Chapter XVII.
After a night of blissful rest in his own bed at home, Frank wrote with absolute good will to Mr. North, delivering over to his ownership theClover, then in care of a boatman at Long Wharf, in New Haven.
Frank was a happy, contented hero for a whole week, petted and noticed by whomsoever he was met. At the end of that time he went from this condition of affairs to be only “the new boy from the country” in General Russell’s school.
We may not stay to give the history of Frank’s school days, nor of the trials he there met. At Christmas he was expected home.
Kate subdued and endured her loneliness from day to day, her chief relief from Frank’s absence being found in writing to him long, loving letters, in which, very soon, many lines began to be taken up with the lovely times she was having at her drawing and painting lessons. Kate began to feel the stir of a growing affection for form and color. She scarcely understood the feeling; she did not try to understand its development; but she ran across the marsh bridge with every bit of fresh achievement, whether of pencilor brush, to show the same to delighted Mrs. Dobson and critical Harry.
Harry was exceedingly industrious in those days—more so than ever before. Harry had all the joy of an old miser in his well-stored crops, and he knew just when and where he could find sale for them.
For a number of days Mr. Hallock had returned from business bearing a brighter face, and Kate firmly believed that the old, bothersome days of trouble were passing away. Kate did not mind wearing last year’s dresses one bit; and as for last winter’s hat and cloak, the only day on which she sighed for better raiment was the one on which she went to call upon Frank at the school, and that sigh and wish were altogether on Frank’s account; but when he whispered to her, as she was leaving, “Kate, I say, I haven’t seen a girl in New Haven half so good-looking as you are,” she thought no more of old-fashioned hat or cloak, and would have been willing to wear even the precious old bonnet safely stored away in a big yellow bandbox in the garret at the Point—the bonnet that had been worn by her great-grandmother. Anything Kate would have worn to call forth such a remark from Frank.
The evening of the day on which the first snow fell that year, Kate drove Neptune to the station to meet her father, and her brightest smile faded before his sad, careworn face. She knew at a glance that some new thing to worry him had happened; so, on the bit of journey home, she tried her utmost to tell him of every cheery crumb of news that she could think of, and appeared not to notice any unusual thing about his manner.
That night Frank’s school-bill came. Mr. Hallock, forgetful of Kate’s presence, looked at it and laid it down with a long sigh.
“May I see, papa?” was the first intimation he received that she had heard.
“Yes, Kate; and you may pay it, if you like,” he replied, with a cheerless attempt at a smile.
Kate looked at it.
“What a lot of money!” she said. Presently, after a minute’s thought, she asked: “Papa, have you got the money to pay this?”
“No, my child. At present I have not.”
“Would Neptune do it?”
“Neptune?”
“Why, yes. Don’t you remember asking me one day if I would sell him? and I will, papa, if it is to somebody who will treat him kindly and love him.”
“Kate, my dear, perhaps I may be compelled to take your offer; but we will see about it; and if I do, you shall have the finest pony—”
“O, papa! don’t,” cried Kate. “I don’t want any other pony, not as long as I live; it’s so dreadful to love anything that can be bought and sold. I will try never to do it again,” and Kate made excuse to leave the room, fearing that she should spoil her offer by crying. Kate had been a long time in coming to the point of being willing to give Neptune up; but now that she had made the sacrifice in so many words, she was resolved not to cry about it—not if she could help it; but feeling very greatly the need of more sympathy than Neptune could give, and not wishing to makeknown her grief to her mother, she carried her little moan over to Mrs. Dobson; and finding her all alone in the house, Kate had a good cry, and felt better by the time Harry came in; so much better, indeed, that she looked up, smiling at him, and said: “Neptune is going some day before long. I’ve told papa he might sell him; and please, I don’t want anybody to say they are sorry for me, ’cause it isn’t myself that I’m sorry for, but Neptune”; and Kate bit her lip to keep it from quivering into another spasm of crying.
“Who is going to buy Neptune?”
The question came from Harry, who somehow did not seem to feel half as much sympathy for Kate as that young girl thought he ought to feel; and a bit of indignation, more at him than at the talked-of sale, escaped her lips in the words,
“O, anybody who wants him!”
“Why, Kittie, my Clover, didn’t you tell me not ten minutes ago that Neptune was to be sold only to somebody who would be ever so kind to him?” questioned Mrs. Dobson, with a bit of self-assertion quite unusual in her manner, if not in her words.
“Anybody could promise, but I should not be there to see the kindness or the cruelty. O, I wonder what makes God let men be so cruel! I pray and pray, every time I see a horse whipped and jerked, and made to carry too big a load, that some awful thing may happen to the men who do it! O, I wouldn’t touch a cent of money, not if I starved, that was made out of the horse-railroads in New York—such dreadful, dreadful loads as the poor things are made to carry, and everything! I don’t think it is a bit worse—”
But Kate did not finish; she was ready to cry. Harry, foreseeing what would happen, took a letter from his pocket and held it up before her face, saying:
“Just see! What news!—from Michigan, too—from one of the Huxtables!”
And Harry opened it and began to read, but the heart of the letter he kept to himself, not feeling able to have anyone bear it with him.
On the night when Frank was out in the fog, Harry, waiting in his room for the approach of low tide, wrote the first letter he had sent back to his old home since he had found a new one, and this was the response, and this was the portion of the letter he had kept to himself: “Last summer there was a real nice man—ever so rich, folks say, whose name was Mr. Ludlow, from Maine, out here looking for you. He went everywhere, where anybody about here told him you might have gone; and then when he couldn’t find you anywhere, he put it in the papers, asking where you were. We kept one awhile, but I can’t find it now; but he told me he was your Uncle Horace; and you must find him out, mother says, right off; and there’s some land out here that belongs to you, that Mr. Ludlow found out about, and he’s taking care of it till you’re found.”
Now Harry had had a whole mile of a walk in which to sober down, after hearing this great, good news for himself; and he very quickly foresaw what might come of it, not only to himself, but to his best friends, and he resolved to keep it all to himself until he could find out the best thing to do; and it was theeffect of this letter that Kate Hallock felt, although she knew not of it.
“I’m ever so glad you’ve heard from your friends, Harry,” said Kate, preparing to go home; “and, for my part, I don’t see why that queer uncle of yours up or down in Maine isn’t looking you up.”
Harry’s face grew very red—and Harry wasn’t given to blushing. Had he stood where Kate’s quick eyes had read more of the letter than he did? But no; he had stood with the last of the sunlight coming through the window on his letter and Kate was where it was impossible to overlook it. Surely Kate had a very curious manner of feeling things that she could not see. He opened the door for her departure, and, closing it after himself, he said:
“Let me go across with you, Kittie. When the snow and ice come, we can’t slip over the near way any more.”
Over the stone wall they went, down the slope and through the meadow, and they had even emerged from the bit of woods before Harry found courage to ask:
“When you know of anybody who wants to buy Neptune, Kittie, will you come right away and tell me, because I know of a person who would like to own him?”
“Who is it? Anybody in this town?” quickly questioned Kate.
“There is a reason why I can’t tell you who it is; but if the time comes, you remember—”
“I will, Harry,” promised Kate; and on the Point side of the marsh they parted.
Before Christmas the snow came down for three days in succession. It became doubtful whether or not sufficient laurel, pine and hemlock could be unsnowed from the forests and river hills to afford the usual Christmas furnishings for the churches. The marsh bridge was buried deep from sight, and one vast gleam of white extended from the house on the Point to the house in the Lane, broken only by the bit of forest that lay between, whilst a round of snow showed where the stone fences lay.
The ice began to grow in the harbor and stretch downward and outward into the bay. Every morning more and more of the Sound was frozen over. It was a cold, cold time, the coldest that had been known in many years. Harry Cornwall was compelled to assist Josh in bringing in the wood, for that industrious dog could not fetch it fast enough to supply the fires it became necessary to build to keep everything from freezing up.
The Lane, from Mrs. Dobson’s, seaward, had not been broken, when, a few days before the twenty-fifth of December, Neptune appeared, shaking his merrybells adown the snowclad way. Not a dozen sleighs had been before him since the snow fell. It was Kate and her mother whom he was taking to pay Mrs. Dobson a little visit.
“Mamma, what if it shouldn’t be?” ejaculated Kate, as they reached the house, adding immediately, “I wonder that Harry didn’t hear us coming,” for Harry did not appear.
“Now, Kate,” added Mrs. Hallock, “I warn you once more not to say anything to spoil it all.”
“You may trust me, mamma,” returned Kate, tossing the blanket over Neptune and carefully adjusting it; “only I do so want it to be really and awfully true.”
To be very brief, the apparent object of this visit was to invite Mrs. Dobson and Harry to spend Christmas at the Point; the real object was to ask certain questions regarding the young captain who went to sea so many years ago. Not that he had been heard from, but there had appeared a man, unearthed as it were from an asylum for the insane, in a distant state, about whom a number of persons had become curious to learn more. After thirty years of insanity he had begun to show signs of a restored intellect and claimed to be—well, no less a person thantheCaptain Dobson who was master of theSnow.
The story he told was singularly deficient in dates and details, but he was steadfast in his adherence to the statement concerning his native state and town, and remembered nothing between his life under a torrid sun on an uninhabited island, whither he drifted from his sinking ship, and his present state and condition.
The state in question claimed from Connecticut the money due for the support of one of her insane citizens for thirty years, and investigation in this matter led to Mr. Hallock’s learning the before-unheard-of circumstances.
Not a word of all this must reach Mrs. Dobson, although the old town was alive and bubbling over with excitement on the subject.
Mrs. Hallock had undertaken the mission to ask Mrs. Dobson certain questions, but as the moment drew close, she would gladly have relinquished the task.
“Be real brave, mamma!” whispered Kate, the second before the door was opened to admit them.
There was Mrs. Dobson, in the sweetest of moods, and snowiest of caps, making mince pies.
“I’m so glad you’ve come, ’cause I know Harry don’t know how to go to your house to-day, and I just wanted to know if you would not come to the old house and take Christmas dinner with me this year, you and Frank, and his friends, if they come.”
Before Mrs. Hallock had time to thank her, or decline her invitation, she went on to say, “This year has been an amazing good year. I never felt so prosperous and as if I wantedto keep Thanksgiving all the timeas I do now, and I believe I’ve fairly done with the foolishness of looking out on every feast day for the Captain. How he must pity me, if he is permitted to look down and know how I’ve watched for him!”
“Why, grandma,” said Kate, rocking the blue chair in which she sat until she made the floor creak, “what kind of a man was it that you looked for when you did look? He must be very brown, and dried, and kind of grizzly by this time, living nobody knows where, mustn’t he?”
Mrs. Dobson had taken her hands from the work she was doing and sat down to talk to her guests. In reply to Kate’s question, she said: “Kittie, I’m onlywaiting for you to get to be the great artist I know you’re going to be, to get you to paint his picture for me.”
“O, I will!” exclaimed Kate. “But what will there be about him that isn’t a bit like other men?”
“There will be two crowns upon the top of his head, the hair of one must be black and the hair of the other must be red,” replied Mrs. Dobson, “only I don’t see exactly how you can make that show in a portrait.”
Kate suddenly ceased to work, bit her lip and tried to avoid looking at her mother.
“I think we can manage it somehow,” said Kate. “Perhaps we could paint him saying his prayers on occasion of your marriage in the church.”
“We were not married in church; we were married at home, and everybody stood straight up and Captain Dobson was the tallest man in the room,” said Mrs. Dobson.
“Did they wear gloves then?” asked Mrs. Hallock.
“Yes,” returned Mrs. Dobson, “but Captain Dobson never liked to wear gloves, because one little finger was gone, and he said it made him feel as though he didn’t know what to do with that glove finger a-hanging.”
It did not take a half dozen questions more—not one of which seemed to arouse Mrs. Dobson’s curiosity—to learn all that was desired. The description of the man corresponded with the statement Mrs. Dobson made, save that the black crown had come to be white.
“Mrs. Dobson,” said Mrs. Hallock, “our errand here was to ask you to take Christmas dinner with us; but this year, since you have been so kind, we will come to you, only you must let me send down an assistant with a few articles that I am sure you will need, to accommodate so large a party.”
They left in haste. Neptune thought his little mistress must be very cross—she snatched the blanket so from his back; and he had been doing his best to stand as still as he could! Straightway to a farmhouse lying four miles from the village they went. It was here that Isaac Dobson, only and younger brother of Captain Dobson, lived; and to him they delivered the photograph and the description that had been sent, together with the story of their late visit to Mrs. Dobson.
“It does seem, if true, a little more like a return from the dead, than anything I ever heard tell of,” said Mr. Isaac Dobson, who looked and appeared like a man who was walking in a fog. “To think that I may see my brother face to face again! Why, I was a little mite of a chap the day he went away, and there was such a crowd on the dock that I was lifted up to see the ship sail.”
“Be sure, Mr. Dobson, that you get him home by Christmas,” cried back Kate, after they had started for home.
“You may trust me to do my best,” he said, and immediately made preparations to go for his long-lost brother.
After the evidence given, it is quite needless to assure the reader that this man was, indeed, the Captain Dobson of this story.
The happenings of Christmas day came in the following manner:
Very early in the morning, long before day-dawn, Mrs. Dobson, on hospitable thoughts intent, was up and doing.
As soon as it was light, Harry, looking across at the Point, saw the signal flying from the tower room that he knew was placed for him.
“Something’s the matter over at the Point; I’m wanted,” he said to Mrs. Dobson. “But I’ll not be gone an instant more than I can help, and you needn’t save any breakfast for me; I’ll keep my appetite for the coming dinner.”
It was Kate who had signalled for Harry, on learning the night before that in the morning a stranger would come to look at Neptune. Very early she was on the outlook for Harry. Frank had arrived late the evening before, and in his uniform looked in some way unusually brave and fine beside Harry in his much-worn suit, that Kate had again and again reminded him was getting a little too old for dress-up wear; but Harry had only smiled an answer and kept on wearing it. Kate would not have said one word had she not been perfectly certain that Harry was able to afford a new outfit.
“Kittie tells me,” said Harry to Mr. Hallock, whom he sought out, “that Neptune is to be sold, and I have found a buyer for you.”
“Who is it?” asked Mr. Hallock, looking keenly at the flushed lad.
“I’m not to tell,” returned Harry, “but you can trust me—can’t you?—that it is someone who will bevery kind to the little horse. I hear that your price is two hundred dollars, and I am authorized to pay the sum to you.”
“Somebody trusts you, my boy,” remarked Mr. Hallock, “and so will I.”
“Thank you, sir. Will to-morrow do for the money?”
“All right, Harry. You shall have Neptune, though it goes very hard for Kate to part with him—very.”
“Not half so hard, papa, just now,” chimed in Kate, who had been lingering about in great excitement, “when it’s Christmas and Captain Dobson—”
“Kate!”
Kate thrust both her hands over her mouth.
“Papa, I think he ought to know,” she added immediately, removing them.
“Tell him, then.”
And Kate poured out the story in a manner as refreshing as a summer shower, ending it with the good news that papa had just received a telegram from Mr. Isaac Dobson that “we will be home on the midday train.”
“And grandma is going to church!” said Harry. “I’m afraid somebody will tell her he’s coming.”
“Not a soul will dare to do it,” remarked Mrs. Hallock. “I would carry the sad news of a death far sooner than this dreadful joy to Mrs. Dobson. We must just wait for the truth to discover itself.”
Grandma Dobson went that Christmas morning, for Kate had the bliss of driving her to the church.
During the service, Mrs. Dobson was pitifully disturbed. Why was it that everybody seemed to regard her with unusual notice? Was it because her bonnet was “on one side”? No, that was not it; and she passed her hands softly over the clustering curls—they were all in place; and who was it, she wondered, for whose safe return from a long absence thanks were given. Who could it be? She hadn’t heard of anybody’s return. She would ask when service was over; but she did not ask, for everybody put the thought of asking far away from her mind. She never knew her townfolks so polite and kind before. Everybody seemed so glad to stop and shake hands and wish her a “Happy Christmas!” Some way she told Kate, who rushed her home over the snow, that she supposed folks thought she was getting too old for a merry Christmas any longer; “But, Kittie, my Clover,” she said, “I am not so very old after all, only fifty-nine; and this Christmas, with you all at the old brown house, will make me quite young again. I do hope Harry has remembered to look into the brick oven after the things I put in.”
“Don’t worry, grandma. Mother was going right over and the cook, and I just this minute caught sight of Frank hiding behind the corner. Go on, Nep.!”
Kate was intensely excited. Had Captain Dobson got there already? Was he in waiting in the house? and, O dear! how would everybody bear it? What a dreadful thing too much joy was, after all!
Frank advanced to assist Mrs. Dobson. The door opened and Mr. Isaac Dobson came out.
“I thought,” he said, “you wouldn’t mind having one more at your Christmas dinner to-day—or three or four, for that matter; so I’ve brought my family over; but we fetched along a roast turkey and some other things with us—so don’t worry.”
“I’m very glad to see you, Isaac. I wonder what will happen next. This is a queer Christmas, I must be allowed to say”; and as she alighted and glanced backward up the Lane, she saw a dozen or more sleighs approaching. Where could they be going?
She hastened forward up the narrow walk, and had not arrived at the door when the foremost sleigh drew up by the side of Neptune, and she discovered old Dr. Paul, minister of the First church, and close behind him the rector of St. John’s with his smiling face.
“Is it a funeral?” she questioned; and then the sweet, tired woman felt a little like crying, or laughing, she did not know which; but Mrs. Hallock had opened the door and said “Come right in. I want to see you a minute before anybody else comes”; and so Mrs. Dobson was led right into the room where Harry was attended so lovingly in the early part of this story, and Kate slipped in behind her; and so the door was closed and the story told as only one sweet, loving woman can tell life’s best story to another woman as sweet and loving.
The words that were said we cannot repeat, nor even express the maze of emotion which filled the heart of Mrs. Dobson—but she arose equal to even that occasion, when Mrs. Hallock reminded her that too great a shock might be disastrous to Captain Dobson, who was like a little child in some things.
“Let him come in, alone,” she said, “and find me here. To think that God has answered my prayer, when I’ve been thinking it wicked to keep on praying so long. Go, Kittie, and let him come in.”
Captain Dobson was in the little bedroom opening from the long kitchen, and from this room also Mrs. Hallock knocked at the door. Captain Dobson opened it, and silently that lady and Kate passed into the little room and through it into the long kitchen, that was half filled with sympathetic friends.
“How did she bear it?” asked one and another.
“Just as we might expect Mrs. Dobson to bear everything,” Mrs. Hallock replied.
Then, without a word or warning, in her sweet childish voice, Kate Hallock began to sing “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” She began alone, but at the second word everybody in the room added voice to voice, and at the close the door into the front room was found standing ajar and Dr. Paul went in. He gravely shook hands with Mrs. Dobson and the Captain, and, after stating the fact that the first marriage ceremony at which he officiated in his ministry among them was that of Captain Dobson and Mrs. Dobson, he said he would now, with the consent of the parties, renew it. “It is too long for the silver-wedding and too short for the golden-wedding, and, my friends, we will call this the Praise God wedding.”
Without in the least intending form or ceremony, Kate Hallock entered the room and stood beside Grandma Dobson and Harry Cornwall found himself very near Captain Dobson. The room was very full,as good Dr. Paul repeated the marriage service over the bride with the silver curls and the man with the calm, grave, happy face. “Not at all grizzly,” Kate admitted.
After that, hunger came down on all the multitude, and so great was the care taken by Mrs. Hallock and Mrs. Isaac Dobson, to say nothing of the contents of the brick oven, that the minister and the rector and all the friends who had come down to witness the dread joy, thought not of Christmas dinner elsewhere that day.
You know already—you must know—that Harry Cornwall had turned his farm-products into money in order to buy Neptune, that he might have the happiness of restoring that loved animal to Kate Hallock, and that the plan was well carried out; and you ought to know that you can never find in the Connecticut Records that the charge for caring for Captain Dobson so many years was ever borne by the state; but you cannot know with what great reluctance we bid Kate and Harry and Frank good-bye.
THE END.
THE END.
THE END.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTESTypos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
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