.
"Wal, ding!" said he. "That's Joe Pasquale's boat, sure's I'm a-standin' here!"
"Who," said Ken, "is Joe Pasquale?"
"He is--orwoz--a Portugee fisherman--lobsterman, ruther. He got drownded in Febrerry--fell outen his boat, seems so, an' we gothim, but we never got the boat. Couldn't figger wher' shehadgot to. He was down harbor when 't happent. Cur'ous tide-racks 'round here."
"Whose is she, then?" Ken asked. "Any widows or orphans?"
"Nary widder," said the harbor-master, chewing tobacco reflectively. "Nokin. Finders keepers. B'longs to you, I reckon. Ain't much good, be she?"
"Hole stove in her," Ken said. "The engine is all there, but I guess it'll need a good bit of tinkering at."
"Ain't wuth it," said the harbor-master. "She 's old as Methusaly, anyways. Keep her--she's salvage if ever there wuz. Might be able to git sunthin' fer her enjine--scrap iron."
"Thanks," said Ken; "I'll think it over." And he ran nearly all the way to Applegate Farm.
Kirk did not forget his promise to the Maestro. He found the old gentleman in the garden, sitting on a stone bench beside the empty fountain.
"I knew that you would come," he said. "Do you know what day it is?"
Kirk did not, except that it was Saturday.
"It is May-day," said the Maestro, "and the spirits of the garden are abroad. We must keep our May together. Come--I think I have not forgotten the way."
He took Kirk's hand, and they walked down the grass path till the sweet closeness of a low pine covert wove a scented silence about them. The Maestro's voice dropped.
"It used to be here," he said. "Try--the other side of the pine-tree. Ah, it has been so many, many years!"
The Maestro sat down beside Kirk
Kirk's hand sought along the dry pine-needles; then, in a nook of the roots, what but a tiny dish, with sweetmeats, set out, and little cups of elder wine, and bread, and cottage cheese! The Maestro sat down beside Kirk on the pine-needles, and began to sing softly in a rather thin but very sweet voice.
"Here come we a-maying,All in the wood so green;Oh, will ye not be staying?Oh, can ye not be seen?Before that ye be flitting,When the dew is in the east,We thank ye, as befitting,For the May and for the feast.Here come we a-maying,All in the wood so green,In fairy coverts strayingA-for to seek our queen. "
"One has to be courteous to them, " he added at the end, while Kirk sat rapt, very possibly seeing far more garden spirits than his friend had any idea of.
"I myself," the Maestro said, "do not very often come to the garden. It is too full, for me, of children no longer here. But the garden folk have not forgotten."
"When I'm here," murmured Kirk, sipping elder wine, "Applegate Farm and everything in the world seem miles and years away. Is there really a magic line at the hedge?"
"If there is, you are the only one who has discovered it," said the old gentleman, enigmatically. "Leave a sup of wine and a bit of bread for the Folk, and let us see if we cannot find some May-flowers."
They left the little pine room,--Kirk putting in the root hollow a generous tithe for the garden folk,--and went through the garden till the grass grew higher beneath their feet, and they began to climb a rough, sun-warmed hillside, where dry leaves rustled and a sweet earthy smell arose.
"Search here among the leaves," the Maestro said, "and see what you shall find."
So Kirk, in a dream of wonder, dropped to his knees, and felt among the loose leaves, in the sunshine. And there were tufts of smooth foliage, all hidden away, and there came from them a smell rapturously sweet--arbutus on a sunlit hill. Kirk pulled a sprig and sat drinking in the deliciousness of it, till the old gentleman said:
"We must have enough for a wreath, you know--a wreath for the queen."
"Who is our Queen of the May?" Kirk asked.
"The most beautiful person you know."
"Felicia," said Kirk, promptly.
"Felicia," mused the Maestro. "That is a beautiful name. Do you know what it means?"
Kirk did not.
"It means happiness. Is it so?"
"Yes," said Kirk; "Ken and I couldn't be happy without her. Sheishappiness."
"Kenneth is your brother?"
"Kenelm. Does that mean something?"
The old gentleman plucked May-flowers for a moment. "It means, if I remember rightly, "a defender of his kindred. " It is a good Anglo-Saxon name. "
"What does my name mean?" Kirk asked.
The Maestro laughed. "Yours is not a given name," he said. "It has no meaning. But--you mean much to me."
He caught Kirk suddenly in a breathless embrace, from which he released him almost at once, with an apology.
"Let us make the wreath," he said. "See, I'll show you how."
He bound the first strands, and then guided Kirk's hands in the next steps, till the child was fashioning the wreath alone.
"'My love's an arbutusOn the borders of Lene,'"sang the Maestro, in his gentle voice. "Listen and I will tell you what you must say to Felicia when you crown her Queen of the May."
The falling sun found the wreath completed and the verse learned, and the two went hand in hand back through the shadowy garden.
"Won't you make music to-day?" Kirk begged.
"Not to-day," said the old gentleman. "This day we go a-maying. But I am glad you do not forget the music."
"How could I?" said Kirk. At the hedge, he added: "I'd like to put a bit of arbutus in your buttonhole, for your May."
He held out a sprig in not quite the right direction, and the Maestro stepped forward and stooped to him, while Kirk's fingers found the buttonhole.
"Now the Folk can do me no harm," smiled the old gentleman. "Good-by, my dear."
Felicia was setting the table, with the candle-light about her hair. If Kirk could have seen her, he would indeed have thought her beautiful. He stood with one hand on the door-post, the other behind him. "Phil?" he said.
"Here," said Felicia. "Where have you been, honey?"
He advanced to the middle of the room, and stopped. There was something so solemn and unchancy about him that his sister put a handful of forks and spoons on the table and stood looking at him. Then he said, slowly:
"I come a-maying through the wood,A-for to find my queen;She must be glad and she must be good,And the fairest ever seen.
And now have I no further needTo seek for loveliness;She standeth at my side indeed--Felicia--Happiness!"
With which he produced the wreath of Mayflowers, and, flinging himself suddenly upon her with a hug not specified in the rite, cast it upon her chestnut locks and twined himself joyfully around her. Phil, quite overcome, collapsed into the nearest chair, Kirk, May-flowers and all, and it was there that Ken found them, rapturously embracing each other, the May Queen bewitchingly pretty with her wreath over one ear. "I didn't make it up," Kirk said, at supper. "The Maestro did--or at least he said the Folk taught him one like it. I can't remember the thanking one he sang before the feast. And Ken, he saysyourname's good Anglo-Saxon and means 'a defender of his kindred.'"
"It does, does it?" said Ken. "You'll get so magicked over there some time that we'll never see you again; or else you'll come back cast into a spell, and there'll be no peace living with you."
"No, I won't," Kirk said. "And I like it. It makes things more interesting."
"I shouldthink so," said Ken--secretly, perhaps, a shade envious of the Maestro's ability.
As he locked up Applegate Farm that night, he stopped for a moment at the door to look at the misty stars and listen to the wind in the orchard.
"'A defender of his kindred,'" he murmured. "H'm!"
Hardly anything is more annoying than a mysterious elder brother. That Ken was tinkering at theFlying Dutchman(as he had immediately called the power-boat, on account of its ghostly associations) was evident to his brother and sister, but why he should be doing so they could not fathom.
"We can't afford to run around in her as a pleasure yacht," Felicia said. "Are you going to sell her?"
"I am not," Ken would say, maddeningly, jingling a handful of bolts in his pocket; "not I."
The patch in theFlying Dutchmanwas not such as a boat-builder would have made, but it was water-tight, and that was the main point. The motor required another week of coaxing; all Ken's mechanical ingenuity was needed, and he sat before the engine, sometimes, dejected and indignant. But when the last tinkering was over, when frantic spinnings of the flywheel at length called forth a feeble gasp and deep-chested gurgle from the engine, Ken clapped his dirty hands and danced alone on the rocks like a madman.
He took the trial trip secretly--he did not intend to run the risk of sending Phil and Kirk to that portion of Davy Jones' locker reserved for Asquam Bay. But when he landed, he ran, charging through baybush and alder, till he tumbled into Felicia on the door-step of Applegate Farm.
"I didn't want to tell you until I found out if she'd work," he gasped, having more enthusiasm than breath. "You might have been disappointed. But she'll go--andnowI'll tell you what she and I are going to do!"
On a morning late in May, a train pulled into the Bayside station, which was the rail terminal for travelers to Asquam, and deposited there a scattering of early summer folk and a pile of baggage. The Asquam trolley-car was not in, and would not be for some twenty minutes; the passengers grouped themselves at the station, half wharf, half platform, and stared languidly at the bay, the warehouse, and the empty track down which the Asquam car might eventually be expected to appear. It did not; but there did appear a tall youth, who approached one of the groups of travelers with more show of confidence than he felt. He pulled off his new yachting-cap and addressed the man nearest him:
"Are you going to Asquam, sir?"
"I am, if the blamed trolley-car ever shows up."
"Have you baggage?"
"Couple of trunks."
"Are you sending them by the electric freight?"
"No other waytosend them," said the man, gloomily. "I've been here before. I've fortified myself with a well-stocked bag, but I sha'n't have a collar left before the baggage comes. As for my wife--"
"I can get your luggage to Asquam in a bit over an hour," said the businesslike young gentleman.
The somewhat bored group lifted interested heads. They, too, had trunks doomed to a mysterious exile at the hands of the electric freight.
"I'm Sturgis," said the youth, "of the Sturgis Water Line. I have a large power-boat built for capacity, not looks. Your baggage will be safe in a store-room at the other end,"--Captain Sturgis here produced a new and imposing key,--"and will be taken to your hotel or cottage by a reliable man with a team at the usual rate of transfer from the trolley. My charges are a little higher than the trolley rates, but you'll have your baggage before luncheon, instead of next week." A murmuring arose in the group.
"Let's see your vessel, Cap," said another man.
Ken led the way to a boat skid at the foot of the wharf, and pointed out theFlying Dutchman, unpainted, but very tidy, floating proudly beside the piles.
"I have to charge by bulk rather than weight," said the proprietor of the Sturgis Water Line, "and first come, first served."
"Have you a license?" asked a cautious one.
Ken turned back a lapel and showed it, with the color rushing suddenly to his face.
But the upshot of it was, that before the Asquam car--later than usual--arrived at Bayside, theFlying Dutchmanwas chugging out into the bay, so loaded with trunks that Ken felt heartily for the Irishman, who, under somewhat similar circumstances, said "'t was a merrcy the toide wasn't six inches hoigher!" Out in the fairway, Ken crouched beside his engine, quite thankful to be alone with his boat and the harvest of trunks--so many more than he had hoped to have. For this was the first trip of the Sturgis Water Line, and its proprietor's heart, under the new license, had pounded quite agonizingly as he had approached his first clients.
Down at Asquam, the room on the wharf under the harbor-master's shop stood waiting to receive outgoing or incoming baggage; at the wharf, Hop would be drawn up with his old express-wagon. For Hop was the shore department of the Line, only too glad to transport luggage, and in so doing to score off Sim Rathbone, who had little by little taken Hop's trade. He and Ken had arranged financial matters most amicably; Ken was to keep all his profits, Hop was to charge his usual rates for transfer, but it was understood that Hopkins, and he alone, was shore agent of the Sturgis Water Line, and great was his joy and pride.
Ken, on this first day, helped the old man load the trunks, rode with him to their various destinations, saw them received by unbelieving and jubilant owners, and then tore back to Applegate Farm, exultant and joyful. Having no breath for words, he laid before Felicia, who was making bread, four dollars and a half (six trunks at seventy-five cents apiece), clapped the yachting cap over Kirk's head, and cut an ecstatic pigeon-wing on the kitchen floor. "One trip!" gasped Phil, touching the money reverently with a doughy finger. "And you're going to make two round trips every day! That's eighteen dollars a day! Oh, Ken, it's a hundred and twenty-five dollars a week! Why, we're--we're millionaires!"
Ken had found his breath, and his reason.
"What a little lightning calculator!" he said. "Don't go so fast, Philly; why, your castle scrapes the clouds! This time of year I won't carryanybaggage on the up trips--just gasolene wasted; and there's the rent of the dock and the store-room,--it isn't much, but it's quite a lot off the profit,--and gas and oil, and lots of trips when I sha'n't be in such luck. But Idothink it's going to work--and pay, even if it's only fifteen or twenty dollars a week."
Whereupon Felicia called him a lamb, and kissed him, and he submitted.
That night they had a cake. Eggs had been lavished on it to produce its delectable golden smoothness, and sugar had not been stinted.
"It's a special occasion," Felicia apologized, "to celebrate the Sturgis Water Line and honor Captain Kenelm Sturgis--defender of his kindred," she added mischievously.
"Cut it!" muttered Ken; but she took it to mean the cake, and handed him a delicious slice.
"All right," said Ken. "Let's feast. But don't be like the girl with the pitcher of milk on her head, Phil."
If you suppose that Miss Felicia Sturgis was lonely while her brother, the captain, was carrying on his new watery profession, you are quite mistaken. She hadn't time even to reflect whether she was lonely or not. She had no intention of letting Applegate Farm sink back to the untidy level of neglect in which she had found it, and its needs claimed much of her energy. She tried to find time in which to read a little, for she felt somewhat guilty about the unceremonious leave she had taken of her schooling. And there was cookery to practise, and stockings to mend, and, oh dear, such a number of things!
But Kirk's education filled the most important place, to her, in the scheme of things at Asquam. If she had not been so young, and so ambitious, and so inexperienced, she might have faltered before the task she set herself, temporary though it might be. Long before the Sturgis Water Line had hung out its neat shingle at the harbor-master's wharf; before the Maestro and music had made a new interest in Kirk's life; while Applegate Farm was still confusion--Felicia had attacked the Braille system with a courage as conscientious as it was unguided. She laughed now to think of how she had gone at the thing--not even studying out the alphabet first. In the candle-light, she had sat on the edge of her bed--there was no other furniture in the room--with one of Kirk's books on her knee. Looking at the dots embossed on the paper conveyed nothing to her; she shut her eyes, and felt the page with a forefinger which immediately seemed to her as large as a biscuit. Nothing but the dreadful darkness, and the discouraging little humps on the paper which would not even group themselves under her fingers! Felicia had ended her first attempt at mastering Braille, in tears--but not altogether over her own failure.
"Oh, it must be hideous for him!" she quavered to the empty room; "simply hideous!"
And she opened her eyes, thankful to see even good candle-light on bare walls, and the green, star-hung slip of sky outside the window. But somehow the seeing of it had made her cry again.
Next day she had swallowed her pride and asked Kirk to explain to her a few of the mysteries of the embossed letters. He was delighted, and picked the alphabet, here and there, from a page chosen at random in the big book. The dots slunk at once into quite sensibly ordered ranks, and Felicia perceived a reason, an excuse for their existence.
She learned half the alphabet in an hour, and picked outbandhand
ljoyfully from page after page. Three days later she was reading, "The cat can catch the mouse"--as thrilled as a scientist would be to discover a new principle of physics. Kirk was thrilled, also, and applauded her vigorously.
"But you're looking at it, and that's easier," he said. "And you're growner-up than me."
Felicia confessed that this was so.
And now what a stern task-mistress she had become! She knew all the long words in the hardest lessons, and more too. There was no escaping school-time; it was as bad as Miss Bolton. Except that she was Felicia--and that made all the difference in the world. Kirk labored for her as he had never done for Miss Bolton, who had been wont to say, "If only he wouldwork--" The unfinished sentence always implied untold possibilities for Kirk.
But Felicia was not content that Kirk could read the hardest lessons now. They plunged into oral arithmetic and geography and history, to which last he would listen indefinitely while Phil read aloud. And Felicia, whose ambition was unbounded,--as, fortunately, his own was,--turned her attention to the question of writing. He could write Braille, with a punch and a Braille slate,--yes, indeed!--but who of the seeing world could read it when he had done? And he had no conception of our printed letters; they might as well have been Chinese symbols. He would some day have a typewriter, of course, but that was impossible now. Phil, nothing daunted by statements that the blind never could write satisfactorily, sent for the simplest of the appliances which make it possible for them to write ordinary characters, and she and Kirk set to work with a will.
On the whole, those were very happy mornings. For the schoolroom was in the orchard --the orchard, just beginning to sift scented petals over the lesson papers; beginning to be astir with the boom of bees, and the fluttering journeys of those busy householders, the robins. The high, soft grass made the most comfortable of school benches; an upturned box served excellently for a desk; and here Kirk struggled with the elusive, unseen shapes of A. B. C.--and conquered them! His first completed manuscript was a letter to his mother, and Phil, looking at it, thought all the toil worth while. The letter had taken long, but Felicia had not helped him with it.
DEAR MOTHERI AM WRITING THIS MYSELF A ROBIN IS SINGING NEARME BECAUSE HE HAS THREE EGGS WHICH FIL FOUND YESTERDAY. I HOPE YOU AREBETTER DEARAND CAN COME BACK SOONYOUR KIRK XXXXXXXXXXXX
Mrs. Sturgis's feelings, on reading this production, may be imagined. She wept a little, being still not herself, and found heart, for the first time, to notice that a robin was singing outside her own window. There is no question but that Kirk's days were really the busiest of the Sturgis family's. For no sooner did the Three R's loose their hold on him at noon, than the Maestro claimed him for music after lunch, three times a week. Rather tantalizing music, for he wasn't to go near the piano yet. No, it was solfeggio, horrid dry scales to sing, and rhythm, and notation. But all was repaid when the Maestro dropped to the piano-stool and filled a half-hour with music that made Kirk more than ever long to master the scales. And there was tea, always, and slow, sun-bathed wanderings in the garden, hand in hand with the Maestro.
He must hear, now, all about the Sturgis Water Line, and Ken's yachting cap with the shiny visor, and how Kirk had taken the afternoon trip three times, and how--if the Maestro didn't know it already--the sound of water at the bow of a boat was one of the nicest noises there was.
"There are those who think so," said the old gentleman. "Kirk, tell Ken not to let the sea gain a hold on him. He loves it, does he not?"
"Yes," said Kirk, aghast at the sudden bitter sorrow in the gentle voice. "Why?"
"The sea is a tyrant. Those she claims, she never releases. I know."
He stood among the gently falling blossoms of the big quince-tree by the terrace. Then he suddenly drew Kirk to him, and said:
"I spoke of the garden being filled, to me, with the memory of children; did I not?"
Kirk remembered that he had--on May-day.
"A little boy and a little girl played here once," said the Maestro, "when the pools were filled, and the garden paths were trim. The little girl died when she was a girl no longer. The boy loved the sea too well. He left the garden, to sail the seas in a ship--and I have never seen him since."
"Was he your little boy?" Kirk hardly dared ask it.
"He was my little boy," said the Maestro. "He left the garden in the moonlight, and ran away to the ships. He was sixteen. Tell Kenelm not to love the sea too much."
"But Ken wouldn't go away from Phil and me," said Kirk; "Iknowhe wouldn't."
Kirk knew nothing of the call that the looming gray sails of theCelestinehad once made.
"I thought," said the Maestro, "that the other boy would not leave his sister and his father." He roused himself suddenly. "Perhaps I do Ken injustice. I want to meet the gallant commander of theFlying Dutchman. It seems absurd that such close neighbors have not yet met. Bring him--and Felicia, when you come again. We'll drink to the success of the Sturgis Water Line. And don't dare to tell me, next time, that you never heard of the scale of A flat major, my little scamp!"
Kirk, to whom the Maestro's word was law, delivered his message very solemnly to Ken, who laughed.
"Not much fear of my cultivating too strong an affection for Mud Ocean, as navigated by theDutchman. If I had a chance to see real water and real ships, it might be different."
"But how horrid of his son never to let him know--poor old gentleman!" said Felicia, who was putting on her hat at the window.
"Probably the old gentleman was so angry with him in the beginning that he didn't dare to, and now he thinks he 's dead," Ken said.
"Who thinks who's dead?" Phil asked. "You'd never make a rhetorician."
"I should hope not!" said her brother. "Why, the sailor thinks his father's dead. Get your hat, Kirk."
"We're going to an auction," Felicia explained.
"A 'vandew'," Ken corrected. "You and Phil are, that is, to buy shoes and ships and sealing-wax, and a chair for my room that won't fall down when I sit in it, and crockery ware--and I guarantee you'll come home with a parlor organ and a wax fruit-piece under a glass case."
Phil scoffed and reproved him, and he departed, whistling "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep," lugubriously. His brother and sister caught up with him, and they all walked together toward Asquam, Ken bound for his boat, and the others for the "vendu," which was held at an old farm-house where Winterbottom Road joined Pickery Lane.
Many ramshackle old wagons were already drawn up in the barn-yard and hitched to trees along the cart track. Their owners were grouped in the dooryard around the stoves and tables and boxes of "articles too numerous to mention," chattering over the merits and flaws of mattresses and lamps, and sitting in the chairs to find out whether or not they were comfortable. A bent old farmer with a chin-beard, stood chuckling over an ancient cradle that leaned against a wash-tub.
"There's one most 's old 's I be!" he said, addressing the world at large; "fust thing I 'member, I crawled outen one like thet!"
The auctioneer was selling farm tools and stock at the other side of the house, and most of the men-folks were congregated there--tall, solemn people, still wearing winter mufflers--soberly chewing tobacco and comparing notes on the tools. Felicia and Kirk, though they would have liked well enough to own the old white horse and the Jersey heifers, felt themselves unable to afford live stock, and stayed in the dooryard. Among the furniture so mercilessly dragged from its familiar surroundings to stand on the trampled grass, was a little, square, weathered thing, which Felicia at first failed to recognize as the inevitable melodeon. It lacked all the plush and gewgaws of the parlor organ of commerce; such a modest, tiny gray box might easily have passed for a kitchen chest.
Felicia pushed back the cover, and, pressing a pedal with one foot, gave forth the chords of her favorite, "How should I your true love know?" The organ had a rather sweet old tone, unlike the nasal and somewhat sanctimonious drone of most melodeons, and Felicia, hungry for the piano that had not been brought to Asquam, almost wished she could buy it. She remembered Ken's prophecy--"you'll come home with a melodeon"--and turned away, her cheeks all the pinker when she found the frankly interested eyes of several bumpkins fixed upon her. But Kirk was not so ready to leave the instrument.
"Why don't we get that, Phil?" he begged. "Wemusthave it; don't you think so?"
"It will go for much more than we can afford," said Felicia. "And you have the Maestro's piano. Listen! They're beginning to sell the things around here."
"Butyouhaven't the Maestro's piano!" Kirk protested, clinging very tightly to her hand in the midst of all this strange, pushing crowd.
The people were gathering at the sunny side of the house; the auctioneer, at the window, was selling pots and candles and pruning-shears and kitchen chairs. Felicia felt somehow curiously aloof, and almost like an intruder, in this crowd of people, all of whom had known each other for long years in Asquam. They shouted pleasantries across intervening heads, and roared as one when somebody called "'Lisha" bought an ancient stovepipe hat for five cents and clapped it on his head, adding at least a foot to his already gaunt and towering height. She felt, too, an odd sense of pathos at the sight of all these little possessions--some of them heirlooms--being pulled from the old homestead and flaunted before the world. She did not like to see two or three old women fingering the fine quilts and saying they'd be a good bargain, for "Maria Troop made every stitch on 'em herself, and she allus was one to have lastin' things." Poor little Mrs. Troop was there, tightly buttoned up in her "store clothes," running hither and thither, and protesting to the auctioneer that the "sofy" was worth "twicet as much's Sim Rathbone give for 't."
A fearful crash of crockery within brought her hand to her heart, and a voice from the crowd commented jocularly, "Huh! Breakin' up housekeepin'!" Even Mrs. Troop smiled wryly, and the crowd guffawed.
"Now here," bellowed the auctioneer, "is a very fine article sech as you don't often see inthesedays. A melodeon, everybody, a parlor organ, in size, shape, and appearance very unusual, so tosay."
"Ain't it homely!" a female voice remarked during the stout auctioneer's pause for breath.
"Not being a musician, ladies and gents, I ain't qualified to let you hear the tones of this instrument,but--I am sure it will be an ornament to any home and a source of enjoyment to both old andyoung. Now--what'll you give me for this fine oldorgan?"
"Seventy-five cents," a deep voice murmured.
"Got your money with you, Watson?" the auctioneer inquired bitingly. "I am ashamed of this offer, folks, but nevertheless, I am offered seventy-five cents--seventy-five cents, for this fine old instrument. Now who'll--"
The melodeon climbed to two dollars, with comparative rapidity. The bidders were principally men, whose wives, had they been present, would probably have discouraged the bidding, on the score that it was impossible to have that thing in the house, when Jenny's had veneer candle-stands and plush pedals. Felicia was just beginning to wonder whether entering into the ring would push the melodeon too high, and the auctioneer was impatiently tapping his heel on the soap-box platform, when a clear and deliberate voice remarked:
"Two dollars and ten cents."
Several heads were turned to see the speaker, and women peeped over their husbands' shoulders to look. They saw a child in green knickerbockers and a gray jersey, his hand in that of a surprised young girl, and his determined face and oddly tranquil eyes turned purposefully to the auctioneer.
"Make it a quarter," said a man lounging against the leader-pipe.
"Two and a quarter," said the auctioneer. "I'm bid two dollars and a quarter for the organ."
"Two dollars and fifty cents," said the young bidder, a shade of excitement now betraying itself in his voice. The girl opened her mouth, perhaps to protest, and then closed it again. "Two-fifty!" bawled the auctioneer. "Two-fifty? Going--any more? Going--going--" he brought his big hands together with a slap, "Gone!at two dollarsandfifty cents, to--who's the party, Ben?"
Ben, harassed, pencil in mouth, professed ignorance.
"Kirkleigh Sturgis," said the owner of the musical instrument, "Winterbottom Road."
"Mister Sturgis," said the auctioneer, while Ben scribbled. "Step right up, young man. Give Ben your money and put your pianner in your pocket. Now folks, the next article--"
Kirk and Felicia, not to speak of the organ, two chairs, a wash-basin, a frying-pan, two boxes of candles, a good mop, and a pot of soft soap, were all carted home by the invaluable Hop. They met Ken, in from his second trip, in the middle of Winterbottom Hill, and they gave him a lift.
"Oh, if you knew what you're sitting on!" Phil chuckled.
"Good heavens! Will it go off?" cried Ken, squirming around to look down at his seat. "I thought it was a chest, or something."
"It's--a melodeon!" Phil said weakly.
"A melodeon! Oh, ye gods and little fishes!" shouted Ken. "Oh, my prophetic soul!" and he laughed all the way to Applegate Farm.
But while Felicia was clattering pans in the kitchen, and Ken went whistling through the orchard twilight to the well, the purchaser of the organ felt his way to it, not quite sure, yet, of its place by the window. He sat down in front of it, and pressed the stiff old pedals. His careful fingers found a chord, and the yellow notes responded with their sweet, thin cadence--thevox humanastop was out. He pulled, by chance, the diapason, and filled the room with deep, shaken notes. Half frightened at the magic possibilities, he slipped from the chair and ran out into the young May night, to whisper to it something of the love and wonder that the Maestro's music was stirring in him. Here in the twilit dooryard he was found by his brother, who gave him the hand unoccupied by the bucket and led him in to the good, wholesome commonplaces of hearth-fire and supper and the jolliest of jokes and laughter.
At first, each day in the old house had been an adventure. That could not last, for even the most exciting surroundings become familiar when they are lived in day after day. Still, there are people who think every dawn the beginning of a new adventure, and Felicia, in spite of pots and pans, was rather of this opinion.
It was, for instance, a real epoch in her life when the great old rose-bush below the living-room windows budded and then bloomed. She had watched it anxiously for weeks, and tended it as it had not been tended for many years. It bloomed suddenly and beautifully,--"out of sheer gratitude," Ken said,--and massed a great mound of delicate color against the silver shingles of the west wall. It bore the sweet, small, old-fashioned roses that flower a tender pink and fade gracefully to bluish white. Felicia gathered a bunch of them for the Maestro, who had bidden the three to come for tea. Neither Ken nor Felicia had, as yet, met Kirk's mysterious friend, and were still half inclined to think him a creature of their brother's imagination.
And, indeed, when they met him, standing beside the laden tea-table on the terrace, they thought him scarcely more of an actuality, so utterly in keeping was he with the dreaming garden and the still house. Felicia, who had not quite realized the depth of friendship which had grown between this old gentleman and her small brother, noted with the familiar strangeness of a dream the proprietary action with which the Maestro drew Kirk to him, and Kirk's instant and unconscious response. These were old and dear friends; Ken and Felicia had for a moment the curious sensation of being intruders in a forgotten corner of enchanted land, into which the likeness of their own Kirk had somehow strayed. But the feeling passed quickly. The Maestro behind the silver urn was a human being, after all, talking of the Sturgis Water Line--a most delightful human being, full of kindliness and humor. Kirk was really their own, too. He leaned beside Felicia's chair, stirring his tea and she slipped an arm about him, just to establish her right of possession.
The talk ran on the awakening of Applegate Farm, the rose-bush, lessons in the orchard, many details of the management of this new and exciting life, which the Maestro's quiet questioning drew unconsciously from the eager Sturgises.
"We've been talking about nothing but ourselves, I'm afraid," Felicia said at last, with pink cheeks. She rose to go, but Kirk pulled her sleeve. No afternoon at the Maestro's house was complete for him without music, it seemed, and it was to the piano that the Maestro must go; please, please! So, through the French windows that opened to the terrace, they entered the room which Kirk had never been able to describe, because he had never seen it. Ken and Phil saw it now--high and dim and quiet, with book-lined walls, and the shapes of curious and beautiful things gleaming here and there from carved cabinet and table.
The Maestro sat down at the piano, thought for a moment, and then, smiling, rippled into the first bars of a little air which none of his listeners had ever before heard. Eerily it tripped and chimed and lilted to its close, and the Maestro swung about and faced them, smiling still, quizzically.
"What does it mean?" he asked. "I am very curious to know. Is it merely a tune--or does it remind you of something!"
The Sturgises pondered. "It's like spring," Felicia said; "like little leaves fluttering."
"Yes, it is," Ken agreed. "It's a song of some sort, I think--that is, it ought to have words. And it's spring, all right. It's like--it's like--"
"It's like those toads!" Kirk said suddenly. "Don't you know? Like little bells and flutes, far off--and fairies."
The Maestro clapped his hands.
"I have not forgotten how, then," he said. "Ithaswords, Kenelm. I hope--I hope that you will not be very angry with me."
He played the first twinkling measures again, and then began to sing:
"Down in the marshes the sounds beginOf a far-away fairy violin,Faint and reedy and cobweb thin."
Cobweb thin, the accompaniment took up the plaintive chirping till the Maestro sang the second verse.
"I say," said Ken, bolt upright in his chair. "Isay!"
"Areyou angry?" asked the Maestro. He flung out his hands in a pleading gesture. "Will he forgive me, Kirk?"
"Why, why--it 's beautiful, sir!" Ken stammered. "It's only--that I don't see how you ever got hold of those words. It was just a thing I made up to amuse Kirk. He made me say it to him over and over, about fifty-nine times, I should say, till I'm sure I was perfectly sick of it."
"Having heard it fifty-nine times," said the old gentleman, "he was able to repeat it to me, and I took the opportunity to write it off on a bit of paper, because, my dear boy, I liked it."
"A lovely, scrumptious tune," said Kirk. "It makes it nicer than ever."
"What do you say," said the Maestro, "to our giving this unsurpassed song to the world at large?"
"Do you mean having it printed?" Felicia asked quickly, "Oh, what fun!" She beamed at Ken, who looked happy and uncomfortable at once.
"I'm afraid I 'm too unknown, sir," he said. "I--I never thought of such a thing."
"Perhaps," said the Maestro, with a smile, "the composer is sufficiently well known to make up for the author's lack of fame."
Ken's face grew a shade redder. "Of course," he stammered. "Oh, I beg your pardon."
"Then the permission is granted?"
Quite naturally, Ken granted it, with what he thought ill-worded thanks, and the Sturgises walked home across the meadow without knowing on what they trod.
"A real author!" Felicia said. "Itoldyou that wasn't a pome, when I first heard it."
But Ken chose to be severe and modest, and frowned on the "Toad Song"--as it was familiarly called--for a topic of conversation. And as weeks slid by, the whole affair was almost forgotten at Applegate Farm.
Those were weeks during which the Maestro, from the shadowy hero of Kirk's tales, became a very real part of this new life that was slowly settling to a familiar and loved existence. The quiet garden and the still old house became as well known to Ken and Felicia as to their brother, and, indeed, the Maestro might often have been seen in the living-room at Applegate Farm, listening to Kirk's proud performance on the melodeon, and eating one of Phil's cookies.
Ken had not much time for these visits. The Sturgis Water Line was so popular that he could not even find a spare day or two in which to haul out theDutchmanand give her the "lick of paint" she needed. He had feared that, with the filling of the cottages at the beginning of the season, business would fall off, but so many weekly visitors came and went at the hotels that theDutchmanrarely made a trip entirely empty, and quite often she was forced to leave, till the next time, a little heap of luggage which even her wide cockpit could not carry. Sometimes Ken made an extra trip, which brought him back to the pier at Asquam as the first twilight was gathering.
He had just come in from such an "extra," one day during the busy Fourth of July weekend, and climbed out upon the wharf when the shadows of the pile-heads stretched darkly up the streetway. Hop fastened the tail-board of his wagon behind the last trunk, rubbed his hands, and said:
"Wife sent ye down some pie. Thought ye desarved it a'ter runnin' up 'n' down all day."
He produced the pie, wrapped up in a paper, from under the seat, and presented it to Ken with a flourish and a shuffle that were altogether characteristic. Supper was waiting at Applegate Farm, Ken knew, but the pie-- which was a cherry one, drippy and delectable --was not to be resisted, after long hours on the water. He bit into it heartily as he left Asquam and swung into Pickery Lane.
He hurried along, still wrapped in the atmosphere which had surrounded him all day. He felt still the lift of the boat over the short swell, he smelled the pleasant combination of salt, and gasolene, and the whiff of the hayfields, and his eyes still kept the glare and the blue, and the swinging dark shape of theDutchman'sbows as he headed her down the bay. Just before he reached Winterbottom Road, he saw, rather vaguely through the twilight, the figures of a man and a small hoy, coming toward him. They had, apparently, seen him, also, for the man walked more quickly for a step or two, then stopped altogether, and finally turned sharply off the road and swung the child over a stone wall, with a quick remark which Ken did not hear.
He did hear, however, the child's reply, for it was in a clear and well-known voice. It said: "I don't thinkthiscan be the way. I didn't come over a wall."
The remainder of the cherry pie dropped to the dust of the Winterbottom Road. Not more than three gigantic leaps brought Ken to the spot; he vaulted the wall with a clean and magnificent spring that would have won him fame at school. The man was a stranger, as Ken had thought--an untidy and unshaven stranger. He was not quite so tall as Ken, who seized him by the arm.
"May I ask where you're going?" roared Ken, at which the small boy leaped rapturously, fastened himself to Ken's coat-tail, and cried:
"Oh, I'm so glad it's you! I started to come and meet you, and I walked farther than I meant, and I got lost, and I met this person, and he said he'd take me home, and--"
"Shut up!" said Ken. "And let go of me!"at which Kirk, thoroughly shocked, dropped back as though he could not believe his ears.
"I was takin' the kid home," muttered the man, "just like he says."
"Why were you going in exactly the opposite direction, then?" Ken demanded.
As he leaped abreast of the man, who was trying to back away, the day's receipts of the Sturgis Water Line jingled loudly in his trousers pocket. The stranger, whose first plan had been so rudely interfered with, determined on the instant not to leave altogether empty-handed, and planted a forcible and unexpected blow on the side of Ken's head. Ken staggered and went down, and Kirk, who had been standing dangerously near all this activity, went down on top of him. It so happened that he sprawled exactly on top of the trousers pocket aforesaid, and when the man sought, with hasty and ungentle hands, to remove him from it, Kirk launched a sudden and violent kick, in the hope of its doing some execution.
Kirk's boots were stout, and himself horrified and indignant; his heel caught the stranger with full force in the temple, and the man, too, was added to the prostrate figures in the darkening field. Two of them did not long remain prostrate. Ken lurched, bewildered, to his feet, and seeing his foe stretched by some miracle upon the ground, he bundled Kirk over the wall and followed giddily. Stumbling down the shadowy road, with Kirk's hand in his, he said:
"That was good luck. I must have given the gentleman a crack as he got me."
"He was trying to steal your money, I think," Kirk said. "I was lying on top of you, so I kicked him, hard."
"Oh,thatwas it, was it?" Ken exclaimed. "Well, very neat work, even if not sporting. By the way, excuse me for speaking to you the way I did, but it wasn't any time to have a talk. You precious, trusting little idiot, don't you know better than to go off with the first person who comes along?"
"He said he'd take me home," Kirk said plaintively. "I told him where it was."
"You've got to learn," said his brother, stalking grimly on in the dusk, "that everybody in the world isn't so kind and honest as the people you've met so far. That individual was going to take you goodness knows where, and not let us have you back till we'd paid him all the money we have in the world. If I hadn't come along just at that particular moment, that's what would have happened.
Kirk sniffed, but Ken went on relentlessly:
"What were you doing outside the gate, anyway? You're not allowed there. I don't like your going to the Maestro's, even, but at least it's a safe path. There are automobiles on Winterbottom Road, and they suppose that you can see 'em and get out of their way. I'm afraid we'll have to say that you can't leave the house without Phil or me."
Ken was over-wrought, and forgot that his brother probably was, also. Kirk wept passionately at last, and Ken, who could never bear to see his tears, crouched penitent in the gloom of the road, to dry his eyes and murmur tender apologies. At the gate of the farm, Ken paused suddenly, and then said:
"Let's not say anything about all this to Phil; she'd just be worried and upset. What do you say?"
"Don't let's," Kirk agreed. They shook hands solemnly, and then turned to the lighted windows of Applegate Farm. But it would not have been so easy to keep the unpleasant adventure secret, or conceal from Felicia that something had been wrong, if she herself had not been so obviously cherishing a surprise. She had thought that Kirk was waiting at the gate for Ken, and so had been spared any anxiety on that score. She could hardly wait for Ken to take off his sweater and wash his hands. Supper was on the table, and it was to something which lay beside her elder brother's plate that her dancing eyes kept turning.
Ken, weary with good cause, sat down with a sigh, and then leaned forward as if an electric button had been touched somewhere about his person.
"What--well, by Jiminy!" shouted Ken. "I never believed it, never!"
"It's real," Phil said excitedly; "it looks just like a real one."
"What?"Kirk asked wildly; "tell me what!"
Ken lifted the crisp new sheet of music and stared at it, and then read aloud the words on the cover.
"Fairy Music," it said--and his name was there, and the Maestro's, and "net price, 60ยข" "like a real one," indeed. And within were flights of printed notes, and the words of the "Toad Pome" in cold black and white. And above them, in small italics, "Dedicated to Kirkleigh Sturgis."
"Just like Beethoven's things to the Countess von Something, don't you know!" Phil murmured, awed and rapturous.
When Ken laid the pages down at last, Kirk seized on them, and though they could mean nothing to him but the cool smoothness of paper and the smell of newly dried printers' ink, he seemed to get an immense satisfaction from them.
But the surprise was not yet over. Beneath the copy of the song lay a much smaller bit of paper, long, narrow, and greenish. It bore such words asCentral Trust Company, andPay to the Order of Kenelm Sturgis. The sum which was to be paid him was such as to make Ken put a hand dramatically to his forehead. He then produced from his pocket the money which had so nearly gone off in the pocket of the stranger, and stacked it neatly beside his plate.
"One day's bone labor for man and boat," he said. "Less than a quarter as much as what I get for fifteen minutes' scribbling."
"And the Maestro says there'll be more," Felicia put in; "because there are royalties, which I don't understand."
"But," said Ken, pursuing his line of thought, "I can depend on theDutchmanand my good right arm, and Ican'tdepend on the Pure Flame of Inspiration, or whatever it's called, so methinks the Sturgis Water Line will make its first trip at 8:30 promptly to-morrow morning, as advertised. All the same," he added jubilantly, "what a tremendous lark it is, to be sure!"
And he gave way suddenly to an outburst of the sheer delight which he really felt, and, leaping up, caught Felicia with one hand and Kirk with the other. The three executed for a few moments a hilarious ring-around-a-rosy about the table, till Felicia finally protested at the congealing state of the supper, and they all dropped breathless to their seats and fell to without more words.
After supper, Felicia played the Toad Song on the melodeon until it ran in all their heads, and Kirk could be heard caroling it, upstairs, when he was supposed to be settling himself to sleep.
It was not till Ken was bending over the lamp, preparatory to blowing it out, that Phil noticed the bruise above his eye.
"How did you get that, lamb?" she said, touching Ken's forehead, illuminated by the lamp's glow.
Ken blew out the flame swiftly, and faced his sister in a room lit only by the faint, dusky reflection of moonlight without.
"Oh, I whacked up against something this afternoon," he said. "I'll put some witch-hazel on it, if you like."
"I'm soawfullyglad about the Toad Song," whispered Felicia, slipping her hand within his arm. "Good old brother!"
"Good old Maestro," said Ken; and they went arm in arm up the steep stairs.
Ken lighted his sister's candle for her, and took his own into the room he shared with Kirk. There was no fear of candle-light waking Kirk. He was very sound asleep, with the covers thrown about, and Ken stood looking at him for some time, with the candle held above his brother's tranquil face. "I wonder where he'd have been sleeping to-night if I hadn't come along just about when I did?" mused Ken. "The innocent little youngster--he never supposed for a minute that the rapscallion would do anything but take him home. How's he ever going to learn all the ways of the wicked world? And whateverpossessed him to shoot off the Toad Pome to the Maestro?"
Ken put the candle on the bureau and undid his necktie.
"The blessed little goose!" he added affectionately.
There is nothing like interesting work to make time pass incredibly quickly. For the Sturgises were interested in all their labors, even the "chores" of Applegate Farm. It goes without saying that Kirk's music--which was the hardest sort of work--absorbed him completely; he lived in a new world. So, almost before they could believe it, September came, filling the distance with tranquil haze, and mellowing the flats to dim orange, threaded with the keen blue inlets of the bay. Asters began to open lavender stars at the door-stone of Applegate Farm; tall rich milkweed pressed dusty flower-bunches against the fence, and the sumach brandished smoldering pyramids of fire along the roadsides.
Ken came home late, whistling, up from Asquam. Trade for the Sturgis Water Line was heavy again just now; the hotels and cottages were being vacated every day, and more baggage than theDutchmancould carry lay piled in the Sturgis "warehouse" till next morning. Ken's whistle stopped as he swung into Winterbottom Road and began to climb the hill. Just at the crest of the rise, where the pale strip of road met the twilight of the sky, the full moon hung, a golden disc scarcely more luminous than the sky around it. As he moved up the hill, it moved also, till it floated clear of the dark juniper-trees and stood high above them. Crickets were taking up their minor creaking, and there was no other sound.
Through the half dusk, the white chimneys of Applegate Farm showed vaguely, with smoke rising so lazily that it seemed almost a stationary streak of blue across the trees. What a decent old place it was, thought Ken. Was it only because it constituted home? No; they had worked to make it so, and it had ripened and expanded under their hands.
"I shouldn't mind Mother's seeing it, now," Ken reflected.
He sighed as he remembered the last difficult letter which he and Phil had composed--a strictly truthful letter, which said much and told nothing. He wondered how much longer the fiction would have to be sustained; when the doctor at Hilltop would sanction a revelation of all that had been going on since that desolate March day, now so long ago.
As Ken neared the house, he heard the reedy voice of the organ, and, stopping beside the lighted window, looked in. Felicia was mending beside the lamp; Kirk sat at the melodeon, rapturously making music. From the somewhat vague sweetness of the melody, Ken recognized it as one of Kirk's own compositions--without beginning, middle, or end, but with a gentle, eerie harmony all its own. The Maestro, who was thoroughly modern in his instruction, if old-school himself, was teaching composition hand in hand with the other branches of music, and he allowed himself, at times, to become rather enthusiastic. "Even if I didn't want him to make music of his own," he told Felicia, "I couldn't stop him. So I supply the bricks and mortar for the foundation. He might as well build his little tunes rightly from the beginning. He will go far--yes, far. It is sheer harmony." And the Maestro would sigh deeply, and nod his fine head.
Ken, remembering these words with some awe, studied his brother's face, through the pane, and then came quietly in at the door. Kirk left his tune unfinished, and launched himself in the direction of Ken, who scooped him into his arms.
"Do you know, Phil," Ken said, voicing at once the thought he had felt all the way up Winterbottom Road; "do you know, I think, after all, this is the very best thing we could have done."
"What?" Phil asked, not being a mind-reader.
"This,"Ken said, sweeping his arm about the lamplit room. "This place. We thought it was such a horrible mistake, at first. Itwasa sort of venture to take."
"A happy venture," Felicia murmured, bending over her sewing. "But it wouldn't have been so happy if the defender of his kindred hadn't slaved on the high seas 'for to maintain his brither and me,' likeHenry Martinin the ballad."
"Oh, fiddlestick!" said Ken. "Who wants to loaf around? Speaking of loaf, I'm hungry."
"Supper's doing itself on the stove," Phil said. "Look lively with the table, Kirk."
Kirk did so,--his efficiency as a table-setter had long since been proved,--and Ken, as the weary breadwinner, stretched out in a chair.
"Did you happen to remember," said Felicia, coming to the door, spoon in hand, "that the Kirk has a birthday this week?"
"Ithas?" exclaimed Ken. "I say, I'd forgotten."
"It's going to be nine; think of that!" said Phil. "Woof! My kettle's boiling over!" She made a hasty exit, while Ken collared his brother and looked him over.
Who'd ha' thunk it!" he said. "Well, well, what's to be done about this?"
"Lots," said Felicia, suddenly appearing with the supper. "Lots!"