The Fortune of the Indies/Chapter 1
The
Fortune of the Indies
CHAPTER I
INGRAMS PAST
RESTHAVEN looks, in many ways, much as it did a hundred years ago. Except that then there was a tall sailing-ship alongside every wharf, and there were brown Malay seamen singing, and very curious bales piled on the piers, wafting scents of tea and coffee and unknown spice across the New England sea-smell. And there were dark, lofty whaling-vessels, too, fitting out for their next long cruise into all the waters of the world; for in those days Resthaven boasted both the Eastern and the whaling trades. A very few of the old whalers still come in to the quiet harbor—bluff, square-rigged ships, too proud to install the steam-engines that would shorten their cruises but injure their long-cherished tradition. So, because of these few stout survivors, Resthaven is not altogether bare, even to-day, of square yards and gray canvas.
But many of the low wharves are unused now; their great piles are rotting oozily below tide-water mark. On the jetties, grass grows in rough patches where once rich cargoes were piled; silence hangs across the water that once tingled to the lift of anchor chanteys. Up from the waterfront the narrow, shaded streets climb steeply; some of them are paved still with cobbles, stretching in gray, uneven slopes beneath ancient elms. The houses that border these streets have changed little in the hundred years. Time has dignified and not deteriorated them; they seem to gaze serenely, each from the delicate fanlight above its fine doorway, where honeysuckle, or clematis, or swinging wisteria half hides the white, fluted door-posts.
Perhaps least changed of all is the old Ingram mansion, which stands proudly, as it should, on the highest ground in all Resthaven, fronting the wide harbor view with its pillared portico and curved stone steps. It is approached up a neat flagged pathway, and enclosed by a wrought-iron fence, over which lean lilac and syringa bushes. Around it great elms raise lordly boughs—leafless now—and pattern the white walls with their shifting shadows. In this early February twilight the shades were not yet drawn—indeed, blinds are seldom closed at all in Resthaven—and had you been walking up the narrow, brick sidewalk of Chesley Street, you might have seen within the high-ceiled dining-room of the Ingram mansion two old ladies who stood beside the window anxiously looking out. They were very much alike, these old ladies, in their plain gray dresses and soft white fichus. Alike, too, were the slight frowns which troubled their blue eyes. They were watching for their grand-niece, who should long ago have been at home; indeed, the tea-urn had been boiling for the past half hour.
Jane Ingram had forgotten that she should have been at home. The increasingly sharp voice of the February dusk-wind did not serve to remind her of it. In response to its whistling she merely turned up the collar of her rough, blue reefer and squared her elbows again on a pile-head of what still was known as Ingram's Wharf. Just so had her great-grandfather, Mark Ingram, set his elbows upon the taffrail of his ship as she warped into that same dock a very great many years before.
Jane was twelve years old. She was not very big, and she had what everybody in Resthaven recognized as "the Ingram eyes"—very blue and deep-set under perfectly level eyebrows. Her mouth was rather straight, too, and so was her hair, which was tawny in color and somewhat unruly. It was clipped short below her ears, and to keep it back from her forehead she habitually tied it with a blue tape—a thing which her great-aunts considered unsuitable. The tape was at present concealed by a blue watch-cap, which was pulled over her ears in so determined a fashion that only a few wisps of hair escaped from beneath it.
Resthaven Harbor deepened from gray to green, from green to purple, and stars swam above it—blue winter stars, tangling among the rigging of the old whaler on which Jane was so intent. Aboard the ship a kerosene lamp flared out, sending a long flicker up the foremast. The lighthouse which marked the harbor mouth began punctuating the dusk with slow flashes. There was no sound at all but little cold noises of water along the piers.
Jane woke suddenly to the settling chill and the creeping darkness, and removed her elbows from the pile-head. She shook herself and ran up the hill, clattering over the cobbles of Chesley Street and bursting in precipitately at the wide, white door of the Ingram house. A savory smell of muffins made her rather glad she had remembered to come home, and she slid out of her reefer and rubbed her cold fingers. Aunt Lucia came into the hall; Aunt Ellen had taken her seat behind the steaming urn.
"My dear, do you think you should stay out quite so long? It's very cold, besides being so dark."
"I wasn't cold," Jane said, "and the dark is nice, because there are lights in it and a different sort of wind."
Miss Lucia, who could not imagine any sort of wind being pleasant, however different, said nothing, and Jane installed herself at the table with a hungry expression.
"Where are the boys?" she inquired."Not yet in," Miss Ellen answered from behind the tea-cups.
"I'm afraid we'll always be that kind of a family," Jane apologized, attacking her supper heartily.
The aunts were silent. Although they had had seven years of practice, they never could frame satisfactory answers to their niece's remarks. Before he died, Jane's father had said to them: "Don't bother with her too much; she's a safe kind of queer, I think." If this phrase had ever reached the ears of Jane's brothers, she would never have heard an end of it, but as it was, two conscientious old ladies guarded it in their memories and tried their best not to "bother" too much with Jane.
While they are waiting for Mark and Alan (the eldest Ingram son is always Mark) we might do well to look about this still old mansion. The green dusk veiled the portico as we entered; we did not see how sadly it stands in need of paint. But within this paneled room, gently lighted by oil-lamps, many little things all point toward a conviction that the Ingram fortunes cannot be what they were when the first Mark Ingram built his house here above the wharves where his ships lay. No, the little woven rugs are very threadbare; there are gaps in the rows of china within the shell cabinet, hinting at the reluctant sale of least treasured pieces; Miss Ellen's mouse-gray dress, if we only knew it, has been turned; and, for that matter, Jane's reefer once belonged to Alan and has been for several years in the cedar chest, waiting until her shoulders should be broad enough to wear it.
But lessened fortunes cannot diminish the beauty of fine architecture. There is no more lovely stairway in Resthaven than that of the Ingram mansion, sweeping up its gracious flights with perfect curve of smooth mahogany rail and delicate banisters. And the doorways are fashioned broad and high; in the down-stairs rooms they are arched, and fluted pilasters support their curved white lintels. The long windows are set with that exquisite proportion which no modern architect finds easy to copy, and wooden inside shutters with smoked-glass knobs fold back against the paneled walls. To-night Miss Ellen rose to shut those which closed the eastern windows of the dining-room, for a rising nor'easterly breeze had begun to thrust in occasional sharp wisps of cold around the loosened panes.
The hall door flew open with a clash, admitting a swirl of very cold wind, as well as the breathless persons of Mark and Alan Ingram. If you were as well acquainted with generations of Ingrams as Resthaven is, you would wonder how these boys came to bear the name at all. For they were both as dark as their mother had been, and as tall, whereas the Ingrams had always been small, with a wiry slightness that gave an impression of height. No, it was quite evident that the last of the true Ingram look was to be found in the slow, blue fire of Jane's eyes and the clear lines of a mouth that could somehow be at once determined and dreamy.
Mackinaws cast off, the two boys sat themselves down with apologies to the aunts. The appetites of seventeen and fifteen after a long tramp are not soon satisfied, and there was silence for a time around the orange lamp. The aunts were busy over apportioning the dessert. Jane folded her hands and said vaguely:
"I wonder if they just said it that way because it sounds grand, or if it's really true."
"What?" Alan inquired; "what, anyway?"
"'With the Fortune of the Indies went the fortunes of the Ingrams,'" his sister quoted dreamily.
"Doesn't it look as though it were true?" Mark said. "I haven't noticed much fortune embarrassing the Ingrams of late. I'd awfully like more ham, Aunt Lucia."
"I'm afraid there is no more, my dear," said Miss Lucia. "Could you eat bread? The saying is true, Jane, though I am very little given to believing in old tales."
"I must say I don't see where it all went to," Alan put in. "Wasn't great-grandfather supposed to be one the wealthiest men in the China trade?"
"You must remember," said Miss Ellen, "that most of his great investments went wrong after his death. The Civil War ruined many a fortune, Alan.""And the ship and her cargo were lost," Miss Lucia added.
"The ship wasn't everything," argued Alan, "even if she was the best in the trade. And it was before the Civil War."
"The Fortune of the Indies," Jane murmured; "she was the most beautiful ship that ever was."
"The thing I'd like to know," said Mark, "is whatever became of the model of her."
"Who wouldn't!" exclaimed his brother, reaching for the cookies. "It does seem as if the Ingrams ought to have been able to hang on to that, at least."
The aunts sighed a little. This topic was one which recurred every so often, unavoidably, and was apt to last indefinitely, if not diverted. The old ladies, with a little nod to one another, rose from the table. Aunt Lucia took from behind the kitchen door a small apron, which her sister fastened for her. Though there was a little servant, of a sort, in the kitchen, the aunts themselves always washed the remnant of Ingram china.
The boys went off to study, but Jane, who needed very little impetus to be started on an endless train of thought about her great-grandfather's ship, stole down the hall with a purpose of her own. At the back of the house, partly under the sweeping stairway, was a small room which in the old days had been used as the office. There still stood in a corner the great glass-doored secretary, within whose drawers lay the precious log-books of many an Ingram cruise, and the carnelian seal cut with the image of a ship and the letters "M. I." and a hundred other dusty reminders of a time when momentous business had been carried on in this little white-paneled room. Those white walls were hung with strange, stiff paintings of ships—the Fortune of the Indies herself, the Gloria, the Andromache, Great-grandfather Mark's first ship. It was a still room, even in that quiet house. By day you could look out from its small-paned window to the garden; hollyhocks in summer, and tall foxgloves, and columbine seedlings pushing themselves between the flagging of the path, all shadowed by the oldest elms in Resthaven. The elms were bare now, and the uncut grass yellow and rough, and the dry stalks were black in the flower-beds.The room was dark. Jane lighted the candle on the secretary and curled herself into the smooth seat of the desk-chair. She knew just which one of the battered log-books she wanted, and she drew it from among the others and opened it. Cramped old writing in yellowed ink, deciphered by candle-light, does not make easy reading, but Jane was well used to this.
June 3, 1841. This day 12 m set sail for the Indies and China in my new ship the Fortune of the Indies. Light air S. by E. 2 p. m. ordered all sail set, inclusive of the moonsail—that which the Gloria has not. Lost Kennico Light 5:29 p. m. Breeze freshening from the S. The ship is handy, it appears.
And that was the beginning of the first cruise of the Fortune of the Indies. And all that he could say of her, this Great-grandfather Mark of few words, was that she "appeared handy." She, the first clipper ship that had ever sailed from Resthaven; a dream of wonder, from the red burgee that floated above her main truck, shimmering down through spaces of new, sunlit canvas and mazy rigging to the spotless decks; the bright, black hull, the burnished flash of the copper plates below her water-line, the gilded figure that bent above her keen, clipper bows. He had dreamed her and built her; now he was to sail her. Couldn't he, wondered his great-granddaughter, spare a word of the pride and contentment he must have felt to write in the stiff old log? And Jane could see the moon-sail, floating nebulous, high, high above the starlit expanse of the other sails. The Gloria had no moonsail; few ships had at that time. She was the other Ingram-vessel, older, steadier than the Fortune and less beautiful, but a noble ship and one that had toiled long to win those Ingram fortunes now dwindled and lost.
On the day that the Fortune of the Indies first sailed, Grandfather Mark was eight years old. Jane had calculated this for herself. By frequent reference to the family Bible and comparison with the log-books she was able, by this time, to state offhand the age of any Ingram at the time of any cruise. She wondered if he had stood there with great-grandmother on the wharf, watching the new ship drop down to the harbor mouth with the tide, watching her great sails one by one soaring into place, watching the farewell dip of the red burgee as the Fortune of the Indies filled away and shimmered out to sea.
But it was not many years before the little Mark went to, sea, too,—first as boy and then as mate, till at last the child who had watched the new sails set took command of the Gloria when he was scarcely out of his teens, as men did in those fine old days. So father and son, each in his own ship, sailed out of Resthaven to far ports.
On the cruise before his last, Great-grandfather Mark fashioned, in long hours of trade-wind idleness, a model of the ship he loved. It was a very beautiful thing. Jane had never seen it, but she knew that it was beautiful. For the man who could have fashioned in his mind the Fortune herself could surely build a perfect model of her. He had brought the little ship home; his wife had installed it above the parlor mantel. His daughters, Ellen and Lucia, remembered it dimly; they were very little girls when both ship and model were lost.
Of the last cruise of the Fortune of the Indies there is no log, for it went down with her and her master. But there is an agitated entry in the log of the Gloria, scrawled by the second Mark in a Malay port.
I have heard only now that on the third day of June, this year 1854, my dear Father was lost with his Ship, the Fortune of the Indies and all therein, in the China Sea, lat. and long, unknown. Few particulars are available; it appears the typhoon which delayed my progress from the Bashee Islands struck with greater force farther west. One survivor was picked up clinging to a hatch-grating, by the Aphrodite, Salem, just arrived here, but died before any detail could be obtained from him. My Father was in the forty-sixth Year of his age.
Grandfather Mark did not add that the Fortune of the Indies was lost on the anniversary of the day she set sail on her first cruise. And the model, too, was gone. In vain did Miss Lucia and Miss Ellen, racking their wits at Jane's urgent plea, try to remember just when it was that the little vessel hung no more above the mantel-shelf. A bulky thing to steal, and a difficult one to dispose of, but stolen it must have been, for it was scarcely believable that any Ingram, however penniless, would sell a thing so precious. But there the matter stood; the Ingrams finally accepted their loss as regrettable but inevitable. Yet here was Jane, when the fire had cooled, fanning to new life the flames of longing for the lost ship and the lost fortunes.
Indeed, no wonder the old family saying came to be! Nothing was quite the same after the Fortune of the Indies and her master vanished in the grip of the typhoon. Great-grandfather Mark in his will left the Gloria to his son; to his wife the mansion and a group of investments already tottering as the Eastern trade slackened. The surviving Ingrams began to readjust themselves. The younger Mark sailed the Gloria for some years more, but the fine old ships were being steadily elbowed off the seas by swift and scornful steam-vessels. The Gloria was very old and Grandfather Mark had no money for further ventures; slowly she broke up at Ingram Wharf, only faintly reproachful in her resignation. And Jane's father came no more nearly in touch with the sea than a clerkship in a Boston mercantile house.
It is a long foreword, and dull perhaps, but the shadows of it all clung so closely in the little office of the Ingram house that Jane felt it keenly and lived over the tale and longed for a hundred years to drop off the world; longed for many and many a thing, till the candle guttered and she jumped up, shivering, to blow it out.
Aunt Lucia was mending beside the library lamp. Aunt Ellen was asleep. They were very old ladies. Jane stood in the doorway, suddenly aware of how closely they were linked with all that she had been dreaming of. Why, they were little girls when the Fortune of the Indies went down!
"Have you been studying, my dear?" Miss Lucia asked. "You have been very quiet."
No, Jane hadn't been studying. In fact, she had forgotten entirely the three pages of parsing and the chapter of French history which she should have been doing. And it was bedtime now. What a scramble in the morning! She fled upstairs to see whether or not she could read any of the history while she undressed, which experiment resulted in her standing at an uncomfortable angle with one boot in her hand for at least twenty-five minutes.