The Unspeakable Gentleman/Chapter 2
II
I rode through town that afternoon, and it was not entirely because time hung heavily on my hands. We were proud of our town. The houses were as elegant and substantial as any you could find. Our streets were broad and even. Our walks were paved with brick. There was not a finer tavern than ours to the north of Boston, or better dressed men frequenting it. Men said in those days that we would be a great seaport; that the world would look more and more to that northern Massachusetts river mouth. They had spoken thus of many other harbor towns in the centuries that men have gone down to the sea. I think they have been wrong almost as often as they had predicted. The ships have ceased to sail over the bar. No one heeds the rotting planking of the wharves. The clang of hammers and the sailors' songs have gone, and trade and gain and venture have gone with them.
Strange, as I recall that afternoon. They were building a new L to the tavern. Tradespeople were busy about their shops. Coaches newly painted, and drawn by well-matched horses, rolled by me. Gentlemen in bright new coats, servants in new family livery, sailors from the docks, clerks from the counting houses, all gave the street a busy air—lent it a pleasant assurance of affluence.
I was mistaken when I thought I could ride by as a stranger might. It seemed to me that there was no one too busy to stop and look, to turn and whisper a word to someone else. They had learned already that I was my father's son. I could feel a hot flame of anger burning my cheeks, the old, stinging passion of resentment I had felt so often when my father's name was mentioned. They knew me. Their looks alone told that, but never a nod, or smile of greeting, marked my return.
Though I had never spoken to them, I knew them all—the Penfields, father and son, tall and lean with bony faces and sandy hair and eyebrows, and restless, pale blue eyes—Squire Land, small and ascetic, his lips constantly puckered as though he had tasted something unpleasant. Captain Proctor, stouter than when I had seen him last, with the benign good nature that comes of settled affairs and good living. Over them and over the town, those eight years had passed with a light hand.
But it was not our town I had come to visit. I found Ned Aiken, as I knew I should, with the Eclipse in harbor. He was seated on his door step by the river road, as though he had always been planted in that very place. I remember expecting he would be glad to see me. Instead, he took his pipe from his mouth, and gazed at me steadily, like some steer stopped from grazing. Then he placed his pipe on the stone step, and rose slowly to his feet, squat and burly, his little eyes glinting below his greasy, unbraided hair, his jaw protruding and ominous. Slowly he loosened the dirty red handkerchief he kept swathed about his throat, and raised a stubby hand to push the hair from his heavy forehead. Then his face relaxed into a grim smile, and he seated himself on the step again.
"You've changed since last I saw you," he said; "changed remarkable, you have. Why, right now I thought you might be someone else."
Had Brutus also been laboring under the same delusion?
I told him I was glad we were still on speaking terms, and seated myself beside him. He studied me for a while in silence, leisurely puffing at his pipe.
"You mistook me for someone?" I asked finally.
"Yes," said Mr. Aiken, and slapped his pipe against the palm of his hand. "You've been shootin' up, you have, since I set eyes on you."
He paused, seemingly struck by a genial inspiration.
"Yes, shootin' up." Still looking at me he gave way to a hoarse chuckle.
"Why, boy, we've all been doing some shootin'—you, your dad, and me too—since we seen you last," and he was taken by a paroxysm of silent mirth.
"Now that's what I call wit!" he gasped complacently, and then he repeated in joyous encore:
"You shootin'—me shootin'—he shootin'."
"You weren't shooting at anybody?" I asked with casual innocence.
"And why shouldn't we be, I want to know?" he demanded, but his tongue showed no sign of slipping. His glance had resumed its old stolid watchfulness, which caused me to remain tactfully silent.
"But we wasn't shootin' at anybody," Mr. Aiken concluded, more genially. "Not at anybody, just at selected folks."
He stopped to glance serenely about him, and somehow the dusty road, the river, the trees and the soft sunlight seemed to make him strangely confiding. His harsh voice lowered in gentle patronage.
"Would you like to know who those folks were?" he asked finally.
I must have been too eager in giving my assent, for Mr. Aiken smiled broadly and nodded his head with complacent satisfaction.
"I thought you would admire to," said Mr. Aiken; "like as not you'd give a tooth to know, now wouldn't you? Never do know a tooth is useful till you lose it. Now look at me—I've had as many as six stove out off an' on, and now—But you wanted to know who it was we shot at, didn't you? So you did, boy, so you did. Well, I'll tell you, so I will. Yes, so help me if I don't tell you, boy." And his voice trailed off in a low chuckle.
"It was folks like you," he concluded crisply; "folks who didn't mind their own business."
Gleefully he repeated the sentence. Its ringing cadence and the trend of his whole discourse gave him evident pleasure, and even caused him to continue further with his rebuke.
"There you have it," said Mr. Aiken, "the Captain's own words, b'Gad. 'Mr. Aiken', he says, 'I fancy we may meet a number of people whose affairs will not stop them interfering with our own. If you see any,' he says, 'shoot them, Mr. Aiken'."
He had lapsed into a good-natured, reminiscent mood, and, as he fixed his gaze on the trees across the road, he was prompted to enlarge still further on the episode. He seemed to have forgotten I was there as he continued.
"I wish it had been on deck," he remarked, "instead of a place with damned gold chairs and gold on the ceiling, and cloth on the walls, and velvets such as respectable folks use for dress and not for ornament, and candles in gold sticks, and the floor like a sheet of ice.
"Hell," said Mr. Aiken, "I'd sooner slip on blood than on a floor like that. Yes, so I would. I wonder why those frog eaters don't make their houses snug and decent instead of big as a church. Now, though I'm not a moral man, yet I call it immoral, damned if I don't, to live in a house like that."
"Yet somehow pleasant,' I ventured politely, "surely you have found that the beauty of most immoral things. They all seem to be pleasant. Am I not right, Mr. Aiken?"
He looked at me sharply, shrugged his shoulders, and denied me the pleasure of an answer.
"Not that I meant to puzzle you," I added hastily, "but you have sailed so long with my father, that I considered you in a position to know. Now in France"
Mr. Aiken dropped his pipe.
"Who said anything about France?" he demanded.
"And did you not?" I asked, beginning to enjoy my visit. "Surely you were speaking just now about a chateau, the scene of some pleasant adventure. Pray don't let me interrupt you."
A bead of perspiration rolled down Mr. Aiken's brow, and he tightened his handkerchief about his throat, as though to stifle further conversation. He sat silent for a minute while his mind seemed to wander off into a maze of dim recollections, and his eyes half-closed, the better to see the pictures that drifted through his memory.
"What am I here ashore and sober for," he asked finally, "so I won't talk, that's why, and I won't talk, so there's the end of it. It's just that I have to have my little joke, that's all, or I wouldn't have said anything about the chato or the Captain either.
"Though, if I do say it," he added in final justification, "there ain't many seafaring men who have a chance to sail along of a man like him."
"And how does that happen?" I asked.
"Because there ain't any more like him to sail with."
He sat watching me, and the gap between us seemed to widen. He seemed to be looking at me from some great distance, from the end of the road where years and experience had led him, full of thoughts he could never express, even if the desire impelled him.
"No, not any," said Mr. Aiken.
The dusk was beginning to gather when I rode home, the heavy purple dusk of autumn, full of the crisp smell of dead leaves and the low hanging wood smoke from the chimneys.
My father was reading Voltaire beside a briskly burning fire. Closing his book on his forefinger, he waved me to a chair beside him.
"My son," he said, "they mix better than you think, Voltaire and gunpowder. Have you not found it so?"
"I fear," I replied, "that my experience has been too limited. Give me time, sir, I have only been twice to sea. Next time I shall remember to take Voltaire with me."
"Do," he advised courteously; "you will find it will help with the privateers—tide you over every little unpleasantness. Ah yes, it is advice worth following. I learned it long ago—a little difference of opinion—and the pages of the great philosopher"
He raised his arm and glanced at it critically.
"Words well placed—is it not wonderful, their steadying effect—the deadly accuracy which their logic seems to impart to the hand and eye? A man can be dangerous as with twenty pages of Voltaire behind him."
He took a pinch of snuff, and leaned forward to tap me gently on the knee, his expression coldly genial.
"I have read all the works of Voltaire, Henry, read them many times."
Unbidden, a picture of him came before me in a room with gilt chairs and candelabra whose glass pendants sparkled in the mild yellow light—with a smell of powder mingling strangely with the scent of flowers.
"But why," he concluded, "should I be more explicit than Mr. Aiken? To fear nothing, say nothing. It is a maxim followed by so many politicians. Strange that it still stays valuable. Strange"
And he waved his hand in a negligent gesture of deprecation.
"Why, indeed, be more explicit," I rejoined. "Your sudden interest is quite enough to leave me overcome, sir, when, after years of neglect, you see to it I ride out safely of an afternoon."
He tapped his snuff box thoughtfully.
"Coincidence again, Henry, that is all. How was I to know you would be outside Ned Aiken's house while I was within?"
"And how should I know that paternal care would prompt you to remain within while I was without?"
For a second it seemed to me that my father was going to laugh—for a fraction of a second something like astonishment seemed to take possession of him. Then Brutus appeared in the doorway.
"My son," he said, as I followed him to supper, "I must compliment you. Positively you improve upon acquaintance."