It was in the counting-room, down at the shipyard; shall I ever forget the day? It was summer and the sky with its clouds and the river with its sails were a lovely symphony in blue and white, with an atmosphere of breeze and sunshine. Some lumbermen on a raft were singing “Sweet Marie,” and the children, Dave and Estelle, were shouting with glee as they tumbled off a teeter into the piles of soft and fragrant sawdust.
“You know I am slow,” Cyrus continued, while I was trying to get my breath after the shock of astonishment I had felt when he told me that he was not going to college. He had arisen from the desk where he had been jotting down figures and stood, very erect and pale, by the window. He was only nineteen, but I thought admiringly that he already looked like a minister. “It would be a great while before I should have any success, if I ever did. And I couldn’t think of going into the ministry to make money.”
“Money!” I echoed in amazement. “Why, we are all getting where we can take care of ourselves!” And I wondered if he did not know that even I, whose talents were only domestic ones, was to supply the Palmyra canning factory with preserves and the new summer hotel with strawberries and eggs.
“The business isn’t prospering,” said Cyrus slowly. “Uncle Horace will never have any interest in it.”
“You don’t like it either,” I said, and Cyrus permitted himself to make a little weary grimace. But he caught himself up the next minute.
“It would be a pity to have it go out of the family,” he said. “I can’t help but think how grandfather would hate to have the business fail.”
“He never seemed to think of that,” I said. “He only wanted you to be a minister. Mother, too, wanted you to be one—like father.”
Cyrus smiled a little bitterly, and pointed through the open window where Dave appeared upon a lofty teeter, high in the air, his slender figure outlined against the blue of the sky, the sunlight glinting on his curly yellow poll.
“We’ll send him to college,” he said. “See here!” He drew a letter from his pocket. “This is from his teacher, Miss Raycroft, saying she can do nothing with him, and I’ve had a polite suggestion from the committee that it would be just as well to keep him at home, as he disturbs the order and discipline of the school by drawing pictures, chiefly caricatures, upon the books and walls and blackboards.”
I was dumb with dismay. We knew that there was a little mischief in David. He would draw pictures; the fly-leaves of all the books that he used were spoiled, and travelers stopped to laugh at the grotesque figures in red chalk or black paint that adorned the barn door. But that Dave’s mischief could be taken as seriously as this I had never expected.