The Great Quest Part 3

When, after my second turn at his instruction, I came away with my arms aching from the unaccustomed exertion and saw that Arnold Lamont was watching us and covertly smiling, I flamed red and all but lost my temper. Why should he laugh at _me_, I thought. Surely I was no clumsier than the others. Indeed, he who thought himself so smart probably could not do half so well. Had not Mr. Gleazen praised me most of all? In my anger at Arnold's secret amus.e.m.e.nt, I avoided him that evening and for several days to come.

It was on Sat.u.r.day night, when we were closing the store for the week, that quite another subject led me back to my resentment in such a way that we had the matter out between us; and as all that we had to say is more or less intimately connected with my story I will set it down word for word.

A young woman in a great quilted bonnet of the kind that we used to call calash, and a dress that she no doubt thought very fetching, came mincing into the store and ordered this thing and that in a way that kept me attending closely to her desires. When she had gone mincing out again, I turned so impatiently to put the counter to rights, that Arnold softly chuckled.

"Apparently," said he, with a quiet smile, "the lady did not impress you quite as she desired, Joe."

"Impress me!" I snorted, ungallantly imitating her mincing manner.

"She impressed me as much as any of them."

"You must have patience, Joe. Some day there will come a lady--"

"No, no!" I cried, with the c.o.c.ksure a.s.sertiveness of my years.

"But yes!"

"Not I! No, no, Arnold--, 'needles and pins, needles and pins'--"

"When a man marries his trouble begins?" Sadness now shadowed Arnold's expressive face. "No! Proverbs sometimes are pernicious."

"You are laughing at me!"

I had detected, through the veil of melancholy that seemed to have fallen over him, a faint ray of something akin to humor.

"I am not laughing at you, Joe." His voice was sad. "You will marry some day--marry and settle down. It is good to do so. I--"

There was something in his stopping that made me look at him in wonder. Immediately he was himself again, calm, wise, taciturn; but in spite of my youth I instinctively felt that only by suffering could a man win his way to such kindly, quiet dignity.

I had said that I would not marry: no wonder, I have since thought, that Arnold looked at me with that gentle humor. Never dreaming that in only a few short months a new name and a new face were to fill my mind and my heart with a world of new anxieties and sorrows and joys, never dreaming of the strange and distant adventures through which Arnold and I were to pa.s.s,--if a fortune-teller had foretold the story, I should have laughed it to scorn,--I was only angry at his amused smile. Perhaps I had expected him to argue with me, to try to correct my notions. In any case, when he so kindly and yet keenly appraised at its true worth my boyish pose, I was sobered for a moment by the sadness that he himself had revealed; then I all but flew into a temper.

"Oh, very well! Go on and laugh at me. You were laughing at me the other night when I was fencing, too. I saw you. I'd like to see you do better yourself. Go on and laugh, you who are so wise."

Arnold's smile vanished. "I am not laughing at you, Joe. Nor was I laughing at you then."

"You were not laughing at me?"

"No."

"At whom, then, were you laughing?"

To this Arnold did not reply.

The fencing lessons, begun so auspiciously that first evening, became a regular event. Every night we gathered on the green and fenced together until twilight had all but settled into dark. Little by little we learned such tricks of attack and defense as our master could teach us, until we, too, could stamp and leap, and parry with whistling circles of the blade. And as we did so, we young fellows of the village came more and more to look upon Cornelius Gleazen almost as one of us.

Though his coming had aroused suspicion, though for many weeks there were few who would say a good word for him, as the summer wore away, he established himself so firmly in the life of his native town that people began to forget, as far as anyone could see, that he had ever had occasion to leave it in great haste.

If he praised my fencing and gave me more time than the others, I thought it no more than my due--was I not a young man of great prospects? If Uncle Seth had at first regarded him with suspicion, Uncle Seth, too, had quite returned now to his old abrupt, masterful way and was again as sharp and quick of tongue as ever, even when Neil Gleazen was sitting in Uncle Seth's own chair and at his own desk. Perhaps, had we been keener, we should have suspected that something was wrong, simply because _no one_--except a few stupid persons like the blacksmith--had a word to say against Neil Gleazen.

You would at least have expected his old cronies to resent his leaving them for more respectable company. But not even from them did there come a whisper of suspicion or complaint.

Why should not a man come home to his native place to enjoy the prosperity of his later years? we argued. It was the most natural thing in the world; and when Cornelius Gleazen talked of foreign wars and the state of the country and the deaths of Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson, and of the duel between Mr. Clay and Mr. Randolph, the most intelligent of us listened with respect, and found occasion in his shrewd observations and trenchant comment to rejoice that Topham had so able a son to return to her in the full power of his maturity.

There was even talk of sending him to Congress, and that it was not idle gossip I know because three politicians from Boston came to town and conferred with our selectmen and Judge Bordman over their wine at the inn for a long evening; and Peter Nuttles, whose sister waited on them, spread the story to the ends of the county.

Late one night, when Uncle Seth and I were about to set out for home, leaving Arnold and Sim to lock up the store, we parted with Gleazen on the porch, he stalking off to the right in the moonlight and swinging his cane as he went, we turning our backs on the village and the bright windows of the tavern, and stepping smartly toward our own dark house, in which the one lighted lamp shone from the window of the room that Mrs. Jameson, our housekeeper, occupied.

"He's a man of judgment," Uncle Seth said, as if meditating aloud, "rare judgment and a wonderful knowledge of the world."

He seemed to expect no reply, and I made none.

"He was venturesome to rashness as a boy," Uncle Seth presently continued. "All that seems to have changed now."

We walked along through the dust. The weeds beside the road and the branches of the trees and shrubs were damp with dew.

"As a boy," Uncle Seth said at last, "I should never have thought of going to Neil Gleazen for judgment--aye, or for knowledge." And when we stood on the porch in the moonlight and looked back at the village, where all the houses were dark now except for a lamp here and there that continued to burn far into the night, he added, "How would you like to leave all this, Joe, and wrestle a fall with fortune for big stakes--aye, for rich stakes, with everything in our favor to win?"

At something in his voice I turned on my heel, my heart leaping, and stared hard at him.

As if he suddenly realized that he had been saying things he ought not to say, he gave himself a quick shake, and woke from his meditations with a start. "We must away to bed," he cried sharply.

"It's close on midnight."

Here was a matter for speculation. For an hour that afternoon and for another hour that evening Uncle Seth and Neil Gleazen had sat behind my uncle's desk, with their chairs drawn close together and the beaver laid on the cracker-box, and had scribbled endless columns of figures and mysterious notes on sheet after sheet of foolscap. What, I wondered, did it mean?

At noon next day, as I was waiting on customers in the front of the store, I saw a rider with full saddlebags pa.s.s, on a great black horse, and shortly afterwards I heard one of the customers remark that the horse was standing at the inn. Glancing out of the window, I saw that the rider had dismounted and was talking with Cornelius Gleazen; though the distance was considerable, Gleazen's bearing and the forward tilt of his beaver were unmistakable. When next I pa.s.sed the window, I saw that Gleazen was posting down the road toward the store, with his beaver tipped even farther over his right eye, his cane swinging, and a bundle under his arm.

As I bowed the customers out, Gleazen entered the store, brus.h.i.+ng past me with a nod, and loudly called, "Seth Upham! Seth Upham!

Where are you?"

"Here I am. What's wanted?" my uncle testily retorted, as he emerged from a bin into which he had thrust his head and shoulders in his efforts to fill a peck measure.

"Come, come," cried Gleazen in his great, gruff voice. "Here's news!"

"News," returned my uncle, sharply; "news is no reason to scare a man out of a year's growth."

Neil Gleazen laughed loudly and gave my uncle a resounding slap on the back that made him writhe. "News, Seth, news is the key to fortune. Come, man, come, lay by your pettifogging. Here's papers just in by the post. You ain't going to let 'em lie no more than I am."

To my amazement,--I could never get used to it,--my uncle's resentment seemed to go like mist before the sun, and he said not a word against the boisterous roughness of the friend of his youth, although I almost believe that, if anyone else had dared to treat him so, he would have grained the man with a hayfork. Instead, he wiped his hands on his coa.r.s.e ap.r.o.n and followed Gleazen to the desk, where they sat down in the two chairs that now were always behind it.

For a time they talked in voices so low that I heard nothing of their conversation; but after a while, as they became more and more absorbed in their business, their voices rose, and I perceived that Gleazen was reading aloud from the papers some advertis.e.m.e.nts in which he seemed especially interested.

"Here's this," he would cry. "Listen to this. If this ain't a good one, I'll miss my guess. 'Executor's sale, s.h.i.+p Congress: on Sat.u.r.day the 15th, at twelve o'clock, at the wharf of the late William Gray, Lynn Street, will be sold at public auction the s.h.i.+p Congress, built at Mattapoisett near New Bedford in the year 1823 and designed for the whale fishery. Measures 349 tons, is copper fastened and was copper sheathed over felt in London on the first voyage, and is in every respect a first-rate vessel. She has two suits of sails, chain and hemp cables, and is well found in the usual appurtenances. By order of the executors of the late William Gray, Whitewell, Bond and Company, Auctioneers.' There, Seth, there's a vessel for you, I'll warrant you."

My uncle murmured something that I could not hear; then Gleazen tipped his beaver back on his head--for once he had neglected to set it on the cracker-box--and hoa.r.s.ely laughed. "Well, I'll be shot!"

he roared. "How's a man to better himself, if he's so confounded cautious? Well, then, how's this: 'Marshal's Sale. United States of America, District of Ma.s.sachusetts, Boston, August 31, 1826.

Pursuant to a warrant from the Honorable John Davis, Judge of the District Court for the District aforesaid, I hereby give public notice that I shall sell at public auction on Wednesday the 8th day of September, at 12 o'clock noon, at Long Wharf, the schooner Caroline and Clara, libelled for wages by William s.h.i.+pley, and the money arising from the sale to be paid into court. Samuel D. Hains, Marshal.' That'll come cheap, if cheap you'll have. But mark what I tell you, Seth, that what comes cheap, goes cheap. There's no good in it. It ain't as if you hadn't the money. The plan's mine, and I tell you, it's a good one, with three merry men waiting for us over yonder. Half's for you, a whole half, mind you; and half's to be divided amongst the rest of us. It don't pay to try to do things cheap. What with gear carried away and goods damaged, it don't pay."

Uncle Seth was marking lines on the margin of the newspaper before them.

"I wonder," he began, "how much--"