“But why? What trouble? What makes you think so?” Betsey pressed her questions anxiously. But his answers were most unsatisfactory.
“Oh, just trouble. And how do I know it is coming soon? I feel it in my bones like.”
He would say no more and she was forced to go about her errand. As she crossed the lawn by the house she saw that the workshop door was open to the warm night air and that Mr. Reynolds was as busy as ever inside. It made a quaint picture, the shadowy room, the brilliant circle of light, the old man’s intent, intelligent face bent over his work, the black crow sitting immovable as a statue on the corner of the table. A pleasant noise of quietly whirring wheels came out of the door, a peaceful, comfortable song that mingled with the cheery chirp of a cricket in the grass. It was such a happy, untroubled scene. No presentiment of evil could be lurking that night in any bones, but Michael’s.
When Elizabeth returned with the little tree, David was as entranced with it as she had been. It stood on the edge of the basin in the last of the failing twilight and, in its airy grace of form and glittering of jade and jewels, it seemed scarcely a thing of reality at all. Miss Miranda laid her knitting on her knee for the light was gone at last. The sunset colors had faded in the water and the fireflies were beginning to wink and shine in the shadows of the pine trunks as she began.
CHAPTER VII
THE TREE OF JADE
From the time when they first went to the dame school to learn their letters, Jonathan Adams and Humphrey Reynolds spent most of their waking hours in each other’s company. They looked for birds’ nests together in the woods at the edge of the broad Susquehanna River, they paddled along its marshy banks, they played absorbing games in that busy, entrancing place, Jonathan’s father’s shipyard. Or they would stand side by side watching a great ship of war come sailing up the bay, a flying vision of square white sails and darkly outlined rigging, the vessel that was commanded by Captain Reynolds, Humphrey’s father. The two boys talked much of what they would do when they were men; they would sit for long hours on the wharf, their legs dangling above the water, discussing the future.
“I am going into the Navy like my father,” Humphrey would say, “and I intend to sail in the finest and fastest ship of the whole fleet to the very ends of the world and back again. And I will have you for executive officer, Jonathan.”
“No,” Jonathan would return seriously, “I get sick when I go to sea and I don’t like hardtack and salt pork. No, I will stop at home in my father’s yards and some day I will build a ship that is a real ship and not just tubs like these.”
They parted when they were seventeen and did not meet again for years, for Humphrey went into the Navy as he had planned and Jonathan, with mallet and chisel in hand and with that sober, earnest air that always clung to him, was already at work in his father’s shipyard. In time he became master of the entire business, while Humphrey was scouring the seas, sailing on just those far voyages of which he had so often dreamed. Jonathan had his dreams also, but he did not speak of them, only toiled away at building the heavy, sturdy vessels that carried America’s trade overseas early in the last century. Honest ships they were and reliable, as sure of coming to port as though they had belonged to the age of steam, but oh, how long it took them to make a voyage! In the privacy of his dingy little office Jonathan, with the door fastened, would push aside the clutter of plans and drawings and would get out the model of a strange vessel, sharp, slender and graceful, with a hull like a racing yacht. He would set it upon the bench to carve a little here, to alter a curve by a hair’s breadth there, or merely to stand staring at it sometimes for hours at a time, staring and thinking.