And the very next winter his house had burned to the ground; and the seven children—there were only seven then—had been parceled out amongst the neighbors for six or seven months until, about midsummer, the new house was roofed over and the windows set; and then the family moved in, and there they lived for several more months, "sort of camping-out fashion," as poor Melina cheerfully put it, while Captain Joe was occasionally seen putting on a row of shingles or sawing a board. At last, after the snow had begun to fly, the neighbors came once more to the rescue. A collection was made for the stricken family; carpenters finished the house; a mason built the chimney and plastered the downstairs partitions; curtains were donated for the windows; and the Pettipaws spent the winter in comfort.
The following spring Captain Joe got a position as second officer on a coastwise ship out of Boston, and the affairs of the family began to look up. From that he was promoted to the captaincy of a little freighter plying between Montreal and the Labrador; and the next we knew, he was in command of a large collier sailing out of Sydney, Nova Scotia. Poor Melina appeared in a really handsome new traveling suit, ordered from the big mail order house in Montreal; and the young ones could all go to church the same Sunday, and often did.
For the last year or two we had ceased to make frequent inquiries after Captain Joe; he had dropped pretty completely out of our life; and the thought that he might be holding a commission of special dangerousness had never so much as entered our minds. But poor Melina's calmness in the face of the news-item surprised everyone. It was like a reproach to her neighbors for not having acknowledged before the worth of the man she had married. It had not required a German torpedo to teach her that. And as for his safety, that apparently caused her no anxiety whatever.
"You couldn't kill the Captain," she repeated, with a quiet, untroubled smile, which was as much as to say that anything else might happen to a Pettipaw, but not that.
The rest of us admired her faith without being able to share it. Poor Melina rarely had leisure to read a newspaper, and she did not know much about the disasters of the war zone. And so, instinctively, everyone began to say the eulogistic things about Captain Joe that had never been said—though now we realized they ought to have been said—while he was with us.
"He was such a good man," said Mrs. Thibault, the barrister's wife. "So devoted to his home. I remember of how he would sit there on the doorstep for hours, watching his little ones at their play. Poor babies! Poor little babies!"
"Such a brave man, too; and so witty!" said John Boutin, our tailor. "The stories he would tell, my! my! Many a day in the shop he'd be telling stories from dinner till dark, without once stopping for breath as you might say. It passed the time so nice!"
"And devout!" added Mrs. Fougère, the postmistress. "A Christian. He loved to listen to the church-bells. I remember like it was yesterday his saying to me, 'The man,' he said, 'who can hear a church-bell without thinking of religion, is as good as lost, to my thinking.'"
"Not that he went to church very often," said Boutin.
"His knee troubled him," explained Mrs. Fougère.