Five Hundred Dollars | Page 4

at Indian Point it vanished; or look up shore ten miles to where the coast-line ended in a bold, wooded headland, which seemed, by a perpetual mirage, to bear foliage so lofty as to show daylight through beneath the branches. At night you could see the flash of the revolving light on Windmill Rock, and the constant rays from the lightship on the Rips. So that by day or night you could never be lonesome, unless, perhaps, on some thick night, when you could see no light, and could only hear a grating knell from the bell-buoy, and could seem to see, through the white darkness, the waters washing over its swaying barrel.
There was a good-sized boarded barn, well shingled on the roof, with hay-mows, and with room for two or three cows and a horse and a wagon, and with wide doors "fore and aft," as the neighbors put it; through its big front door you could look out to sea. Then there were twenty acres of land, including a wood-lot which could be thinned out every year to give one all his fire-wood, and what was cut would hardly be missed.
Such was the place which, on the death of the Widow Callender, had been offered for sale for eight hundred dollars. For months it had stood empty, stormed by all the sea-winds, lit up by the sun, when at last an unexpected buyer had turned up in David Prince.
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It was a happy Sunday that he passed with his little family at the new home. They went all over the house again and again, and looked from every window, and planned where flower-frames should be put, to take the sun. Then, going out of doors, they inspected the revolving clothes-dryer, which David, with a seaman's instinct, had already rigged with four little sloops to sail about on the ends of the projecting arms, on Mondays, tacking after shirts and stockings. Then they went to the barn, and David showed how he was going to cover the sides with spruce shingles, so that he could have a warm place to work in in the winter. Then they went over the fields, and planned a garden for the next spring; and then they went down to the shore, and, where a little arm of the sea made in, David showed where he would haul up his dory, and would keep his boat, when he could afford to get one together: in the mean time he was going to fish on shares with Jacob Foster, who lived a few rods up the road. Then they all strolled back to the house, and dined on shore-birds shot on Saturday afternoon, and new potatoes and turnips which Jacob Foster had brought in.
After dinner, they all sat at the front windows, in the room which they were pleased to call the parlor, David holding on his knees the two oldest boys, delighted with the recovery of such a Sindbad of a father, while the third, still a little shy of him, stood by his mother. David told of the voyage, repeating, by request, full half-a-dozen times, the story of the night when he was snapped off the end of the jib-boom; to do which he had to set the boys down and stand, to make the swift, sudden clutch, with his eyes shut, at the towing rope; at which the boys screamed on every repetition.
After supper, David and his wife, leaving the children with orders to go to bed at the first flash from the Windmill, went to church.
They took the same back seat which they had the night that David shipped. There was much the same scene before them. There was bald-headed Deacon Luce, in his usual Damocles' seat exactly beneath the dangling chandelier, which children watched in morbid hope of a horror; there was the president of the Dorcas Society, a gray-haired woman who had navigated home a full-rigged ship from the Gold Coast; there were grave-faced men who, among them, could have charted half the globe. In the pulpit was the same old-fashioned, bookish man, who, having led his college class, had passed his life in this unknown parish, lost in delight, in his study, in the great Athenian's handling of the presumptuous Glaucon, or simply unfolding parables in his pulpit.
That former night came vividly back to Delia Prince. Through the opening hymn, in which she did not join; through the story of the feast in Simon's house, she was thinking of the time when David told her he had shipped, and she had made up her mind to save a home.
But in the second hymn she joined; and in her joy she forgot herself and sang,--as she had been used to sing when she was the leader of all the singing.