Chapter 6

“Oh, this is awful!” said Dorothy. She was shivering and sick with terror at this unseemly midnight revelry of her grandfather's old mill. It was as if it had awakened in a fit of delirium, and given itself up to a wild travesty of its years of peaceful work.

Shep was creeping about in the darkness.

“Look here! We've got to stop this clatter somehow. The stones are hot now. The whole thing'll burn up like tinder if we can't chock her wheels.”

“Shep! Does thee _mean_ it?”

“Thee'll see if I don't. Thee won't need any lantern either.”

“Can't we break away the race?”

“Oh, there's a way to stop it. There's the tip-trough, but it's downstairs and we can't reach the pole.”

“I'll go,” said Dorothy.

“It's outside, thee knows. Thee'll get awful wet, Dorothy.”

“Well, I'd just as soon be drowned as burned up. Come with me to the head of the stairs.”

They felt their way hand in hand in the darkness, and Dorothy went down alone. She had forgotten about the “tip-trough,” but she understood its significance. In a few moments a cascade shot out over the wheel, sending the water far into the garden.

“Right over my chrysanthemum bed,” sighed Dorothy.

The wheel swung slower and slower, the mocking tumult subsided, and the old mill sank into sleep again.

There was nothing now to drown the roaring of the floods and the steady drive of the storm.

“There's a lantern,” Shep called from the door. He had opened the upper half and was shielding himself behind it. “I guess it's Evesham coming back for us. He's a pretty good sort of a fellow after all; don't thee think so, Dorothy? He owes us something for drowning us out at the sheep-washing.”

“What does all this mean?” said Dorothy, as Evesham swung himself over the half-door and his lantern showed them to each other in their various phases of wetness.

“There's a big leak in the lower dam; I've been afraid of it all along; there's something wrong in the principle of the thing.”

Dorothy felt as if he had called her grandfather a fraud, and her father a delusion and a snare. She had grown up in the belief that the mill-dams were part of Nature's original plan in laying the foundations of the hills; but it was no time to be resentful, and the facts were against her.

“Dorothy,” said Evesham, as he tucked the buffalo about her, “this is the second time I've tried to save you from drowning, but you never will wait. I'm all ready to be a hero, but you won't be a heroine.”

“I'm too practical for a heroine,” said Dorothy. “There! I've forgotten my chickens.”

“I'm glad of it. Those chickens were a mistake. They oughtn't to be perpetuated.”

Youth and happiness can stand a great deal of cold water; but it was not to be expected that Rachel Barton would be especially benefited by her night journey through the floods. Evesham waited in the hall when he heard the door of her room open next morning. Dorothy came slowly down the stairs; he knew by her lingering-step and the softly closed door that she was not happy.

“Mother is very sick,” she answered his inquiry. “It is like the turn of inflammation and rheumatism she had once before. It will be very slow,--and oh, it is such suffering! Why do the best women in the world have to suffer so?”

“Will you let me talk things over with you after breakfast, Dorothy?”

“Oh yes,” she said, “there is so much to do and think about. I wish father would come home!”

The tears came into Dorothy's eyes as she looked at him. Rest, such as she had never known or felt the need of till now, and strength immeasurable, since it would multiply her own by an unknown quantity, stood within reach of her hand, but she might not put it out.

Evesham was dizzy with the struggle between longing and resolution. He had braced his nerves for a long and hungry waiting, but fate had yielded suddenly; the floods had brought her to him,--his flotsam and jetsam more precious than all the guarded treasures of the earth. She had come, with all her girlish, unconscious beguilements, and all her womanly cares and anxieties too. He must strive against her sweetness, while he helped her to bear her burdens.

“Now about the boys, Dorothy,” he said, two hours later, as they stood together by the fire in the low, oak-finished room, which was his office and book-room. The door was ajar so that Dorothy might hear her mother's bell. “Don't you think they had better be sent to school somewhere?”

“Yes,” said Dorothy, “they ought to go to school,--but--well, I may as well tell thee the truth. There's very little to do it with. We've had a poor summer. I suppose I've managed badly, and mother has been sick a good while.”

“You've forgotten about the pond-rent, Dorothy.”

“No,” she said, with a quick flush, “I hadn't forgotten it, but I couldn't _ask_ thee for it.”

“I spoke to your father about monthly payments, but he said better leave it to accumulate for emergencies. Shouldn't you call this an 'emergency,' Dorothy?”

“But does thee think we ought to ask rent for a pond that has all leaked away?”

“Oh, there's pond enough left, and I've used it a dozen times over this summer. I should be ashamed to tell you, Dorothy, how my horn has been exalted in your father's absence. However, retribution has overtaken me at last; I'm responsible, you know, for all the damage last night. It was in the agreement that I should keep up the dams.”

“Oh!” said Dorothy; “is thee sure?”

Evesham laughed.

“If your father was like any other man, Dorothy, he'd make me 'sure,' when he gets home. I will defend myself to this extent; I've patched and propped them all summer, after every rain, and tried to provide for the fall storms; but there's a flaw in the original plan”--

“Thee said that once before,” said Dorothy. “I wish thee wouldn't say it again.”

“Why not?”

“Because I love those old mill-dams. I've trotted over them ever since I could walk alone.”

“You shall trot over them still. We will make them as strong as the everlasting hills. They shall outlast our time, Dorothy.”

“Well, about the rent,” said Dorothy. “I'm afraid it will not take us through the winter, unless there is something I can do. Mother couldn't possibly be moved now; and if she could, it will be months before the house is fit to live in. But we cannot stay here in comfort, unless thy mother will let me make up in some way. Mother will not need me all the time, and I know thy mother hires women to spin.”

“She'll let you do all you like if it will make you any happier. But you don't know how much money is coming to you. Come, let us look over the figures.”

He lowered the lid of the black mahogany secretary, placed a chair for Dorothy and opened a great ledger before her, bending down, with one hand on the back of the chair, the other turning the leaves of the ledger. Considering the index and the position of the letter B in the alphabet, he was a long time finding his place. Dorothy looked out of the window over the tops of the yellowing woods to the gray and turbid river below. Where the hemlocks darkened the channel of the glen she heard the angry floods rushing down. The formless rain mists hung low and hid the opposite shore.

“See!” said Evesham, his finger wandering rather vaguely down the page. “Your father went away on the 3d of May. The first month's rent came due on the 3d of June. That was the day I opened the gate and let the water down on you, Dorothy. I'm responsible for everything, you see,--even for the old ewe that was drowned.”

His words came in a dream as he bent over her, resting his unsteady hand heavily on the ledger.

Dorothy laid her cheek on the date that she could not see and burst into tears.

“Don't,--please don't!” he said, straightening himself and locking his hands behind him. “I am human, Dorothy.”

The weeks of Rachel's sickness that followed were perhaps the best discipline Evesham's life had ever known. He held the perfect flower of his bliss unclosing in his hand; yet he might barely permit himself to breathe its fragrance. His mother had been a strong and prosperous woman; there had been little he had ever been able to do for her. It was well for him to feel the weight of helpless infirmity in his arms as he lifted Dorothy's mother from side to side of her bed, while Dorothy's hands smoothed the coverings. It was well for him to see the patient endurance of suffering, such as his youth and strength defied. It was bliss to wait on Dorothy and follow her with little watchful homages, received with a shy wonder which was delicious to him; for Dorothy's nineteen years had been too full of service to others to leave much room for dreams of a kingdom of her own. Her silent presence in her mother's sick-room awed him. Her gentle, decisive voice and ways, her composure and unshaken endurance through nights of watching and days of anxious confinement and toil, gave him a new reverence for the powers and mysteries of her unfathomable womanhood.

The time of Friend Barton's return drew near. It must be confessed that Dorothy welcomed it with something of dread, and that Evesham did not welcome it at all. On the contrary, the thought of it roused all his latent obstinacy and aggressiveness. The first day or two after the momentous arrival wore a good deal upon every member of the family, except Margaret Evesham, who was provided with a philosophy of her own, that amounted almost to a gentle obtuseness and made her a comfortable non-conductor, preventing more electric souls from shocking each other.

On the morning of the fourth day, Dorothy came out of her mother's room with a tray of empty dishes in her hands. She saw Evesham at the stair-head and hovered about in the shadowy part of the hall till he should go down.

“Dorothy,” he said, “I'm waiting for you.” He took the tray from her and rested it on the banisters. “Your father and I have talked over all the business. He's got the impression that I'm one of the most generous fellows in the world. I intend to leave him in that delusion for the present. Now may I speak to him about something else, Dorothy? Have I not waited long enough for my heart's desire?”

“Take care,” said Dorothy softly,--“thee'll upset the tea-cups.”

“Confound the tea-cups!” He stooped to place the irrelevant tray on the floor, but now Dorothy was halfway down the staircase. He caught her on the landing, and taking both her hands drew her down on the step beside him.

“Dorothy, this is the second time you've taken advantage of my trusting nature. This time you shall be punished. You needn't try to hide your face, you little traitor. There's no repentance in you!”

“If I'm to be punished there's no need of repentance.”

“Oh, is that your Quaker doctrine? Dorothy, do you know, I've never heard you speak my name, except once, and then you were angry with me.”

“When was that?”

“The night I caught you at the gate. You said, 'I had rather have one of those dumb brutes for company than thee, Walter Evesham.' You said it in the fiercest little voice. Even the 'thee' sounded as if you hated me.”

“I did,” said Dorothy promptly. “I had reason to.”

“Do you hate me now, Dorothy?”

“Not so much as I did then.”

“What an implacable little Quaker you are.”

“A tyrant is always hated,” said Dorothy, trying to release her hands.

“If you will look in my eyes, Dorothy, and call me by my name, just once, I'll let 'thee' go.”

“Walter Evesham,” said Dorothy, with great firmness and decision.

“No, that won't do! You must look at me, and say it softly, in a little sentence, Dorothy.”

“Will thee please let me go, Walter?”

Walter Evesham was a man of his word, but as Dorothy sped away, he looked as if he wished that he was not.

The next evening Friend Barton sat by his wife's easy-chair drawn into the circle of firelight, with his elbows on his knees and his head between his hands.

The worn spot on the top of his head had widened considerably during the summer, but Rachel looked stronger and brighter than she had done for many a day. There was even a little flush on her cheek, but this might have come from the excitement of a long talk with her husband.

“I'm sorry thee takes it so hard, Thomas. I was afraid thee would. But the way didn't seem to open for me to do much. I can see now that Dorothy's inclinations have been turning this way for some time; though it's not likely she would own it, poor child; and Walter Evesham's not one who is easily gainsaid. If thee could only feel differently about it, I can't say but that it would make me very happy to see Dorothy's heart satisfied. Can't thee bring thyself into unity with it, father? He's a nice young man. They're nice folks. Thee can't complain of the blood. Margaret Evesham tells me a cousin of hers married one of the Lawrences, so we are kind of kin after all.”

“I don't complain of the blood; they're well enough placed, as far as the world is concerned. But their ways are not our ways, Rachel; their faith is not our faith.”

“Well, I can't see such a very great difference, come to live among them. 'By their fruits ye shall know them.' To comfort the widow and the fatherless, and keep ourselves unspotted from the world;--thee's always preached that, father. I really can't see any more worldliness here than among many households with us; and I'm sure if we haven't been the widow and the fatherless this summer, we've been next to it.”

Friend Barton raised his head: “Rachel,” he said, “look at that!” He pointed upward to an ancient sword with belt and trappings which gleamed on the paneled chimney-piece, crossed by an old queen's-arm. Evesham had given up his large, sunny room to Dorothy's mother, but he had not removed all his lares and penates.

“Yes, dear; that's his grandfather's sword--Colonel Evesham, who was killed at Saratoga.”

“Why does he hang up that thing of abomination for a light and a guide to his footsteps, if his way be not far from ours?”

“Why, father! Colonel Evesham was a good man. I dare say he fought for the same reason that thee preaches, because he felt it to be his duty.”

“I find no fault with him, Rachel. Doubtless he followed his light, as thee says, but he followed it in better ways too. He cleared land and built a homestead and a meeting-house. Why doesn't his grandson hang up his old broadaxe and plowshare and worship them, if he must have idols, instead of that symbol of strife and bloodshed. Does thee want our Dorothy's children to grow up under the shadow of the sword?”

There was a stern light of prophecy in the old man's eyes.

“May be Walter Evesham would take it down,” said Rachel simply, leaning back and closing her eyes. “I never was much of a hand to argue, even if I had the strength for it; but it would hurt me a good deal--I must say it--if thee should deny Dorothy in this matter, Thomas. It's a very serious thing for old folks to try to turn young hearts the way they think they ought to go. I remember now,--I was thinking about it last night, and it all came back as fresh--I don't know that I ever told thee about that young Friend who visited me before I heard thee preach at Stony Valley? Well, father, he was wonderful pleased with him, but I didn't feel any drawing that way. He urged me a good deal, more than was pleasant for either of us. He wasn't at all reconciled to thee, Thomas, if thee remembers.”

“I remember,” said Thomas Barton. “It was an anxious time.”

“Well, dear, if father _had_ insisted and had sent thee away, I can't say but life would have been a very different thing to me.”

“I thank thee for saying it, Rachel.” Friend Barton's head drooped. “Thee has suffered much through me; thee's had a hard life, but thee's been well beloved.”

The flames leaped and flickered in the chimney; they touched the wrinkled hands whose only beauty was in their deeds; they crossed the room and lit the pillows where, for three generations, young heads had dreamed and gray heads had watched and wearied; then they mounted to the chimney and struck a gleam from the sword.

“Well, father,” said Rachel, “what answer is thee going to give Walter Evesham?”

“I shall say no more, my dear. Let the young folks have their way. There's strife and contention enough in the world without my stirring up more. And it may be I'm resisting the Master's will. I left her in his care; this may be his way of dealing with her.”

Walter Evesham did not take down his grandfather's sword. Fifty years later another went up beside it, the sword of a young Evesham who never left the field of Shiloh; and beneath them both hangs the portrait of the Quaker grandmother, Dorothy Evesham, at the age of sixty-nine.

The golden ripples, silver now, are hidden under a “round-eared cap;” the quick flush has faded in her cheek, and fold upon fold of snowy gauze and creamy silk are crossed over the bosom that once thrilled to the fiddles of Slocum's barn. She has found the cool grays and the still waters; but on Dorothy's children rests the “Shadow of the Sword.”

THE STORY OF THE ALCÁZAR.

It was told by Captain John to a boy from the mainland who was spending the summer on the Island, as they sat together one August evening at sunset, on a broken bowsprit which had once been a part of the Alcázar.

It was dead low water in Southwest Harbor, a land-locked inlet that nearly cut the Island in two, and was the gateway through which the fishing-craft from the village at the harbor head found their way out into the great Penobscot Bay. There were many days during the stern winter and bleak spring months when the gate was blocked with ice or veiled in fog, but nature relented a little toward the Island folk in the fall and sent them sunny days for their late, scant harvesting, and steady winds for the mackerel-fishing, to give them a little hope before the winter set in sharp with the equinoctial. Now, at low tide, the bright gateway shone wide open, as if to let out the waters that rise and fall ten feet in the inlet. You could look far out, beyond the lighthouse on Creenlaw's Neck and the islands that throng the mouth of the harbor, to the red spot of flame the sunset had kindled below the rack of smoke-gray clouds. The color burned in a dull gleam upon the water, broken by the dark shapes of shadowy islands; the sail-boats at anchor in the muddy, glistening flats leaned over disconsolately on their sides, in despair of ever again feeling the thrill of the returning waters beneath their keels; and the gray, weather-beaten houses crowded together on the brink of the cliff above the beach, looking like a group of hooded old women watching for a belated sail, seemed to have caught the expression of their inmates' lives. At high tide the hulk of the Alcázar had been full of water, which was now pouring out through a hole in the planking of her side in a continuous, murmurous stream, like the voice of a persistent talker in a silent company. The old ship looked much too big for her narrow grave at the foot of the green cliff, in which her anchor was deeply sunk and half overgrown with thistles. Her blunt bow and the ragged stump of the figure-head rose, dark and high, above the wet beach where Captain John sat with his absorbed listener. There were rifts about her rail where the red sunset looked through. Her naked sides, that for years had been moistened only by the perennial rains and snows, showed rough and scaly like the armor of some fabled sea-monster. She was tethered to the cliff by her rusty anchor-chain that swung across the space between, serving as a clothes-line for the draggled driftweed left by the receding tide to dry.