“A stack of them, six feet high!” he gasped—not quite as high as the Old South meeting house steeple! “He let me look through them and I found it, a capital design! I told him so. He said—— Here! wait a minute!” he shouted, suddenly, to the porter, and I, straining my ears, was forced to wait. “Allow me to assist you!” I saw him lift his hat; there was a tone of recognition in his voice.
It was a tall, awkward figure, in a cashmere shawl and carrying an ancient carpet-bag, that he helped upon the hastily restored gangplank even as the steamer’s wheels were ready to turn.
“If ever I’m ketched so far from home ag’in!” murmured Loveday, as she set her foot upon the steamer.
CHAPTER XI
A DIPLOMATIC EFFORT
Loveday retired at once, with a lemon, although the harbor was as smooth as a mill-pond. She was not in the mood for confidences and vouchsafed only the pessimistic declarations that she was “an old idiot,” and that “in this world folks wa’n’t generally no better’n they pretended to be, and ’twas foolish to try to wind a gauze round ’em.”
Loveday was human and homesick, and her honest old heart ached, I knew, with disappointment. She was very tired, too, having thriftily walked to the steamboat wharf and missed her way several times. So I was forced to forgive her for arriving just in time to interrupt young Carruthers, as he was telling me about Dave’s design. That it was Dave’s design I had no doubt from the young man’s manner. Dear Dave! whatever he had done no one could say that he was not bringing forth works meet for repentance now.
It was tantalizing not to know what Mr. Solomon Salter had said about the design. Perhaps Ned Carruthers would write and tell me; he had certainly shown himself very friendly. He was covered with dust from head to foot; people had stared at him on the wharf, a young man in such fashionable attire and so unkempt. It was presumably the result of his search through the “stack” of designs. Drawings were consigned, it seemed, to the same prolonged and dusty oblivion as manuscripts.
Perhaps this friendly act might be regarded as a work meet for repentance on Ned Carruthers’ part. Certainly, my heart warmed toward the young man.
I kept Dave’s secret. When he succeeded would be time enough to have it known. When he succeeded, I said to myself, with perfect confidence, even with a vision before my eyes of the great dusty stack of drawings. I thought I had caught a glimpse of how things worked together. As for Dave’s wrong-doing—I was not “winding a gauze” around it, but I realized that in God’s blessed providence one may sin and yet repent.
When we landed in the forenoon at the pier on our own pretty river, I went, traveling-bag and travel-stains and all, to the shipyard.