“I’m afraid he takes after the other side,” answered Cyrus, with a resigned air.
Cyrus never grew excited or impatient over the other children, now. He seemed to have adjusted the chains to his wrists. He walked out of the room as if to end the conversation. We were in his own den, a room he had fitted up in the great attic which had been open and unfinished before, and he seemed to prefer to leave it to me rather than to continue an argument. But after he had closed the door he opened it again to say, in his well-balanced tone, that always provoked me:
“I have rather more hopes of the girl.”
The girl! He always would take that tone of aloofness towards Dave and Estelle, and that while he was sacrificing himself for their welfare!
“Estelle believes in Dave,” I called after him, softly. “She thinks there is some mystery about it.”
“That is mere childishness,” said Cy, loftily.
At first I doubted whether Dave would adhere to his determination to go into the shipyard to work as a common laborer, and, if he did, whether Uncle Horace and Cy would allow it. But Uncle Horace grimly approved. Dave had the brawn and muscle for a ship’s carpenter, he said, and he could serve his apprenticeship like any other young man. And Cyrus agreed, although I thought he would have been better pleased if Dave had essayed his penance—or begun his life-work—as one was pleased to regard it—at a distance from Palmyra.
There was a ship at the time on the stocks whose inside work was to be done, although the weather was becoming wintry, and Dave went to his apprenticeship at once and looked, in blue overalls, a colored shirt and rough jacket, just as much like a Greek god as ever. Estelle made salves and cold cream for his hands—Dave always had very white and delicate hands—and said very little. The color that had been fitful was always bright in her cheeks, now, and she held her head high. I think she still believed, not in Dave’s penitence, as we were all—unless it were Uncle Horace—trying to do, but in Dave’s innocence, and had not given up the hope of proving it in spite of Dave’s persistent reticence—as persistent to her as to the rest of us; indeed, more so, for it was easy to see that he avoided her.
But he must have admitted to her that he was anxious about the money he had borrowed, for she began to show a feverish eagerness to earn money. Uncle Horace and Cyrus had proposed to pay Dave’s debt, for the sake of the family honor, but Dave stoutly claimed the right to shoulder it himself.
He could discharge it in time, he declared. The young man to whom it was due, repenting perhaps of his dishonorable betrayal of Dave to the college authorities, had agreed to wait for a certain length of time. And now the debt was galling Estelle more than it galled Dave. Even Estelle, who believed in him, could not doubt that Dave was not given to worry.