Having failed in her attempt to admonish her sister, Mrs. Cleaveland took occasion soon after to comfort the sailor.
“You must not mind if Clara seems a little hard sometimes,” she said with gentle kindness. “She does not mean to hurt your feelings. It is only her way. I know she thinks very highly of you.”
“Oh! I understand her pretty well,” he replied gravely. “Clara has a good heart, and she never gives me a blow but she is sorry for it afterward. I don’t blame her. I suppose she sees that I rather took a liking to her”—he blushed up—“and that’s the way she makes me keep my distance. I understand Clara. She suits me.”
He said this with a certain stateliness. Not even Clara’s sister might blame her to him.
“Rather took a liking,” was Captain Cary’s way of expressing the fact that he had surrendered the whole of his honest, generous heart.
There were fires in the woods about Seaton that summer, and, August being very dry, they increased so as to be troublesome. From Major Cleaveland’s house, which stood on the hill-top west of the village, they could see smoke encircling nearly all the horizon by day; and by night flames were visible in every direction but the south, where the sea lay. The air was rank with smoke, cinders came on the wind when it rose, and vegetation turned sooty. Crops were spoiling, farm-houses were threatened, and large quantities of lumber were burned. People looked every day more anxiously for rain, prayers were offered in the churches for it, and still it did not come. The blue of the sky changed to brazen, the silver and gold of moonlight and sunlight became lurid, the springs began to dry up. Sometimes the day would darken with clouds, and they looked up hopefully, and watched to see the saving drops descend. But week followed week, and the refreshing messengers passed by on the other side. More than once, when the sun was in the west, it showed them through that canopy of smoke the dense black peaks and rolling volumes of the thunder-cloud, and at night they could see the beautiful lightning crinkling round the horizon, and hear the music of far-away thunder that came down with pelting rain on distant hills; but still their land was dry, their throats and eyes inflamed, and the fires crept nearer.
Major Cleaveland came home to tea one night with an anxious face. “They are afraid the fire will reach Arnold’s woods to-night,” he said; “and, if it does, Marvin’s house must go, and there is danger that some part of the town may burn. The wind is very high from the northwest.”
Mr. Marvin, Mrs. Yorke’s tenant, had purchased her house and land, and lived there, but the woods still bore their old name of Arnold’s woods.
Later in the evening, while they sat looking out at the baleful glow that grew every moment brighter in the northwest, Charles and Henry Cleaveland came up from the village with later news. Half the men in the town, they said, had gone out beyond Grandfather Yorke’s place to fight fire. The firemen were all there, and Mr. Marvin had his furniture packed ready to send away from the house at a moment’s warning.
“And those poor Pattens!” Clara asked anxiously. “Have they wit enough to save themselves? Has any one thought of them?”