The Great Quest Part 52

"No." Arnold smiled kindly and perhaps a little sadly.

Unbuckling a belt that he had worn since I first knew him, he drew it off and opened it, and I saw to my further amazement that it was full of gold coins. "This," said he, "will go far to pay your expenses."

"I cannot take gold from you," I cried.

"Do not be foolish, Joe. We are old friends, you and I, and this by rights is as much yours as mine."

He thrust the belt into my hands. "It is all for you, but there is enough for our good friend Abe, in case he parts from you before reaching Topham."

"But you--"

"I have more. I am not, Joe, only that which I have pretended to be in your uncle's store in Topham, where you and I have had happy days together."

At my bewildered face, he smiled again.

"My real name, Joe, is old and not obscure. I am one of the least ill.u.s.trious sons of my house; but I myself have served on the staff of the great Bonaparte.

"And that--" I could scarcely believe that honest Arnold Lamont was saying these astounding things.

"That is why it has been necessary--at least advisable--for me to conceal for so many years my ident.i.ty. A man, Joe, does not tell all he knows."

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

AN OLD, OLD STORY

It was spring when we came back to Topham. The sun was warm upon the pleasant fields and gardens, and the blossoms on the fruit trees were thick and fragrant. The loveliest days of all the year were enfolding the pleasant countryside of New England in the glory and peace of their bright skies and soft colors; and as the hired coach that brought us down from Boston, with black Paul, at once proud and uncomfortable in a new suit of white man's clothes, seated stiffly high beside the driver, rolled along the familiar roads, I pointed out to my bride the fair scenes among which my boyhood had been spent.

From Montevideo, which we reached on the evening following the wreck,--there an old English clergyman married us,--we had sailed to New York as pa.s.sengers in a merchant ship; but first we had taken leave of those two good friends, Arnold Lamont, whom we were never to see again, and Abe Guptil, who had bravely insisted on setting out to build anew his fortunes by shipping as second mate of an American bark then in port. From New York a second ship had given us pa.s.sage to Boston, whence we came over the same road to Topham that I had traveled so long before with Arnold and Sim and Abe and Neil Gleazen and my uncle.

We ought, I suppose, to have been a properly anxious young couple, for of the great sum in gold that Arnold had so generously advanced us only a small part remained, and what I should do in Topham, now that Uncle Seth's store was in other hands, I had not the slightest notion. The tower of golden dreams that poor Seth Upham had built in idle moments had fallen into dust; Neil Gleazen's unscrupulous quest had brought only ashes and bitterness; it was from the shadow of a great tragedy that we came into that golden morning in spring.

But great as had been those things that Faith and I had lost, we had gained something so deep and so great that even then, when in discovering it we were so happy that the world seemed too good to be real, we had not more than begun to appreciate the wonder and magnitude of it.

Thus I came back to Topham after such a year and a half as few men have known, even though they have lived a full century--back to Topham, with all my golden prospects shattered by Gleazen's mad adventure, but with a treasure such that, if all the gold in the world had been mine, I would eagerly have given every coin to win it.

With my bride beside me, her hand upon my arm, I rode into sleepy little Topham, past my uncle's house where I had lived for many happy years, past the store where Arnold and poor Sim Muzzy and I had worked together, past the smithy where even now that old prophet, the blacksmith, was peering out to see who went by in the strange coach, and after all was failing to recognize me at the distance, so changed was I by all that had befallen me, up to the door of the very tavern where I had first seen Cornelius Gleazen.

There I handed my dear wife down from her seat in the coach, dressed in a simple gown and bonnet that became her charmingly, and turned and saw, waiting to greet me, the very landlord whom last I had seen reeling back from Gleazen's drunken thrust.

At first, when he looked at me, he showed that he was puzzled; then he recognized me and his face changed.

My fears lest the good man bear me a grudge for my share, small though it was, in that villainous night's work, vanished there and then. "You!" he cried, with both hands outstretched; "why, Joe! why, Joe! We thought you were long since lost at sea or killed by buccaneers--such a story as Sim Muzzy told us!"

"Sim Muzzy?" I cried. "Not Sim!"

"Yes, Sim!"

Then I heard far down the road someone calling, and turned and saw--it was so good that I rubbed my eyes like a child waking from a dream!--actually saw Sim Muzzy come puffing and sweating along, with a cloud of dust trailing for a hundred yards behind him.

"Joe, Joe," he cried, "welcome home! Welcome home, Joe Woods!"

And as I am an honest man, he fell to blubbering on the spot.

"Things are not what they used to be," he managed at last to say.

"The new man in the store don't like the town and the townspeople don't like him, and I've been living in hopes Seth Upham would come home and take it off his hands. But who is this has come back with you, Joe, and what's come of Seth Upham?"

At that I presented him to my wife, who received him with a sweet dignity that won his deepest regard on the spot; and then I told him the whole sad story of our adventures, or as much of it, at least, as I could cram into the few minutes that we stood by the road.

"And so," I concluded, "I have come back to Topham with not a penny to my name, save such few as are left from Arnold's bounty."

Sim heard me out in silence, for evidently his own trials had done much to cure him of his garrulity, and with a very sad face indeed he stood looking back over the village where we had lived and worked so long together.

"Poor Seth Upham!" he said at last. "Well, there's nothing we can do for him now. And as for Neil Gleazen, he's better dead than back in Topham, for here he'd hang as sure as preaching. Jed Matthews, they say, never moved a muscle after Neil hit him on the head. But as for you, Joe, you're no penniless wanderer."

"What do you mean by that?" I asked.

"There was all of fifteen thousand dollars on board the brig."

"What makes you think that?"

"Didn't I help Seth store it in his trunk? 'You're simple, Sim, and honest,' he says to me. 'I'll not have another soul besides you know this, but you're as honest as you are simple,' Them's the words he said, and I was that proud of 'em that I've treasured 'em ever since."

I thought of the papers and bags we had stored in the wagon that night when we fled from Topham.

"He hid it well," I replied. "But even if he had not hidden it so well, I fear that it would nevertheless be at the bottom of the La Plata River, just as it now is, with the brig, and all the goods that were on board her, and many men that sailed in her, good and bad alike."

"But that is not all."

"Not all? What do you mean?"

"Seth Upham left money in the bank, and I've seen his will with my own eyes. 'Twas found in the safe after we left town, and turned over to Judge Fuller."

"But surely, what with buying the brig and taking all his papers, which I looked over myself in the cabin of the Adventure and which were lost, every one, when she broke up, he had nothing left. Why, the brig must have cost a pretty penny."

"That may well be, Joe, but there's money in the bank, for all that.

Seth Upham had more money tucked away than most people would have believed."

I thought this over with growing wonder. "I do believe, my love," I said, "that we shall be able to make a fair start in the world after all, and, which is more, repay certain debts at once."

Faith smiled as she looked up at me; then she turned and looked at the quaint old town, which was spread before us in the sun.

CHAPTER x.x.xV