My heart ached when I saw Susan leaning over the front gate watching for us as we drove up the road. The wind was setting down towards us, and I could smell the coffee that she had put on the fire to boil as soon as she caught sight of us—Susan made coffee splendidly—and I knew that she had kept her promise, and had ready the feast that was to celebrate our success; and that made it all the dismaller that we hadn't any success to celebrate.
When I told her how badly the expedition had turned out she came very near crying; but she gave a sort of gulp, and then laughed instead, and did what she could to make things pleasant for us. We had our feast, but notwithstanding Susan's effort to be cheerful, it was about as dreary a feast as I ever had anything to do with. We brought Old Jacob in and let him feast with us; and he, to do him justice, was not dreary at all. He seemed to enjoy it thoroughly. Indeed, the most trying part of that sorrowful supper-party was the way in which Old Jacob recovered his spirits and declared at short intervals that his memory now was all right again. He even went so far as to say that with his eyes blindfolded and in the dark he could lead us to the precise spot off which the schooner used to lie.
Susan was disposed to regard these assertions hopefully; but we, who had been fumbling about with him for two days, well understood their baselessness. It was not Old Jacob's fault, of course, but his defective memory certainly was dreadfully provoking. Here was an enormous fortune slipping through our lingers just because this old man could not remember a little matter about where a schooner had been anchored.
After he had eaten all the supper that he could hold—which was a good deal—and had gone home, we told Susan the whole dismal story of how our expedition had proved to be a total failure. It was best, we thought, not to mince matters with her; and we stated minutely how time after time the anchorage of the schooner had been precisely located, and then in a little while had been unlocated again. She saw, as we did, that as a clew Old Jacob was not much of a success, and also that he was about the only thing in the least like a clew that we possessed. Realizing this latter fact, and knowing that his great age made his death probable at any moment, Susan strongly advised me, in her clear-sighted way, to have him photographed.
IV.
Gregory Wilkinson seemed to find himself quite comfortable in our little home, and settled down there into a sort of permanency. We were glad to have him stay with us, for he was a first-rate fellow, and always good company in his pleasant, quiet way, and he told us two or three times that he was enjoying himself. He told me a great many more than two or three times that he considered Susan to be a wonderfully fine woman; indeed, he told me this at least once every day, and sometimes oftener. He was greatly struck—just as everybody is who lives for any length of time in the same house with Susan—by her capable ways, and by her unfailing equanimity and sweetness of temper. Even when the colored girl fell down the well, carrying the rope and the bucket along with her, Susan was not a bit flustered. She told me just where I would find the clothes-line and a big meat-hook; and when, with this hastily-improvised apparatus, we had fished the colored girl up and got her safely on dry land again, she knew exactly what to do to make her all right and comfortable. As Gregory Wilkinson observed to me, after it was all over, from the way that Susan behaved, any one might have thought that hooking colored girls up out of wells was her regular business.
As to making Susan angry, that simply was impossible. When things went desperately wrong with her in any way she would just come right to me and cry a little on my shoulder. Then, when I had comforted her, she would chipper up and be all right again in no time. Gregory Wilkinson happened to come in one day while a performance of this sort was going on, and for fear that he should think it odd Susan explained to him that it was a habit of hers when things very much worried her and she felt like being ugly to people. (The trouble that day was that the colored girl, who had a wonderful faculty for stirring up tribulation, had broken an India china teacup that had belonged to Susan's grandmother, and that Susan had thought the world of.) That evening, while we were sitting on the veranda smoking, and before Susan, who was helping clear the supper-table, had joined us, Gregory Wilkinson said to me, with oven, more emphasis than usual, that Susan was the finest woman he had ever known; and he added that he was very sorry that when he was my ago he had not met and married just such another.
He and I talked a good deal at odd times about the money that our great-great-great-uncle the pirate had buried, and that through all these years had stayed buried so persistently. He did not take much interest in the matter personally, but for my sake, and still more for Susan's sake, he was beginning to be quite anxious that the money should be found. He even suggested that we should take Old Jacob over to the bay-side and let him try again to find the Martha Ann's anchorage; but a little talk convinced us that this would be useless. The old man had been given every opportunity, during the two days that we had cruised about with him, to refresh his memory; and we both had been the pained witnesses of the curious psychological fact that the more he refreshed it, the more utterly unmanageable it had become. The prospect, we agreed, was a disheartening one, for it was quite evident that for our purposes Old Jacob was, as it were, but an elderly, broken reed.
About this time I noticed that Gregory Wilkinson was unusually silent, and seemed to be thinking a great deal about something. At first we were afraid that he was not quite well, and Susan offered him both her prepared mustard plasters and her headache powders. But he said that he was all right, though he was very much obliged to her. Still, he kept on thinking, and he was so silent and preoccupied that Susan and I were very uncomfortable. To have him around that way, and to be always wondering what he could possibly be thinking about, Susan said, made her feel as though she were trying to eavesdrop when nobody was talking.