"I forgot no part of your orders, sir," rejoined Roswell. "It was my duty to obey them, and I believe I have done so to the letter--"
"Stop, Gar'ner," interrupted the dying man--"one question, while I think of it. Will the Vineyard men have any claim of salvage on account of them skins?"
"Certainly not, sir. These skins are all our own--were taken, cured, stowed, and brought home altogether by ourselves. There is a lot of skins belonging to the Vineyarders, stowed away in the house, which is yours, deacon, and which it would well pay any small craft to go and bring away. If anybody is to claim salvage, it will be ourselves. No salvage was demanded for the loss off Cape Henlopen, I trust?"
"No, none--Daggett behaved what I call liberal in that affair,"--half the critics of the day would use the adjective instead of the adverb here, and why should Deacon Prates English be any better than his neighbours?--"and so I've admitted to his friends over on the Vineyard. But, Gar'ner, our great affair still remains to be accounted for. Do you wish to have the room cleared before you speak of that--shall we turn the key on all these folks, and then settle accounts--he! he! he!"
The deacon's facetiousness sounded strangely out of place to Roswell; still, he did not exactly know how to gainsay his wishes. There might be an indiscretion in pursuing his narrative before so many witnesses, and the young man paused until the room was cleared, leaving no one in it but the sick man, Mary, himself, and the nurse. The last could not well be gotten rid of on Oyster Pond, where her office gave her an assumed right to know all family secrets; or, what was the same thing to her, to fancy that she knew them. Among all the sayings which the experience of mankind has reduced to axioms, there is not one more just than that which says, "There are secrets in all families." These secrets the world commonly affects to know all about, but we think few will have reached the age of threescore without becoming convinced of how much pretending ignorance there is in this assumption of the world. "Tot ou tard tout se scait" is a significant saying of our old friends, the French, who know as much of things, in practice as any other people on the face of the earth; but "tot ou tard tout ne se scait pas."
"Is the door shut?" asked the deacon, tremulously, for eagerness, united to debility, was sadly shaking his whole frame. "See that the door is shut tight, Mary; this is our own secret, and nurse must remember that."
Mary assured him that they were alone, and turned away in sorrow from the bed.
"Now, Gar'ner," resumed the deacon, "open your whole heart, and let us know all about it."
Roswell hesitated to reply; for he, too, was shocked at witnessing this instance of a soul's clinging to mammon, when on the very eve of departing for the unknown world. There was a look in the glazed and sunken eyes of the old man, that reminded him unpleasantly of that snapping of the eyes which he had so often seen in Daggett.
"You didn't forget the key, surely, Gar'ner?" asked the deacon, anxiously.