Within the Capes. Howard Pyle

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to hear, being, as I said, no great talker, in which case you must come to Eastcaster, and then I will tell you anything that you may want to know.

      I will not enter into a long yarn concerning what happened in Tom Granger’s life before the year 1812, for though such a yarn would hold within it many concerns of interest, it is not for the sake of relating them that I have thus taken my pen betwixt my fingers. It was late in the spring of that year (1812) when he returned home after a three years’ cruise to the East Indies.

      I think that there is no joy in all the world like that of getting home again after a long voyage, such as this had been. I do not know but that it repays one for all the sorrow and pain of leave-taking, and for the home-sickness that follows thereon. Even such changes as have happened betwixt the going and returning do not seem amiss, provided that they have not brought grief and trouble with them.

      The changes that had occurred since Tom’s departure in the summer of 1809 had brought no sadness with them. When he had gone away, he had left his sisters, Susan and Mary, as young girls; the former sixteen and the latter fifteen years old. They had now grown into a pair of fine young women and were chits no longer. This was the first and greatest change that struck Tom, so you may see how little had happened. The folks were already beginning to tease Susan about Will Gaines, who had just returned from Philadelphia, where he had been studying law, and had set up an office for himself in Eastcaster.

      The next day was Sunday, or First-day, as we call it in Quaker neighborhoods, and as all of the family were going to meeting, Tom put on his best toggery to go with them.

      It was a beautiful, bright clear day, and as Tom stood on the porch waiting for Henry, who was to go with him, his heart swelled within him with the love of home. It seemed sweet to him to look on the young leaves of the trees, the green meadowlands and the richness of growing wheat, after seeing nothing for months but a wide stretch of troubled waters; it was good to feel the balmy blowing of a breeze that was not salt; to hear the singing of the robin and the chattering of the wren; the crowing of the cocks and the lowing of the cattle, and not to have in his ears the everlasting washing and gurgling of the water alongside.

      The folks use to ride to meeting on horseback in the old times, the women behind the men on pillion saddles. But Tom was a sailor, and consequently no good figure on horseback, so he and Henry, the youngest, set off ahead of the rest to foot it, for the homestead farm was only a mile and a half from Eastcaster meeting.

      The meeting-house looked very pleasant where it stood, back from the street under the shadow of the two great elms in front of it. The old meeting-house was standing then, for they did not tear it down to make room for the new building until ’32. The present building is larger than the old one was, and is, no doubt, lighter and better, and more comfortable in many ways; but for all that, I have never liked it as well as the old black and red brick meeting-house, with its high roof running up to a point from all four corners and topped with something that looked like a belfry, though it had no bell in it, of course.

      In the old days, as now, when the weather was warm and bright and pleasant, the men used to stand for a while around the door of their side of the meeting, talking and chatting together before they went into the building. Such a group was standing on the grass under the shadow of the elm trees as Tom and his brother Henry came up the steps that led into the meeting-house yard.

      Tom knew all of them, and they came forward and shook hands with him and welcomed him heartily. Will Gaines was amongst them, for, though he was not a member of the Society of Friends, he went to meeting as often as he went anywhere else. It might have been that he came on Susan’s account, though I do not say that he did.

      He was the first to recognize Tom, and he came forward and shook hands with him and seemed very glad to see him. A young man usually is glad to see the brother of the young woman that he wants to marry, but I think that Will really was pleased to see Tom, for he and Tom had been dear friends from the time that they were children together. There were other young men of Tom’s age amongst the group: John Black, Joseph Sparks, Henry Jackson and others. They too came forward and shook hands with him and seemed glad to see him, though not so glad as Will Gaines had been.

      Two men were standing by the open door of the meeting-house, talking earnestly together. One of them was Isaac Naylor, and the other was Mr. Edmund Moor, the real estate agent. As these two men had very much to do with Tom’s life at a later time, it may be well that I should give you a notion of them now.

      Isaac Naylor was a young man—not over thirty at that time, I should think. He dressed very plainly, and was so serious of deportment that I do not know that any one ever saw him smile. He never jested himself, and never enjoyed a jest, for he was too practical for such trivial things. It was as though the man of him had been dried into parchment by his continued self-repression. He was well off in the world, for his father had died the year before, and, as Isaac was the only son, he had inherited all the property, which was very large. Although such a young man, he was high in the meeting, sitting in the gallery with men old enough, in some cases, to be his grandfather.

      Mr. Moor was not a member of meeting, though he attended pretty regularly. He was a large, fleshy man, not exactly fat, but full looking. He had a smooth, goodly face and straight iron-grey hair, brushed straight back from his forehead and behind his ears. I never heard him say an unkind word or saw him in anything but a cordial mood. He was always full of jests and quaint turns of speech, and never failed to shake Tom heartily by the hand whenever he met him; yet for all that Tom did not like him. He had an oily, unctuous way, that was not pleasing to him; he was always so goodly that he did not seem sincere, and always so cordial that it did not seem as though he meant his cordiality.

      Such were the two men that were talking together by the meeting-house door, and each welcomed him in his own manner.

      “How is thee, Thomas?” said Isaac, dryly.

      “Why! It’s Thomas Granger! Bless my soul! Back again like a bad penny, eh?” said Mr. Moor, and he shook Tom by the hand with great warmth.

      In the meantime, Tom’s father and his two brothers, John and William, came over from the horse shed, where they had been hitching their horses, and joined the group, and then they all went into the meeting-house together, taking their seats on the hard wooden benches within.

      That morning they held a silent meeting, no one speaking for all the hour between ten and eleven o’clock. Now and then the wind would rush in little puffs through the open window and across the gloom of the building. A fly buzzed against a window pane, and once a robin outside burst into a sudden gush of song.

      No other sound broke the silence, saving for the rustling of a dress, as one of the women Friends would move in her seat, or the restless sighing of some poor boy in the back part of the building. The overseers sat ranged along on the raised bench facing the meeting, and amongst them was Isaac Naylor. All of them sat with their hats on, motionless, with downcast eyes, buried in serious thought: but no one spoke.

      At such a time every one is supposed to address a sermon to his own heart, but I am very much afraid that Tom Granger addressed none to himself, for his thoughts flew here and there and everywhere, and his mind was never still a moment in the chase of them. Now and then he shifted himself uneasily on the hard wooden bench, trying to find a more comfortable position than the one in which he was sitting, but the seats in Friends’ meeting were not made with a thought to comfort in those days. There was a long partition that ran down the length of the meeting, separating the men’s from the women’s side.

      After a while Tom’s eyes wandered over this partition in a way that they had no business to do. It was toward the place where his mother and his sisters sat that his eyes rested the most, but it was not at them that he was looking, for СКАЧАТЬ