Cape Cod Folks | Page 9

away without a sigh. In another sequestered nook, I paused with a sinful mixture of curiosity and delight, before a Chinese idol standing alone on a pedestal.
There was a strangeness and a newness about things at the Ark that began to be exhilarating, I was reminded, in a negative sort of way, that I had intended to begin my work on this new day with a prayer to the true God for strength and assistance. I had found it necessary to make this resolve because, although I had a "fixed habit of prayer," it was reserved rather for occasions of special humiliation than resorted to as an everyday indulgence; practically, I had well nigh dispensed with it altogether.
However, I started back in an intently serious frame of mind to find my couch. I lost my way, and stumbling against a swinging-door which opened into a comparatively spacious apartment, what was my joy to discover my trunk, with the portmanteau containing my keys on top of it.
I then proceeded to array myself with an absorbing ardor and devotion, doing my hair before a hand-glass with rare resignation of spirit. I began to feel more and more like an incorporated existence, and admitted a sudden eagerness to join the Keeler family at breakfast.
I had no hesitation which direction to take, being guided by the sound of voices and wafts of penetrating odors.
It was a fortunate direction, for I discovered on the way my lost apparel artfully concealed under a small melodeon, and, strangely enough, I was again brought face to face with my deserted couch and the weeping lady on the wall. She held me a moment with the old fascination. As I put up my glasses, I thought I detected in her face a hitherto unnoticed buoyancy of expression and not having wholly escaped in my life from ideas of a worldly nature, I reflected that, probably, her regretted consort had left her with a sufficient number of thousands.
In this same connection, I was reminded that I, myself, had started out on an independent career, and wondered if it would be unkind or undutiful in me to start a private bank account of my own. I concluded that it would not.
When I entered the little room where the Keeler family was assembled:--
"Why, here's our teacher!" exclaimed Grandma Keeler in accents of delight, and came to meet me with outstretched arms. "We couldn't abear to wake ye up, dearie," she went on, "knowin' ye was so tired this mornin'; and there's plenty o' time--plenty o' time. My Casindana come home!" she murmured, with a smile and a tremble of the lips, and a far-away look, for the instant, in her gentle eyes.
In fact, the whole Keeler family received me with outstretched arms. If I had been a long-lost child, or a friend known and loved in days gone by, I could not have been more cordially and enthusiastically welcomed.
The best chair was set for me; glances of eager and inquiring interest were bent upon me.
I accepted it all coolly, though not without a certain air of affability, too, for I had a natural desire to make myself agreeable to people, when it wasn't too much trouble; but I was quite firm, at this time, in the conviction that there was little or no faith to be put in human nature. On the whole I was much entertained and interested.
The two children came to climb into my lap, but this part of the acquaintance did not progress very fast. I thought they must have been struck by something in my eye (I was merely wondering abstractedly if their heads were not out of proportion to the rest of their bodies), for they paused, and Mrs. Philander called them away sharply.
Mrs. Philander was a frail little woman,--she could not have been over thirty or thirty-two years old,--not pretty, though she had a very airy and graceful way of comporting herself. Her eyes were large and dark, with a strange, melancholy gleam in them.
I never knew the secrets of Mrs. Philanders heart. She had often a tired, tense look about the mouth, and seemed often sorely discontent; but she had the sweetest voice I ever heard. She was familiarly called Madeline.
Grandpa or Cap'n Keeler was over eighty years old. He had a tall, powerful frame--at least, it spoke of great power in the past--and I thought his eye must have been uncommonly dark and keen once.
From his manly irascibility of temperament, and his frequent would-be authoritativeness of tone, one might have inferred, from a passing glimpse, that Grandpa Keeler was something of a tyrant in the family; but I soon learned that his sway was of an extremely vague and illusory nature.
Grandma Keeler was twenty years his junior. She had not married him until she