The Fortune of the Indies/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
INGRAMS PRESENT
THE boys were together in Mark's room. They had finished their studying and sat characteristically—Mark sprawled in a big chair, Alan perched on the edge of the table. The room, talk as the aunts might, was always more or less a confusion of the materials of Mark's latest hobby. At present the desk was strewn with half-breadth plans of patent steel merchant vessels and hastily whittled hull-models of wooden ones. Blocks and boards lay upon the floor and leaned in several of the chairs. Where there are boards and planes and jack-knives there are very probably chips and shavings also, though these were not evident in the lamplight which now illuminated the room. Mark had rather neatly cornered them all behind the door and hoped fervently that the aunts would not make too thorough an investigation of his domain. Alan's room had at one time been almost as much cluttered with wireless apparatus, but his instruments were put away now, still with the war seal of the government upon them.
Both boys had inherited an abstract love of the sea and planned vaguely to follow it some day, but their love of it did not pervade them as did their sister's passion for ships of the Ingram trade. Mark was clever with his hands and head, and had some thought of being a ship-builder and waking the old yards of Resthaven to new life. Alan was more dreamy; he scribbled rather thrilling sea-yarns sometimes, and decided that he would write a book as good as "The Pilot" when he finished school. But much as they loved the sea, and unhappy as they would have been away from the harbor life which had filled all their years, neither of them, I think, had ever longed to stand in the first Mark's stead on the quarter-deck of the Fortune. They would far rather have stood on the bridge of a dreadnaught—the thought of that really did wake the old sea-blood, all a-tingle for a new adventure."Jane's cracked about the model, isn't she?" Mark said now, reflectively.
"I should say!" Alan agreed. "She's on the lookout for it everywhere she goes. Were you there when she came streaming in the other day, half exploding because she'd seen some old model through the window of Cap'n Ben Lockhart's house?"
"No," his brother replied.
"Well, she did," Alan went on, "and didn't dare to go in, and spent an hour snooping around to various windows till she could see the stern, and it turned out to be the Penelope or something."
"I'm just as keen as she is to find it," Mark said.
"Naturally," Alan returned; "so am I. But we don't go around like lunatics because of it."
"She doesn't go around like a lunatic!" Mark cried, suddenly defiant. "She always was a queerish kid. Suppose you had some girl for a sister that was always fiddling around with hair-ribbons and boxes of candy and things."
"Oh, well!" Alan argued, "she wouldn't be our sister. I must say, hair-ribbons aren't Jane's specialty; what's she think that old string looks like, anyway? But I shouldn't object to the boxes of candy."
"Oh, you know what I mean," Mark sighed. "I mean I'd rather have her daffy over the Fortune of the Indies than over some silly lace dress."
"I knew what you meant before," Alan said. "Of course I'd rather. Let's crawl to bed if we want to walk out to Bluff Point before breakfast."
Jane caught up with her brothers next morning before they had reached the end of Chesley Street. She was tripping over a boot-lace which she had not had time to fasten and turning up her coat-collar as she ran.
"Wait!" she gasped to the two figures in the cold gray dawn-light ahead. "I'm coming, too!"
"Oh, you'll freeze," Alan said. "It'll be cold as poison. We're going clear out to the Point."
"I know; that's why I came. I don't care if it's cold.""It's too early," Alan continued. "You ought to be in bed. What would the aunts say? And really, you'll freeze."
"Fiddle-dee-dee," said Jane impolitely. "Come on."
"All right, then," Mark said, "but don't make a fuss if you do get cold."
"I never make a fuss," Jane said. This was quite true, and Mark knew it.
"I really like to have you along," he said gallantly, "but I didn't want you to be uncomfortable."
Jane strode along in terrific steps, her hat over her eyes and her hands in the pockets of the reefer. It did not take much walking to leave Resthaven behind, and very soon the gray cobbled streets gave way to beaten footpaths over rolling fields all dun-colored with matted, frost-hard grass, where dead burrs plucked at the passers-by and shivering arms of silver bay-bushes crackled against them. But up from the water, where the light was beginning to spread slate-color into blue, ran a biting, bracing salt wind, and the Ingrams ran, too, laughing and swinging their arms as they raced each other over the knobbly meadows to the bare, surf-drenched rocks of Bluff Point.
It was at the very corner where bay met sea, and the long Atlantic rollers flung themselves here, cold, cold and white-lipped under the February sky. Great gray waves leaped and shouted and thundered and tore masses of shuddering seaweed from the rocks to fling them back and forth in the swirl of foam. Jane was ecstatic and in her element. Standing upon a rock perilously near the spray-clouds that flew about, she proceeded to indulge silently, but with wild gesticulations, in a form of play-acting which she secretly carried on at times. At this moment it was, of course, the Fortune of the Indies caught off the Horn. The sheets were frozen; the decks were a glare of ice; the main royal was slatting itself to pieces on the yard, and half-frozen men, clutching at slippery jacks, were trying desperately to furl it. Jane was leaning at a dangerous angle over an imaginary taffrail.
"Port, port your helm!" she shouted silently. "My heavens, we're lost!"
Jane was indeed lost. Her gestures shook her balance, her foot slipped on a patch of slimy weed, and she shot into an icy pool just as a wave broke thunderously into it. She was not hurt in the least, and scrambled out, dripping, before a white-faced Mark had done more than wet one leg to the knee. Her hair hung straight over her face and the blue tape was around her neck. Her hat had gone out to sea. Mark snatched off her reefer and pushed her into his own mackinaw.
"Run!" he said; "as fast as ever you can! Good gracious, how her teeth are chattering! Slap your arms, too."
They did run—Jane's brothers, alternately contrite, terrified, and angry, gasping mixed scoldings and encouragements all the way home. They tiptoed in at the garden door, listened breathlessly in the hall, and stole past the aunts' rooms. Mark routed from the shell cabinet a cut glass decanter full of anciently mellow peach brandy and poured Jane a dose which undoubtedly saved her from pneumonia, though it made her head spin. When Aunt Lucia came to wake her grand-niece, she never suspected the hot water bottle beneath the quilt, nor saw the wet clothes surreptitiously drying behind a screen at the radiator.
Jane was composed and demure at breakfast, and wore her best hat to school. Mark and Alan ate hastily and silently. Jane said to them, as she stepped out upon the door-stone:
"I didn't mind. Suppose you really were frozen on the yard; it would be much awfuller."
Which, considering that they knew nothing of the cause of Jane's ducking, mystified the boys exceedingly. They looked after her, down Chesley Street. She appeared to be studying her French history, which she had again forgotten. Mark shook his head.
"What do you suppose she'll ever tell the aunts about her hat?" he asked his brother reflectively, as they set out for school. As a matter of fact, no one ever did find out what Jane said about her hat, or, indeed, thought again of hats, old or best. This was because of the astounding news—astounding, certainly, to the Ingram family—which Mark and Alan brought back from school that day and laid before their wondering relatives.