The Isle of Seven Moons/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
"FAIRWINDS" AND "BLUSTER"
As trim and as trig as a homeward-bound ship—for then, as all sailors will tell you, above the water-line at least, they are cleanest—was the Fell place. Clapboards, cobbles, and conch-shells around the walks and flower-beds, were glistening white; so also the fence and the trunks of the trees. For colour-relief there were green shutters; the moss-grey of a pleasantly-sloping roof; the maroon of hollyhocks and marigold yellow against the walls; and, over towards the orchard, an old skiff, green-painted, with a cargo of old-fashioned flowers, foaming in myriad hues over oarlocks and gunwales.
Captain Fell, or "Ole Cap'n Bluster," to use the villagers' soubriquet, was seated—or rather "set"—on the porch. Sighting his daughter's convoy, he tossed "The Salthaven Log, Founded in 1809," in the corner, and puffed down the path like an ineffectual gale upon a ship cleared for rough weather.
"Good-day, sir"—it was a dismissal, not a greeting. The white hair bristled under the slightly-askew visored cap; the Adam's apple swelled like a turkey-cock's; his choleric face purpled; the grey whiskers stood out in the blast of his wrath like two sails wing-and-wing; and the cane and square-toed shoes scrunched the gravel ominously.
As he bore down upon them, nautical similes fairly oozed from his paunchy blue figure, like pitch and oakum from the blistering seams of a ship in the tropics.
"I told you to keep clear o' my place, and here you are no sooner'n you reach port, alongside o' my gate," he boomed at Ben, "you sheer off …" The bombardment died in a spluttered chortle.
"But, Captain Fell. I"
"Stow your gab, sir!"
The girl's hand was pleadingly laid on her father's. He wasn't an awesome or impressive personage to her, just an unreasonable old man, a spoiled old man. She was angry, but of late a new note—apoplectic, threatening—had crept into that full roaring boom of his—and sometimes, what was more touching, a quaver.
"Father, Ben's my oldest friend and"
"Belay that, daughter, I'm skipper o' this ship, and on my own quarter-deck." And he drew her within the gate, closing it with a bang over-pettish for so dignified an officer, but a hint sufficiently explicit for Ben. He laughed disgustedly and turned towards the street as Sally marched, her shoulders up in what would have seemed mock obedience to any but the Captain's eyes. The old man planted his feet sturdily enough now, and the quaver wasn't at all apparent. The doctor had said that one of these fits might carry him off. Sally was beginning to doubt that doctor—there had been so many.
Over her shoulders the boy caught a glimpse of the black eyes. They signalled something. From old custom he could read that signal, and answered in code.
Half way up the cathedral aisle into which the nobly groined elms transformed the street, he met Captain Brent, on his way to supper—at Sally's.
"Why so down in the mouth, Mr. Boltwood?" This formality of the handle, off-ship, was suspicious.
"He's turned me down again," the boy muttered—in love and therefore out of sorts and "out of character."
"Point just a little closer to the wind, boy, Hiram's mostly blow." And his chief whistled a meditative stave or two, then as if he had found a solution in the melody, explained:
"It isn't that fool grudges against your dad—so much—he's afraid of losing her— And that," he added a bit wistfully, if a man, two-handed and upstanding still at sixty, ever suggests such a thing, "I can understand !"
But Ben, blinded by the selfishness of all young love, couldn't understand.
"He's always throwing it up to me," he grumbled on, "it's getting past a joke."
The Captain looked at him; whistled sharply.
"By the great Lord Harry, I thought you had sand!"
The first mate looked sheepish, and scanned the horizon…rattling good officer but boy after all. The older man smiled in amusement, then drove the barb in a bit deeper:
"And it takes that to win women as well as ships—including fathers-in-law," he added as necessary after-thought.
The boy straightened.
"Didn't know nerve went with them," referring to the first, presumably.
"You didn't! Well, think it over." And the captain, too, closed the barring gate.
But the whimsical wrinkles at the corners of his eyes belied the curtness of his retort. However, at the fifth conch-shell they had quite disappeared, as he ruminated half aloud.
"What was it that wench Portia said—about teaching? If I'd followed mine I wouldn't have lost her mother, and he wouldn't have won her." The whistling stopped altogether. "He didn't know it but he wore her out—killed her. It mustn't happen twice." Then he added a strange yet not illogical non-sequitur, "Poor Hiram! But that was long ago—and—by Jupiter! she lives again in the girl!"
"Cap'n Bluster" was goutily recouched on the porch, his broad back to the gate as a further expression of his resentment. At that slight distance, the two old sea-dogs resembled the twin stone lions that flank the gateways to great estates, or old andirons before a fire. A little nearer—and they seemed like pieces purchased by a short-sighted person in different shops, and which, when brought home, are found not quite to match. Neither did they in figure or temperament, but they were one in their quaint old oaths and their old blue uniforms, and in their love for the Sea and Salthaven and Sally. Over the handling of the first and third there was constant dissension; in fact, the friendship had been cemented by a feud of some fifty years standing, a constant guerilla warfare of repartee, with reasonableness on one side, violent illogic on the other.
"Cap'n Fairwinds," for he, too, had been aptly nicknamed by the salty gossips of the place, was square-set but not too square—very fit, in fact, with a beard still brown; above it, a complexion all red and leather. The full lips could tauten on the bridge in a nor'-easter, but off-watch they frequently puckered in a whistle, which for Sally always echoed the wind singing through the rigging, quite as the eyes reflected the colour of the waters they had gazed on so long. That they were well aware of all that was going on, even when she was not their target, she could testify. Around their corners were those little marks, like the tracks of game-birds at a spring, sure trails of shrewdness and humour—like Sally's, too, but hers were mere wraiths of wrinkles, his, leathery creases, deeply indented.
She was on the top steps now and, hard at her heels, the gnarled parent trunk of which she seemed so strange a shoot.
"Well, you old barnacled tramp!" merely the Bluster way of saying that he was very glad to see an old friend, but Sally's greeting quite made up for it.
After reminiscing for a half-hour or so, by way of strategy, on the ports and events of the voyage, all of which a retired and gouty sea-captain devoured greedily, Captain Fairwinds proffered some excellent tobacco, a custom they had, "of swapping," like Jerry Reb and Johnny Yank between hostilities.
Puff, puff, puff, he watched the other s signal-fires. All seemed quiet along the Potomac, so he broached the dangerous subject:
"What's this I hear about young Boltwood?"
"No good, I'll warrant," blared the other, dropping his jaw and pipe in suspicion.
"It's too fine weather to be unreasonable, Hiram." He looked around. Sally was at the other end of the porch, trying, this way and that, the new scarf which he had brought her as the tribute which all returning captains must render. It was from the Argentine and, as usual, bright red—in fact, as Sally afterwards remarked to plump Stella Appleby, "It's funny how men always choose crimson or scarlet—never lavender, or mauve, or any of the softer tints. I guess they're just barbarians after all." Anyway the combination,—scarlet, and black hair and eyes, was bewitching enough, and it quite satisfied the godfather. He bent forward confidentially. "He's a good boy, he'd take care of her, and—" he nodded towards the pirouetting scarlet and black again, "he'd keep her that way. We're not as young as we once were, you know."
"Don't interfere there, Harvey Brent. I tell you I don't like the Boltwood timber—it don't build good ships."
"What are you trying, anyway? A little play all your own—nursing a grudge against an old man, and turning his only son from your door, and all the time spillin' your fool sailor's lingo all over the stage. Just throw in a few 'Shiver-me-timbers,' and you could charge admission. I thought you were a real sailor, Hiram, not a play actor!"
The wing-and-wing whiskers were luffing agitatedly, and under the shaking wattles the Adam's apple worked convulsively, like a floater jerked up and down by a freshly-hooked fish. Captain Fairwinds continued, though a little more gently:
"If we hadn't weathered so many storms together, my old friend, I'd"
"If you want to weather any more, you'll not give me any more opinions on this head, Captain Brent."
Now the latter's own formality with Benjamin had been merely jocular, this was ominous. His eyes narrowed, and his mouth snapped to bob-stay tautness. The argument had always ended that way, Hiram was hopeless!
All women attached to domineering men very early learn patience and tact, also its first principle,—that the sure Northwest Passage to the sunny Orient of a man's "cussed nature" lies directly through an old canal, called the Alimentary.
She said something about "supper," aiming a wink at Captain Harve—a maneuver quite significant of her difference in attitude towards the two old men. It was further noticeable when she placed an affectionate hand on a shoulder of each. With her father, as with Ben, she seemed almost maternal; when she leaned against her godfather she at once slipped back into the child.
Meanwhile he had obeyed that wink and was helping the delightful suspense by exclaiming:
"Hiram, I'll play you a rubber of Pitch for the second helping. And I'll bet you a package of Honest Long Cut' that it's"
"Gingerbread!" roared Cap'n Bluster.
"Spongecake!" the other.
"With elderberry pie on the side!"
"Ris'n biscuit, you mean!"
It was evidently an old game and a very childish one for two old salts who had outridden nor'-easters and rounded the Horn, but Sally smiled on them quite maternally again as she fixed the backgammon board across her father's lap and adjusted the hassock under his tender foot.
They were shuffling the cards when Captain Harve called through the window—
"Ho, Sally, if it's 'Floating' Island,' use the big bowl, and I'll tell you about some I sighted, tonight."
At the naïve pun the girl smiled, then frowned meditatively.
"Ben with his vanishing islands, and Uncle Harve with his that float!" She sighed and went over to the table where stood the delectable dish.
Wonderingly, yet wondering why she wondered, she bent over the blue bowl. It rimmed a creamy, yellow sea, and in it floated seven tiny islands, all snowy-white and delicately peaked and whorled.
An enchanted region—uncharted seas—and her own horizon had been so limited. It wasn't that the sound little cells of her perfectly-functioning system clamoured to react to the titillating shocks of city-life. Her routine was varied enough. Never had she tucked a yellow pay-envelope into the treasure cave of her blouse, but many times over she had earned it. And technique it does need to run a home on the neatly-spliced ends of a captain's pension, and as much subtle strategy to take dictation from a testy old man as from any tired baron in Wall Street. Her life was too full of quiet drama ever to be sluggish. No existence can be, that is made up of farewells and waitings and welcomings-home again, quite as that odd fellow Queer-Hat had observed. Oh, she loved it all and there was Ben, and she wouldn't have changed it, but
"Tamp, tamp, tamp!" It came through the window, and, "I've won. Ho! Cookee, can't you hustle that grub?"
She didn't obey the summons at once, but bent over the bowl again. And before her eyes it seemed for the moment to expand, until it became the blue, ever-widening, ever-retreating horizon of the ocean itself, rimming a golden sea. And before her eyes swam the peaks, all snow and rose, of fairy-like, ethereal islands, floating, vanishing, beckoning, on that golden, sun-smitten sea.