Five Hundred Dollars | Page 8

night she saw the boy's mother stand at the door to call him, and saw him come reluctant to his task.
There was a sense of friendly companionship in all these homely sights and sounds. It was different from the old house, shut in close by a second growth of birch and oak.
The table was standing ready for a late supper. The children had gone for berries to the Island, and they would soon come home, and David was due, too, with his money.
She smiled as he appeared. The ascent to the brow of the hill was so sharp that first you saw a hat in movement, then a head, then shoulders, body, legs, and feet. She ran quickly down the road to meet him, and took his arm.
"You couldn't catch the noon train?" she said. "Captain Wells stopped at the door a little while ago to see what time we should be down to get the deed, and luckily I told him that we might not be down until into the evening. He said he 'd stay at home and wait till we came."
"Delia," said David, when he had seated himself in the house, "I 've got bad news to tell you, and I may as well out with it first as last."
"You have n't shipped for another whaling voyage?"
"No; that would be nothing," he said.
Delia stood and looked at him.
"Well," she said, "didn't you get as much as you counted on?"
"Yes,--twenty more."
"It isn't anything about the children? I expect them home every minute."
"No."
"Delia," he said, "you was a great fool ever to have me. You ought to have taken advice."
"What is the matter?" she said. "Why don't you tell me?"
"I 've lost the money," he said. "The Captain warned me how apt a seafaring man is to lose money; but I did n't take any heed, and I went off with Calvin Green--"
"With Calvin Green! What did I tell you!" she said.
"Wait a minute--and I stopped into a jewelry store and bought you a pair of ear-rings, and I came off and left my wallet on the counter, the way that fool Joe Bassett did, to Gloucester. When I went back, the rascal claimed he never saw me before--said he didn't know me from the Prophet Samuel, as if I was born that minute. And now they'll all say--and it's true--that I'm a chip of the old block, and that I 'm bound to come out at the little end. There!" he said, as he opened a little parcel and took out the earrings. "There 's what 's left of five hundred and twenty dollars, and you must make the most of 'em. Hold 'em up to the light and see how handsome they are. I don't know, after all, but they are worth while for a man to pitch overboard off Cape Horn and harpoon whales two years for. All is, just tell folks they cost five hundred dollars, and they 'll be just as good as hen's-egg diamonds.
"In fact, I don't know but I sort o' like the situation," he went on, in a moment. "It seems sort of natural and home-like. I should have felt homesick if I 'd really succeeded in getting this place paid for. 'T would have seemed like getting proud, and going back on my own relations. And then it 'll please everybody to say, 'I told you so.' There 'll be high sport round town, when it gets out, and we back water down to the old place.
"Come, say something, Delia!" he said, in a moment. "Why don't you say something about it? Don't you care that the money's lost, that you stand there and don't say a word, and look at nothing?"
"I don't want to say anything now," she said, "I want to think."
*****
"Well!" said Captain Bennett, the next day, to his wife, "Delia 's got more spunk! I should have felt like laying right down in the shafts, in her place; but instead of that, to actually go and talk them into letting her keep the Cal-lender place and pay for it so much a month! And David's signed a paper to do it."
"I guess if the truth was known," said Mrs. Bennett, knitting on, "that, come to think it over, she was more scared of David's settling back than she was for losing the money."
"She 's got a pull on him now," said the Captain, "anyway, for if he once agrees to a thing he always does it."

III.
No one fully knows the New England autumn who has not seen its colors on the extreme Old Colony sea-board. There are no mountain ranges, opening out far reaches of burning maples; but there are miles of salt-marsh, spreading as far as the eye can reach, cut by countless creeks, displaying