A HAVEN OF REST
Wreckers' Head so shelters the cove from the northeast that the schooner could be brought safely in to Luiz Wharf, instead of dropping her anchor in deep water. Half the port, and all of Portygee Town, crowded nearby wharves and streets to welcome Tunis Latham's schooner; for news of her peril and the way in which help had reached the Seamew had come down from the Head as on the wings of the wind itself.
There was one face on the wharf Tunis Latham sought out with grim persistency as the schooner was made fast. He had purposely placed Sheila in Zebedee Pauling's care. Tunis kept, directly under his hand, the broken oar which had helped to make so much of his recent trouble. When the Seamew was safe, her skipper leaped ashore. And he carried the broken oar with him.
Orion, grinning and sneering by turns, saw his cousin coming. It must have been preternatural sagacity which caused him to see and recognize the broken oar. Having seen it, he jumped for the head of the wharf.
Tunis leaped away on his cousin's trail. The crowd parted to let them through, and then joined in a streaming, excited tail to their kite of progress. Most of the spectators lived in Portygee Town. Some of them had been members of the Seamew's deserting crews. They were afraid of Tunis Latham, but they had little sympathy for Orion.
The skipper caught up with him in the middle of the road and almost opposite the Pareta cottage. Orion had picked up a cobblestone as he reached the street and, finding himself about to be overtaken, he turned and threw the missile at Tunis' head. The latter dodged it and, with a single, savage blow of the oar felled his cousin to the roadway.
"You unmitigated scoundrel!" Tunis roared. "I ought to take your life. Because of you I nearly lost my own to-day—and the lives of two other men and my schooner into the bargain. You villain!"
As Orion tried to scramble up, the skipper of the Seamew made another pass at him with the oar, and the fellow fell again.
"Don't hit me! Don't hit me again, Tunis! Remember I'm your cousin. I—I haven't done a thing—true an' honest, I haven't!"
The listeners gathered closer. Tunis Latham's face displayed such rage that the Portygees expected him to continue his attack with the oar. But instead he shook it before their eyes—and Orion's.
"See it?" he demanded of the bystanders. "That's the scurvy trick the dog played me. Found this broken oar in somebody's woodpile, burned the name of the Marlin B. into the handle, and foisted it on a fool crew to prove that my schooner was once called by that name. I ought to pound him to death!"
Suddenly a brilliant figure whirled into the midst of the crowd and reached the angry skipper and his victim. Eunez, her black eyes ablaze, her face ruddy with anger, planted herself before Tunis Latham, hands on hips, confronting him boldly. One glance at the prostrate Orion assured her that, although there was blood upon his face, he was not much hurt. She tossed her head and snapped her fingers under the nose of the captain of the Seamew.
"So now, Tunis Latham! It is that you have waked up! Of a gr-r-reat smartness are you, eh?" she cried. "You scorn us all, and tr-r-reat us as you would dogs. Heh! All you shipmasters are alike.
"But you—we put the laugh on you, eh? That oar in your hand—ha, ha! Do not lay the blame altogether upon your cousin. I burned those letters into that wood with my curling irons. Fooled by a girl, eh, Tunis Latham? Ah! Learn your lesson, Captain Latham! We Portygee women are not to be scorned by any schooner captain. No!"
She snapped her fingers again in his face and turned away, swaying her hips and tossing her head as she disappeared into her father's cottage. When Tunis looked around for his cousin, he found that that facile young man, taking advantage of the girl's intervention, had slipped away.
A winter hurricane had pounced upon the Cape and torn at it with teeth and claws, as though seeking to dismember it—to wrench the forty-mile curved claw of the Cape from the remainder of Barnstable County.
The driven snow masked everything—earth, houses, trees, and the shivering bushes; it clung to these objects, iced upon them like frosting. No craft ventured out of Big Wreck Cove, least of all the Seamew, although she had a cargo in her hold and a complete and satisfied crew in her forecastle.
Tunis Latham was speaking of the latter fact to Aunt Lucretia in the warm and homelike kitchen of Latham's Folly.
"Zeb is a good fellow. He has got together a bunch of hands that aren't afraid of ghosts or bogies. You couldn't make those Portygees or some of the other hands we had see the ridiculousness of their fear of the Seamew—bless her! But with this bunch Zeb has got together I wouldn't fear to sail around the Horn."
His aunt looked startled at the suggestion and shook her head.
"I know you wouldn't want I should go for such a long voyage, Aunt Lucretia," he replied. "And I don't want to myself. But I couldn't be content here if I didn't see the prospect bright before me of getting Ida—I mean, of getting Sheila."
His aunt looked at him again not unkindly, but said not a word.
"I've told you all about it, Aunt Lucretia," the skipper of the Seamew pursued. "Everything. If Sheila did wrong to come down here as she did, I did a greater wrong in encouraging her to come and in tempting her with the chance of escaping from the mess she was in. And she's paid—we've both paid—for our folly.
"As for folks talking, if that Bostwick girl wants to keep her job with Hoskin & Marl's she'll keep her mouth shut about Sheila. She understands that. And Hoskin & Marl—everybody, in fact that was connected with that awful thing that happened to Sheila—have done all in their power to make amends."
For the first time his aunt's lips opened.
"The poor child!" she said.
"I want more than your sympathy for Sheila, auntie," he urged earnestly. "I want your approval of what Sheila and I mean to do—in time. Of course, I must be better established first and be making money enough to support a—a family. And Sheila would not think of leaving the old people up there. They need her so sorely."
"But you may as well know, first as last, Aunt Lucretia, that I mean to marry Sheila. I know it was wrong in me to try to palm her off on you as somebody she wasn't—to try to fool you—"
"You did not fool me, Tunis; not for a moment," she told him softly.
He stared at her in amazement.
"No," went on his usually inarticulate aunt. "The moment I first looked into her face I knew she was not Sarah Honey's daughter. That baby's eyes were brown when Sarah brought her here years ago; and no brown eyes could change to such a beautiful violet-blue as—as Sheila's. I knew you and she were trying to deceive me, but I could not help loving the dear girl from my first sight of her."
That was a very long speech indeed for Aunt Lucretia to make. She put her arms about Tunis Latham's neck and said all the rest she might have said in a loving kiss.
Driving as the storm was, there remained something that took the skipper of the Seamew out into the welter of it. With the wet snow plastering his back he climbed out of the saucerlike valley to the rear premises of the Ball place. He even gave a look in at the barn to make sure that all the chores were done for the night. The gray ghost of the Queen of Sheba's face was raised a moment from her manger while she looked at him inquiringly, blowing softly through her nostrils the while.
"You're all right, anyway," said Tunis, chuckling as he closed the barn door. "You've got a friend for life."
He went on to the kitchen door. Inside he could hear the bustle of Sheila's swift feet, the croon of Prudence's gentle voice, and then a mighty "A-choon!" as Cap'n Ira relieved his pent-up feelings.
"Don't let them fish cakes burn, gal," the old man drawled. "If Tunis ain't here mighty quick he can eat his cold. Oh! Here he is—right to the nick o' time, like the second mate's watch comin' to breakfast."
Tunis had shaken his peacoat free of the clinging snow and now stamped his sea-boots on the rug. He smiled broadly and confidently at Sheila and she returned it so happily that her whole face seemed to irradiate sunshine. Prudence nudged Cap'n Ira's elbow.
"Ain't it a pretty sight, Ira?" she whispered.
"She looks 'most as sweet as you did, Prue, when I took you to the altar," sighed the old man windily. "I swan! Women is most alike, young an' old. All but that dratted Ida May Bostwick. She was a caution to cats."
"Now you hush, Ira. She's our own rel'tive and we ought not to speak ill of her."
"Ha!" blew Cap'n Ira, reminding Tunis of the old mare when she snorted. "Ha! Maybe she is. But even so I want none o' her. An' I told Elder Minnett so. I got kinder of an idee that the elder won't be so brash, puttin' his spoon into other folks' porridge again."
"Hush, Ira! Don't be irreverent. Remember he's a minister."
"So he is. So he is," concluded Cap'n Ira. "They say charity covers a multitude of sins; and I expect the call to be a preacher covers a multitude of sinners." He chuckled mellowly again. "But sometimes I've thought that the 'call' some of our preachers hear 'stead o' being the voice of God is some other noise they mistook for it. Well, there, Prudence, I won't say no more. But you must allow that Elder Minnett's buttin' in, as the boys say, come pretty nigh bustin' everything to flinders.
"Come, Tunis. Do sit down or that gal won't be able to dish up supper, and I'm as hungry as a wolf. Pull up your chair, Prudence. Ain't this livin', I want to know?" He shuddered luxuriously at the howl and rattle of the wind without. "Now, folks: 'For that with which we are about to be blessed make us truly thankful. Amen.' Put your teeth in one o' them biscuit, Tunis. I want to recommend 'em to you. Ain't none better on this endurin' Cape—no, sir. We got the best cook on the Head. If you are ever lucky enough to get one ha'f as good, Tunis—"
"Now, you be still, Ira," admonished Prudence, smiling comfortingly at the blushing girl.
"You better sing small, Cap'n Ira," said the skipper of the Seamew hoarsely. "It's mebbe just because we're good-natured and forbearing that you are keeping your cook for a while."
"Ha! So that's the way the wind blows, eh?" croaked Cap'n Ira. "You talk big, young man. But we know Sheila better than you do, p'r'aps. Don't we, Prue?"
His little old wife, with her winter-apple face wrinkled in a smile of utter confidence, leaned nearer Sheila to pat her hand. The girl seized the wrinkled claw suddenly and pressed it with both of hers—pressed it gratefully and with a full-charged heart.
"Don't be disturbed. Don't fear," she whispered so that the old woman only might not hear. "I will not leave you."
The two men looked deeply into each other's eyes and with a great understanding. They are not demonstrative, these Cape men, not as a rule; but Cap'n Ira and Tunis Latham understood all entailed in that promise so softly given, and they subscribed to it. Sheila was to have her way.
Hours later Tunis lit the lamp in his bedroom and then stood before his window, gazing out into the driving snow. Almost immediately he saw the gleam of another lamp, far up the slope, showing from that north window of Sheila's chamber in the old Ball house.
This was the signal they had agreed upon—their good-night symbol whenever he was at home. He stood there a long time, looking out.
Although the wintry wind raved across Wreckers' Head and the snow scurried wildly before it, there was springtime in the hearts of Tunis Latham and Sheila—the springtime of their hopes.