Cape Cod Stories Part 24

And just then the widow opened the kitchen window and called to 'em.

"Colonel Lamont," says she, "there's a sailboat beating up the harbor, and I think the folks on it are looking for you."

The colonel excused himself, and run off down the hill toward the back side of the point, and Asaph was left alone with the girl. He see, I s'pose, that here was his chance to make the best yarn out of what was bound to come out anyhow in a few minutes. So he fetched a sigh that sounded as if 'twas racking loose the foundations and commenced.

He asked Mabel if she was prepared to hear something that would shock her turrible, something that would undermine her confidence in human natur'. She was a good deal upset, and no wonder, but she braced up and let on that she guessed she could stand it. So then he told her that her dad and her had been deceived, that that house wa'n't his nor Mrs.

Badger's; 'twas the Wellmouth poor farm, and he was a pauper.

She was shocked, all right enough, but afore she had a chance to ask a question, he begun to tell her the story of his life. 'Twas a fine chance for him to spread himself, and I cal'late he done it to the skipper's taste. He told her how him and his sister had lived in their little home, their own little nest, over there by the sh.o.r.e, for years and years. He led her out to where she could see the roof of his old shanty over the sand hills, and he wiped his eyes and raved over it.

You'd think that tumble-down shack was a hunk out of paradise; Adam and Eve's place in the Garden was a short lobster 'longside of it. Then, he said, he was took down with an incurable disease. He tried and tried to get along, but 'twas no go. He mortgaged the shanty to a grasping money lender--meanin' Poundberry--and that money was spent. Then his sister pa.s.sed away and his heart broke; so they took him to the poorhouse.

"Miss Lamont," says he, "good-by. Sometimes in the midst of your fashionable career, in your gayety and so forth, pause," he says, "and give a thought to the broken-hearted pauper who has told you his life tragedy."

Well, now, you take a green girl, right fresh from novels and music lessons, and spring that on her--what can you expect? Mabel, she cried and took on dreadful.

"Oh, Mr. Blueworthy!" says she, grabbing his hand. "I'm SO glad you told me. I'm SO glad! Cheer up," she says. "I respect you more than ever, and my father and I will--"

Just then the colonel comes puffing up the hill. He looked as if he'd heard news.

"My child," he says in a kind of horrified whisper, "can you realize that we have actually pa.s.sed the night in the--in the ALMSHOUSE?"

Mabel held up her hand. "Hush, papa," she says. "Hush. I know all about it. Come away, quick; I've got something very important to say to you."

And she took her dad's arm and went off down the hill, mopping her pretty eyes with her handkerchief and smiling back, every once in a while, through her tears, at Asaph.

Now, it happened that there was a selectmen's meeting that afternoon at four o'clock. I was on hand, and so was Zoeth Tiddit and most of the others. Cap'n Poundberry and Darius Gott were late. Zoeth was as happy as a clam at high water; he'd sold the poorhouse property that very day to a Colonel Lamont, from Harniss, who wanted it for a summer place.

"And I got the price we set on it, too," says Zoeth. "But that wa'n't the funniest part of it. Seems's old man Lamont and his daughter was very much upset because Debby Badger and Ase Blueworthy would be turned out of house and home 'count of the place being sold. The colonel was hot foot for giving 'em a check for five hundred dollars to square things; said his daughter'd made him promise he would. Says I: 'You can give it to Debby, if you want to, but don't lay a copper on that Blueworthy fraud.' Then I told him the truth about Ase. He couldn't hardly believe it, but I finally convinced him, and he made out the check to Debby. I took it down to her myself just after dinner. Ase was there, and his eyes pretty nigh popped out of his head.

"'Look here,' I says to him; 'if you'd been worth a continental you might have had some of this. As it is, you'll be farmed out somewheres--that's what'll happen to YOU.'"

And as Zoeth was telling this, in comes Cap'n Benijah. He was happy, too.

"I cal'late the Lamonts must be buying all the property alongsh.o.r.e,"

he says when he heard the news. "I sold that old shack that I took from Blueworthy to that Lamont girl to-day for three hundred and fifty dollars. She wouldn't say what she wanted of it, neither, and I didn't care much; _I_ was glad to get rid of it."

"_I_ can tell you what she wanted of it," says somebody behind us. We turned round and 'twas Gott; he'd come in. "I just met Squire Foster,"

he says, "and the squire tells me that that Lamont girl come into his office with the bill of sale for the property you sold her and made him deed it right over to Ase Blueworthy, as a present from her."

"WHAT?" says all hands, Poundberry loudest of all.

"That's right," said Darius. "She told the squire a long rigamarole about what a martyr Ase was, and how her dad was going to do some thing for him, but that she was going to give him his home back again with her own money, money her father had given her to buy a ring with, she said, though that ain't reasonable, of course--n.o.body'd pay that much for a ring. The squire tried to tell her what a no-good Ase was, but she froze him quicker'n--Where you going, Cap'n Benije?"

"I'm going down to that poorhouse," hollers Poundberry. "I'll find out the rights and wrongs of this thing mighty quick."

We all said we'd go with him, and we went, six in one carryall. As we hove in sight of the poorhouse a buggy drove away from it, going in t'other direction.

"That looks like the Baptist minister's buggy," says Darius. "What on earth's he been down here for?"

n.o.body could guess. As we run alongside the poorhouse door, Ase Blueworthy stepped out, leading Debby Badger. She was as red as an auction flag.

"By time, Ase Blueworthy!" hollers Cap'n Benijah, starting to get out of the carryall, "what do you mean by--Debby, what are you holding that rascal's hand for?"

But Ase cut him short. "Cap'n Poundberry," says he, dignified as a boy with a stiff neck, "I might pa.s.s over your remarks to me, but when you address my wife--"

"Your WIFE?" hollers everybody--everybody but the cap'n; he only sort of gurgled.

"My wife," says Asaph. "When you men--church members, too, some of you--sold the house over her head, I'm proud to say that I, having a home once more, was able to step for'ard and ask her to share it with me. We was married a few minutes ago," he says.

"And, oh, Cap'n Poundberry!" cried Debby, looking as if this was the most wonderful part of it--"oh, Cap'n Poundberry!" she says, "we've known for a long time that some man--an uncommon kind of man--was coming to offer me a home some day, but even Asaph didn't know 'twas himself; did you, Asaph?"

We selectmen talked the thing over going home, but Cap'n Benijah didn't speak till we was turning in at his gate. Then he fetched his knee a thump with his fist, and says he, in the most disgusted tone ever I heard:

"A house and lot for nothing," he says, "a wife to do the work for him, and five hundred dollars to spend! Sometimes the way this world's run gives me moral indigestion."

Which was tolerable radical for a Come-Outer to say, seems to me.

JONESY

'Twas Peter T. Brown that suggested it, you might know. And, as likewise you might know, 'twas Cap'n Jonadab that done the most of the growling.

"They ain't no sense in it, Peter," says he. "Education's all right in its place, but 'tain't no good out of it. Why, one of my last voyages in the schooner Samuel Emory, I had a educated cook, feller that had graduated from one of them correspondence schools. He had his diploma framed and hung up on the wall of the galley along with tintypes of two or three of his wives, and pictures cut out of the Police News, and the like of that. And cook! Why, say! one of the fo'mast hands ate half a dozen of that cook's saleratus biscuit and fell overboard. If he hadn't been tangled up in his cod line, so we could haul him up by that, he'd have been down yet. He'd never have riz of his own accord, not with them biscuits in him. And as for his pie! the mate ate one of them bakeshop paper plates one time, thinking 'twas under crust; and he kept sayin'

how unusual tender 'twas, at that. Now, what good was education to that cook? Why--"

"Cut it out!" says Peter T., disgusted. "Who's talking about cooks?

These fellers ain't cooks--they're--"

"I know. They're waiters. Now, there 'tis again. When I give an order and there's any back talk, I want to understand it. You take a pa.s.sel of college fellers, like you want to hire for waiters. S'pose I tell one of 'em to do something, and he answers back in Greek or Hindoo, or such.

_I_ can't tell what he says. I sha'n't know whether to bang him over the head or give him a cigar. What's the matter with the waiters we had last year? They talked Irish, of course, but I understood the most of that, and when I didn't 'twas safe to roll up my sleeves and begin arguing.

But--"

"Oh, ring off!" says Peter. "Twenty-three!"

And so they had it, back and forth. I didn't say nothing. I knew how 'twould end. If Peter T. Brown thought 'twas good judgment to hire a mess of college boys for waiters, fellers who could order up the squab in pigeon-English and the ham in hog-Latin, I didn't care, so long as the orders and boarders got filled and the payroll didn't have growing pains. I had considerable faith in Brown's ideas, and he was as set on this one as a Brahma hen on a plaster nest-egg.

"It'll give tone to the shebang," says he, referring to the hotel; "and we want to keep the Old Home House as high-toned as a ten-story organ factory. And as for education, that's a matter of taste. Me, I'd just as soon have a waiter that bashfully admitted 'Wee, my dam,' as I would one that pushed 'Shur-r-e, Moike!' edge-ways out of one corner of his mouth and served the lettuce on top of the lobster, from principle, to keep the green above the red. When it comes to tone and tin, Cap'n, you trust your Uncle Pete; he hasn't been sniffling around the tainted-money bunch all these days with a cold in his head."

So it went his way finally, as I knew it would, and when the Old Home opened up on June first, the college waiters was on hand. And they was as nice a lot of boys as ever handled plates and wiped dishes for their board and four dollars a week. They was poor, of course, and working their pa.s.sage through what they called the "varsity," but they attended to business and wa'n't a mite set up by their learning.

And they made a hit with the boarders, especially the women folks. Take the crankiest old battle ship that ever cruised into breakfast with diamond headlights showing and a pretty daughter in tow, and she would eat lumpy oatmeal and scorched eggs and never sound a distress signal.

How could she, with one of them nice-looking gentlemanly waiters hanging over her starboard beam and purring, "Certainly, madam," and "Two lumps or one, madam?" into her ear? Then, too, she hadn't much time to find fault with the grub, having to keep one eye on the daughter. The amount of complaints that them college boys saved in the first fortnight was worth their season's wages, pretty nigh. Before June was over the Old Home was full up and we had to annex a couple of next-door houses for the left-overs.

I was skipper for one of them houses, and Jonadab run the other. Each of us had a cook and a waiter, a housekeeper and an up-stairs girl.