CHAPTER XXXIV
AN OLD, OLD STORY

It was spring when we came back to Topham. The sun was warm upon the pleasant fields and gardens, and the blossoms on the fruit trees were thick and fragrant. The loveliest days of all the year were enfolding the pleasant countryside of New England in the glory and peace of their bright skies and soft colors; and as the hired coach that brought us down from Boston, with black Paul, at once proud and uncomfortable in a new suit of white man's clothes, seated stiffly high beside the driver, rolled along the familiar roads, I pointed out to my bride the fair scenes among which my boyhood had been spent.

From Montevideo, which we reached on the evening following the wreck,—there an old English clergyman married us,—we had sailed to New York as passengers in a merchant ship; but first we had taken leave of those two good friends, Arnold Lamont, whom we were never to see again, and Abe Guptil, who had bravely insisted on setting out to build anew his fortunes by shipping as second mate of an American bark then in port. From New York a second ship had given us passage to Boston, whence we came over the same road to Topham that I had traveled so long before with Arnold and Sim and Abe and Neil Gleazen and my uncle.

We ought, I suppose, to have been a properly anxious young couple, for of the great sum in gold that Arnold had so generously advanced us only a small part remained, and what I should do in Topham, now that Uncle Seth's store was in other hands, I had not the slightest notion. The tower of golden dreams that poor Seth Upham had built in idle moments had fallen into dust; Neil Gleazen's unscrupulous quest had brought only ashes and bitterness; it was from the shadow of a great tragedy that we came into that golden morning in spring. But great as had been those things that Faith and I had lost, we had gained something so deep and so great that even then, when in discovering it we were so happy that the world seemed too good to be real, we had not more than begun to appreciate the wonder and magnitude of it.

Thus I came back to Topham after such a year and a half as few men have known, even though they have lived a full century—back to Topham, with all my golden prospects shattered by Gleazen's mad adventure, but with a treasure such that, if all the gold in the world had been mine, I would eagerly have given every coin to win it.

With my bride beside me, her hand upon my arm, I rode into sleepy little Topham, past my uncle's house where I had lived for many happy years, past the store where Arnold and poor Sim Muzzy and I had worked together, past the smithy where even now that old prophet, the blacksmith, was peering out to see who went by in the strange coach, and after all was failing to recognize me at the distance, so changed was I by all that had befallen me, up to the door of the very tavern where I had first seen Cornelius Gleazen.

There I handed my dear wife down from her seat in the coach, dressed in a simple gown and bonnet that became her charmingly, and turned and saw, waiting to greet me, the very landlord whom last I had seen reeling back from Gleazen's drunken thrust.

At first, when he looked at me, he showed that he was puzzled; then he recognized me and his face changed.