The Fortune of the Indies/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
A SHIP DROPS ANCHOR
THE snowdrop was a nice thing. It was speedily joined by three others, and these took some of Jane's attention next day. The thick, choking, autumn leaves must be pushed back from the small pale stems, and while she was at that business it was quite natural to do a good deal of poking at all the beds, to partly uncover a lot of small green adventurers, jubilant at seeing the sun. Thus it was that Jane was in the garden, very damp as to boots and muddy as to fingers, when the door-bell rang without her hearing it. The aunts were taking naps, so the small servant, as silently as might be, took the matter in her own hands. When a man drove off again, whistling, Jane—also whistling—was still in the garden.
She came in at tea-time, to find her brothers standing in the hall looking at something.
"What's in your box, old lady?" Mark inquired.
"What box?" said Jane, pushing out of her eyes a wisp of hair which had escaped the blue string.
"My stars, if you could see what you did to your face!" Alan commented.
Jane regarded a muddy thumb dubiously, and then blew mightily at the refractory lock, which immediately floated down again, however.
"What box?" she repeated.
"This one," Mark said, stepping aside and kicking it.
To be sure, it was a big box, addressed to Miss J. Ingram.
"Mercy, I never laid eyes on it!" exploded Jane. "Look at the size of it! What in the world? Get something to open it with, somebody!"
"You can't pull it open with your hands," Alan said. "Easy on! We'll have it open in half a shake with the jimmy."
The aunts, a little short-sighted after their naps, were in the hall now, peeping and wondering, and cautioning against excelsior all over the rug. But there was no excelsior: Bits of tissue paper began to stick up as Mark scrunched out nail after nail and bent back the boards of the lid. The top of a little black stick protruded from it—and then Jane felt her heart give a queer bob that made her feel weak all over.
"Let me! Let me!" she begged. "Oh, it can't be!"
But, as she groped down into the box, her hands knew—all tangled in the packing, but unmistakable—down the tall mast, the moonsail, the skysail, the royal, the topgallant, the topsails, the main course—and at the stern, she knew, a dimly golden scroll on which was carved, Fortune of the Indies, Resthaven.
Even the aunts could not protest at the wild way in which paper flew about the hall now. They stood patting one another's arms and watching the mad young shouting Ingrams uncovering bit by bit the lost model, knocking out the cleats that held it fast. Then Jane untied from the spanker-boom a small envelope, and whipped out the card within.
After many wanderings, what ship is not rejoiced to find her voyages ended and to slip back gently to her home port? The Fortune of the Indies lies fathoms deep in far waters, but her little image returns to drop anchor at Ingram Wharf and to put herself under the special command of Captain J. Ingram.
There was no signature, but none was needed. The aunts, who were old, wept a little, and Jane merely remained on her knees where she had dropped to investigate the box, till Mark and Alan had each to seize an arm and beg her to "come out of it."
The reinstatement of the ship above the mantel was rather a state occasion. It was done after supper, with some ceremony. The "rare old print" was banished, and Mark and Alan, assisted by Jane and a step-ladder, installed the Fortune of the Indies in its old place. Then they lighted the candles in the sconces at either side and all sat in a row on the davenport, staring till you would have thought them daft. Jane's letter to Mr. Bolliver was written that night in the office. It was more sincere than coherent, and filled sheet after sheet with ecstatic scribbling which grew larger and larger and more and more earnest toward the end of the letter.
And much later that night, when she was supposed to be sensibly asleep in bed, Jane woke in the moonlight and got up. She took the blankets from her bed and went cautiously downstairs with them. She curled herself up on the davenport and turned her face to the lovely lost ship. The moonlight shimmered through the small long panes and silvered the sails. So Jane slept.
I wish I could record that simultaneously with the return of the Fortune of the Indies came a turn in the fortunes of the Ingrams. This, however, was not the case. Each young Ingram nursed a wholly secret and somewhat shamefaced hope that this might be so, and that a hitherto unknown relative might die in India, leaving to them several thousand lakhs of rupees or a few rubies as large as hens' eggs. No such news reached them, unfortunately, and the ship merely continued to hang above the mantel in a proud sort of state, holding her secret, if she had one, with praiseworthy silence. She was religiously dusted each day by her worshipper, Jane, who flicked a turkey-feather brush at her with as much tenderness and dignity as possible.
So came spring, with the smallest pale leaves on the elm-trees of Chesley Street, and daffodils and hyacinths and squills and crocuses in the border, and forsythia scattering golden bells on the new grass; and then rosy weigelia in stout bold clumps under the office-window, and little pink maple-fingers tapping at Jane's casement. All this was delightful, for spring is nowhere so lovely as in Resthaven, with always a glint of blue harbor between young leaves and the smell of salt mingling with the fragrance of hyacinths. There are wild spring flowers, too—hepatica and anemone in the thin woods inland—and out on Bluff Point, if one has patience to look, all manner of lowly, lovely, green things waking. There is one fine hawthorn out there, too, that holds up a glad armful of pink and white stars to the racing wind.
All this, I say, was delightful; but with the flowers and the first song-sparrows came also the first sea-fogs, very thick and very damp. All the doors in Ingram Mansion stuck fast, as they did every spring, and certain floor-boards began creaking which had not creaked all winter. Also the Fortune of the Indies, after seventy years of knocking about in strange havens without mishap, suddenly swelled and sprung a seam and began to bulge ominously along her bottom planking. Jane discovered it and fled horrified, duster in hand, to the boys, who were having Easter vacation. Mark, who, as I have said, thought of being a ship-builder one day, came to look at the damage; and said that a short time in drydock under his experienced supervision would make the Fortune seaworthy once more.
So the step-ladder was brought into play again, and the little ship borne off by Mark to his room, which, despite the aunts' mild protests, still looked more like a carpenter-shop than was seemly. Here, with Jane at his elbow, he investigated the trouble and prescribed the necessary repairs. It was a matter of careful pressure and gluing, it appeared, and a section of the inner sheathing must be removed in order to get at the sprung seam. So Mark rolled up his sleeves, pried off the hatch, and plunged his arm into the black and musty hold of the little clipper.
"Dust and everything," he commented, groping. "And old pieces of newspaper and junk," he added, clawing out a handful of rumpled paper and dropping it beneath the table. "Now stand by, Jane, and help me."
But Jane had disappeared under the table, whence she spoke indistinctly.
"Wait a minute! I'm after the paper. It might be old and interesting."
Old it certainly was—yellow and frail. Jane, upright again, was unfolding it carefully.
"It isn't newspaper at all," she said, and then was silent, with a sudden silence that made Mark glance up quickly. He looked over her shoulder.
"My stars!" he said.
For the paper was completely covered with fine characters that looked Chinese, and at the bottom it was signed by the first Mark Ingram in flowing yellow script. Neither dared to guess what it could be. It all seemed too improbable, too like a story-book. They could not even hazard an opinion about a document so romantically found. They flew to the aunts with it, and the aunts put on their spectacles and peered and shook their heads. That it 
"It isn't newspaper at all," she said
"Who knows Chinese?"
The question was simultaneously answered.
"Mr. Bolliver must, of course!"