The Fortune of the Indies/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
MR. BOULLIVER
THE attic of the Ingram mansion was a place of wonder. It was dim and cornery, and smelled of leather and wood and spice and camphor and old fabrics, and a little of ships, too. It was full of horsehair-covered trunks and old bandboxes, and the odds and ends of a hundred years. And there were two stout ironbound sea-chests with "M. I." branded on their lids with a red-hot marline-spike. There were letters written from the ends of the earth. Some of them, bound with faded ribbon, were from the first Mark Ingram to his betrothed, and these Jane did not disturb. She had once read the top one, and had felt for days as though she had sorely wounded the family honor. But there were others, in loose sheaves, that told of Chinese pirates and typhoons, Malay men and strange ports and cargoes. Jane's imagination ran like fire between the brown lines and filled in the stiff quaint words with shining images. There were letters, too, from shipboard, augmenting the stilted log with a few fair pictures.
. . . To-day the Titania stood up to us for a race, coming handily down on our quarter, but you may imagine we could scarcely let our Fortune be beat by a Marblehead packet. I let the men, who were eager, crack on all sail, it being a stiff breeze, and before dark we lost the Titania, hull-down to eastward, and reached Torres Straits two days before her.
So wrote Great-grandfather Mark, with veiled pride, in the year 1848. So, also, read Jane, gloatingly, straining her eyes, as usual, in the dim light of one clouded lunette.
. . . To-day we spoke the Gloria, homeward bound, and stood off and on whilst Mark came aboard, he having business with me. He has done well, but contemplates touching at Borneo, which I advise against. However, the young ventures often succeed. I shall not say him nay. He will bear you this letter, for he will see Resthaven sooner than I, and by him I send some few trinkets for my dear little maids.
Many such "trinkets" still clustered upon cabinet-shelves in the drawing-room now, perhaps the very ones great-grandfather spoke of here. Curious sandalwood toys whose spiciness had almost worn away, bits of ivory, lacquered boxes, gilded dolls, and cloisonne beads—row on magic row they showed dimly behind their prisoning glass. It was only on Sunday afternoons that Jane might open the glazed doors, whose key Aunt Ellen kept beneath her pincushion upstairs, and really touch these strange delightful things. On weekdays they seemed to have shrunk back behind the glass—dream-things communing with themselves. On Sundays they could emerge and wake and breathe their tale of the wonder of a ship coming in—of foreign, corded boxes in a staid New England hallway; of two little girls in pantalets, trying to keep their excitement discreet; of a brown captain-brother cutting cord with a bowie-knife, and a smell of musk and the dry grass that precious things were packed in.
How could Jane know it all? Had the aunts, drowsing after their Sunday dinner, told her more than she realized? Yet the mere telling could not have made it so vivid.
Jane usually visited the attic when rain made of it a place thrumming with soft sounds and the cobwebby lunettes were even further dimmed by trickling drops. The roof and the rain were very near; the elm-tops creaked and swayed close without. Chesley Street was invisible, infinitely far below, it seemed. The gray glimpses of harbor through the small, curved panes were distant and unreal. It was a dim little world in itself, the attic, far from the rest of the house, separated from it, surely, by much more than the steep, dark stairs which led to it.
On this occasion it was not raining, but Jane was alone in the house, her aunts being out to tea and her brothers tramping. The house was hers, below her, empty and silent; she felt herself in full command. She turned her attention to the contents of one of the trunks and prepared to impersonate some Ingram ancestor. Usually it was Grandfather Mark's gold-buckled belt and stout sea-boots which she donned, for she scorned the feminine furbelows in the bandboxes. But to-day she decided, with a sudden whim, to fit herself into crinoline, and, after some struggling, stepped forth arrayed in yards of soft white flounces, with a straw spoon-bonnet upon her head.
For the moment she was the first Mrs. Mark tripping down to Ingram Wharf, where lay the Fortune of the Indies, newly off the ways and not yet ready to sail on her first voyage. Jane had reconstructed this scene in a dozen different aspects, but she brought to her little play-acting to-day a more vivid picture of the Fortune herself than she had ever before conceived, thanks to the Exhibition of Maritime Relics. She knew the model by heart; in imagination she could magnify it and set it alongside Ingram Wharf. She could see the shining new gear and the lean clipper hull that had caused Resthaven seamen to wonder and some to shake their heads. For the tales that began to be abroad of the miraculous achievements of the new ships were still scarcely believed, and Eastern seas were not yet white with the towering sails of Yankee clippers, racing every mile from home under their staggering load of canvas. No, Resthaven had doubted, but Mark Ingram's wife had never doubted, or so her great-granddaughter believed.
Jane led by the hand an imaginary little Mark, all wonder to see his father's ship. He would want to explore every inch of it. His phantom feet pattered expectantly across the shining deck. He would want to climb into places dangerous for a little Mark to be in. His father would laughingly pull him back by the tail of his nankeen jacket, and point out to him the crow's-nest aloft, and lift him up to strike the hour upon the burnished ship's bell. Then Jane extended her hand to the imagined Captain Mark, and jumped daintily down from a low hatch-coaming—which rôle was played by a trunk. Just as she slipped her hand within the captain's arm and looked up, up, in happy awe, at the lofty mainmast, a bell pealed faintly from somewhere in the hold. If the Fortune of the Indies had been a steamship, it might have been the engine-room bell, but this happened to be nothing more nor less than the door-bell of the Ingram mansion. The young Mrs. Mark gave way abruptly to a disconcerted Jane, who fumbled at the antiquated hooks, buttons, and loops, and could not at all get out of her costume. As she struggled, the bell rang again, and she ran downstairs, holding up her crinoline and tripping over ruffles.
"I'll have to peep out and see," she thought. "Mercy, "where does the miserable thing unfasten?"
Before she reached the hall, however, the waiting caller tried the knocker, and sent an expert and vigorous double knock echoing into the house.
"They know their business, anyway," thought Jane. "That was a real double knock—none of your feeble, lubberly raps."
She intended to open the door only a crack, but no sooner had she unlatched it than the wind caught it out of her hand, and she stood fully visible in her finery—trailing flounces, India shawl, spoon-bonnet, and all. On the doorstep stood a rather small old gentleman with a dry, brown face, and clear, quick, gray eyes under bristling gray eyebrows. In one hand he held a bunch of sweet peas and a walking-stick with a carved ivory head; with the other he now removed his hat.
"Please excuse—" began Jane, but the old gentleman was staring at her so hard that she stopped.
"Upon—my—soul!" he cried. "Upon my soul, I really cannot say which you look most like—Mark Ingram, or his sister Nelly!"
"Then you must be Mr. Bolliver!" Jane fairly shouted.
"Your faithful servant," he said, bowing.
"Come in; oh, do!" cried Jane; "and sit down while I go and take off all this. I was just pretending, which is silly, because I'm supposed to be far too old."
"Why take it off?" Mr. Bolliver asked.
"The aunts would be flabbergasted," Jane explained, "and annoyed. They're out at tea just now."
"'Pretending,'" Mr. Bolliver mused, "is just one form of dramatic art, for which the age limit is considerably beyond your years."
This entirely new light on a pastime about which Jane had been much twitted consoled her greatly for past scoffing, but she nevertheless fled upstairs and shortly reappeared in her usual blue jumper. Mr. Bolliver was standing before the fire with his hands behind him.
"Fifty years have changed it very little," he remarked. "Very little. The old house has the advantage of me; I fear half a century has been less gentle to me."
"That," said Jane, "is where the model of the "Fortune of the Indies used to hang."
She had not meant to introduce the burning issue quite so abruptly, but there was no help for it now. Mr. Bolliver turned and scrutinized the picture which replaced the ship.
"Ah, yes," he murmured, "a fine old print, quite rare. And that's another, a delightful one, there beside the cabinet."
With which he stepped firmly across the room to peer at the other engraving. The wind was certainly taken out of Jane's sails. She could scarcely, with courtesy, drag the Fortune of the Indies back, stern first, as it were, now that she had been so summarily disposed of as a topic of conversation. So Jane professed an interest in prints and hoped for another chance.
It did not come before there was a fumbling at the latch, the front door swung open, and the two old ladies stood in the hall. Mr. Bolliver gathered up his sweet peas, and, ensconcing himself trimly in the doorway, held them forth with a courtly bow. It must have been evident that in the quick gray eyes of this old gentleman lurked an unmistakable clear gleam of the young Bart, bound for China. For the aunts held up neatly gloved hands and cried, "O Mr. Bolliver!" with one accord.
There was much bustling then, wherein the little servant, just returned from market, was harried, and Jane nearly tripped over a rug while carrying the majestic Ingram tea-urn, and the aunts' blue eyes filled with anxiety, and Mr. Bolliver knit everything together with helpful jocularity. Then Jane effaced herself with a sugar-cake and listened spellbound to her elders' reminiscent conversation. The aunts, usually concerned with present-day anxieties, and never quite realizing Jane's keen desire to hear tales of the things they could remember, rarely searched their old minds for details so long passed. Now, stimulated by Mr. Bolliver's vivid reminders, and a little excited by his presence, they eagerly exchanged with him their memories of a night half a century before.
Out of the half-spoken disjointed sentences Jane reconstructed the scene. The setting was the same; she found it more difficult to visualize the actors in the youth that had been theirs.
Bart Bolliver had arrived, it seemed, in the sunset. His boxes went before him, to the Gloria, borne down Ingram Wharf by sailormen, and he had presented himself and his cowhide bag at the door of the Ingram house. No door-bell such as to-day he had vainly pealed upon—no indeed, he assured them, it was a fine double knock that he rapped out with the great brass knocker. Was it Lucia or Ellen who opened the door to him? They disputed it now between themselves, laughing a little. But Mr. Bolliver remembered—it was Ellen, in the lavender silk frock.
Great-grandmother was alive then, and sat by the window, her fine hands folded upon the lap of her black dress, looking serenely out upon the gilded slope of Chesley Street that ran straight down to the fire of sunset on the harbor. Beside her, Mr. Bolliver recalled, was her candle-stand with the candle and snuffers upon it, and Miss Lucia added that there was surely the Bible and her silver-bowed spectacles, as well. The second Mark's wife was there, too, who was Jane's grandmother, a sweet-faced, silent, young woman, busy that the Ingram mansion might be in every way hospitable toward its guest.
"There was an old black woman," Mr. Bolliver remembered.
"That would be Amelia, Ellen," Miss Lucia said.
"Ah, such biscuits!" Mr. Bolliver sighed.
"I recall thinking, 'I'll not taste such biscuits in China!' And the planked shad with bacon in him!"
"Fancy remembering what there was for dinner!" Miss Ellen murmured.
"How could I forget? I that was not to eat New England fare for twenty years! Yes, and the bowl of apple-blossoms in the candle-light, and your brother, Mark, asking the grace in his quarter-deck voice."
The drawing-room had been bright with candles that night, and Miss Ellen played upon the piano and Miss Lucia sang. Bart Bolliver had sung, too—this time it was the aunts who reminded him. Such a sweet tenor! Did he ever sing now? No, Mr. Bolliver's singing was over, he told them, like many another thing. Mark Ingram had not been of the gay party. He was shut in the office, sitting before his father's desk, with his books and papers and cargo-bills before him. When, much later, Bart Bolliver had climbed the gracious stairway to the room he was to sleep in, he saw still the pulsing candle-light through the door-crack of the office. And somewhere below, out there beyond the tall young elms that brushed his window, out there where the harbor spread dark and still, the Gloria lay waiting for him, waiting for the dawn-tide that set out to sea and China.
Mr. Bolliver had stayed long in the East. After his apprenticeship, he had become a tea-taster for a great export house—a very curious trade, thought Jane, putting a hesitant question as to the duties of the profession. It appeared that all the fine grades of fragrant China tea must be tested, before being packed and shipped; and Jane had a momentary vision of Mr. Bolliver sipping endless cups of tea, perhaps seated cross-legged upon a mat. Not so; to her surprise she heard that the tea was not really drunk at all. A little of it was poured into a tiny saucer, held in the palm of the hand, and sniffed at judicially; a sip of it was held in the mouth, but not swallowed. It must have required a person of the most delicate perceptions thus to judge of countless little whiffs of tea. Such a person, apparently, was Mr. Bolliver, however, and the odd business of his early days certainly set him apart with a magical difference from any one Jane had ever before known. Besides tasting tea, however, he had had time for numberless interesting and exciting experiences, had nearly lost his life during the Boxer troubles, and, incidentally, had amassed a large and well-invested private fortune. This fact he did not directly mention, but from his occasional references to the interests he still held in China and also the ease with which he purchased eight-hundred-dollar ship models, Jane drew her own conclusions.
The entrance of the boys, rather muddy and decidedly ravenous, somewhat confused the aunts, who tried to herd them out by the back passage. But Mr. Bolliver haled them in, pressed on them all the remaining sugar-cakes, and plied them with questions of all kinds. Alan, before long, was eagerly outlining his latest project of working his way around the world on a tramp steamer, thereby gaining much knowledge and material for thrilling books. Mark, it appeared, had decided to go along, in the engine-room—"just for larks."
"And a very good idea, too," said Mr. Bolliver. "I went to sea before I was grown, and to China when I was eighteen. How can you help yourself, Mark Ingram, I should like to know?"
The aunts shook their heads behind the tea-urn. Such ideas, though current in the Ingram family for generations, seemed somehow revolutionary now, in the twentieth century. Though they knew it to be a fact, taken as a matter of family history, you would have had difficulty in convincing them that when their brother, Mark, took command of the Gloria he was little more than a year older than their grand-nephew, Mark.
Mr. Bolliver would not accept the hospitality of Ingram mansion for the night. His room, he said, was engaged at the inn, and his bag was already there. So he took himself off down Chesley Street in the twilight—and if he could see, warped in to the rotting Ingram Wharf, a ghost ship of gossamer sails, ready to weigh for China at dawn, that was nobody's business but his own.
Mr. Bolliver and Jane found a snowdrop in the moist garden next morning—the first snowdrop. The aunts put on their overshoes and came out to see it. It was blooming away, all by itself, under the southwest window of the library. It looked very clear and young and frail and perfect, there in the midst of wet fallen leaves and black earth. During a bleak Northern winter it is easy to forget how luminous and wonderful a flower can be, growing by itself, miraculously, from sodden ground. The aunts stood holding their skirts carefully, and even discreetly sniffed the first warm waking breath of the garden, and smiled.
Jane and Mr. Bolliver repaired later to Ingram Wharf, and there leaned upon piles and talked. Coming spring was on the water, too. Across the harbor weather-beaten freighters, their sides a network of scaffolding, showed brilliant patches of red lead across their stained gray bows. In the wharf-houses, near at hand, men were patching old sails and stitching new ones, and there was a pervading odor of tar and manila rope abroad. Old men came to lean against piles, even as Jane and Mr. Bolliver were leaning, to stare and sigh aimlessly. Younger ones stood in little groups, running square brown fingers along the newly caulked seams of small boats which lay bottom-up on the shingle, or busying themselves with paint-pot and scraping-knife. New lobster-pots and mended nets were piled beside every wharf-house. April stood at the threshold and summoned Resthaven to sea, as it had always done. In earlier days it had called to deep waters and far lands; there were mighty sails to be spread and great anchors to weigh. Now it led only to the stake-net and lobster-pot a mile or two down-harbor—yet the lure was the same, and in spring Resthaven still turned to the sea.
Jane and Mr. Bolliver felt it as they stood on the gray, hewn timbers of Ingram Wharf and looked at far sails beyond the harbor-mouth and faint smoke at the earth's edge.
"I'd do it all again," Mr. Bolliver said, half to himself. "I'd give much to slip fifty years from me and see the Gloria waiting for me again. I'd go with her—yes, gladly—and live it all over."
(Oh, the harbor smell, and the water at the wharf -piles, and the lift of those sails far out! Would Mr. Bolliver have thought the same if he had stayed in his bow-front brick house in Boston, instead of venturing out against the spring in Resthaven?)
"Do you think the Gloria was as beautiful as the Fortune of the Indies?" Jane asked him. (Think of talking to a man who had sailed in the Gloria!)
"If the Fortune was as beautiful as her model," Mr. Bolliver said, "the Gloria could not match her—though she was a fine ship, a very fine ship, and quick in stays. The Fortune was a tricksy witch, your grandfather used to say. I think every one believed that no one but your great-grandfather could manage her. But the Gloria was a fine weatherly ship."
"Don't you think the model is very wonderful?" Jane's second question, this, which she hoped was tactful.
"Yes," said Mr. Bolliver, "quite wonderful. I am very proud and happy to own it."
With which he gazed complacently down-harbor, and Jane was once more dead in the wind's eye. She was not altogether sure what she had hoped he would do, but she fancied that he might bow and say:
"Rest assured, my dear young lady, that full provision will be made whereby none but an Ingram will eventually be allowed possession of the model."
But no such thought was in his mind, apparently, and Jane decided that she was impolite and grasping, anyway, and gave herself up to the pleasure of hearing reminiscences of that last departure for the East, fifty years before.
How tall the Gloria had looked in the dawn when Bart Bolliver stood just where he now stood on Ingram Wharf; and how the little boys waved their caps and the young ladies their lace handkerchiefs; and how the Gloria swung out under her headsails and got the tide under her and slipped downchannel; and how, one by one, the Resthaven lights went out in the daybreak, and the wind freshened, and the Gloria spread sail after sail, and the water ran swithering along her side and leaped at her forefoot. And how Mark Ingram stood on the quarter-deck with his arms folded, and now and again a low word to the helmsman; and how, once he had dipped the pennant, he never looked back to Resthaven, but out and out to China; and, on the other hand, how young Bart stared and stared ever and again back over the bubbling wake to the gray shore-line.
So Jane Ingram hung spellbound on the quick, low words of this little old gentleman, and now and then sighed prodigiously.
"Oh, it's all true!" she cried at last. "It's true, and it was you who did it. Oh, I never thought I'd ever see any one who'd really done it."
"And," said Mr. Bolliver, "I've not been in Resthaven since that morning, nor set foot on this wharf since I left it for the deck of the Gloria."
So Mr. Bolliver took his departure—this time in a modern taxicab—and the Ingrams sorrowed and besought him to come often. And Jane so mourned his loss that she quite forgot his appropriation of the model and the fact that the Historical Society's exhibition of maritime relics closed that day without her having taken a last look at the Fortune of the Indies.