CHAPTER III
FOUND AND LOST
THE boys went to school at McArthur's Academy, a two-mile walk across a long bridge into a more populous town which lay to the north over a harbor backwater. As for Jane, she studied in company with several other small Resthaven girls under a firm old lady who lived in a rusty-red brick house on Ash Street. The old lady's name was Mrs. Titcomb, and once—so long ago that none of her small pupils could imagine it—she had been a sea-captain's wife, which naturally endeared her to Jane. Captain Titcomb had been lost at sea only two years after their marriage, and his wife had survived him so long that she seemed like any one of the Resthaven spinster ladies. It was almost impossible to realize that once she had leaned on the arm of a gallant captain; had trod the deck of his ship in her wedding finery, and looked up beyond his brown young face to the sails that were to bear him to destruction. Jane thought of it sometimes as she gazed at Mrs. Titoomb's plain, strong old face, and Mrs. Titcomb would rebuke her for the gazing. She taught in a fashion not at all new-fangled, but extremely thorough. Perhaps it was partly due to Jane's schooling that she was so unlike most girls outside Resthaven—or in it, for the matter of that.
But it is not of Jane, nor of Mrs. Titcomb's Select School, that we must think now. For Mark and Alan, instead of loafing home across the bridge, musing at every stone pier and staring down-harbor to the smoke-drift at sea, were running pell-mell, their caps in their tingling hands, with news that, to the Ingrams, was vastly interesting.
They tumbled in unceremoniously upon the aunts, who were mending the fire in the grate circumspectly. Mark and Alan snatched the poker and shovel from the old ladies' hands, that they might be sure to listen, and using the implements unconsciously to point their remarks they poured out their tale, both at once."The model of the Fortune of the Indies is in Boston!"
"Ned Myers saw it when he was visiting his uncle!"
"The name was on the gold scroll at the stern!"
"It's in a little old antique shop in the South End!"
"Will you let us go instanter to get it?"
"How much do you suppose they'll want for it?"
The aunts put their hands to their heads in protest, and into the midst of all this hurly-burly drifted Jane, swinging her best hat by its ribbon.
"Want for what?" she inquired.
So the jumbled tale had to be poured forth all over again, the poker lunging, at times, dangerously near Jane's nose. Considering that she was really the person most deeply interested, Jane kept remarkably calm. Her mouth grew rather straighter than ever, and she merely said:
"I knew it would turn up some day."
The aunts really had to agree that some one must go to Boston, that they might at least try to recover the ship model. Owing to the scantiness of the Ingram fortunes only one person could go, and that person was obviously Mark, and, quite as obviously, not Jane. She felt sure that she could win the model from the antique dealer, if her brother failed, even though she might have to smuggle it from the shop under cover of darkness and sail it out of Boston Harbor. To do this last, however, she would have needed to nibble a bit of Alice in Wonderland's mushroom, she thought ruefully.
She gave Mark a great many parting words of advice as to ways and means of threatening or cajoling the shopman, to which her brother paid no attention whatever, being much occupied with trying to determine in which pocket he should put his money. He was trying, also, not to seem as majestic as he felt. Journeys away from Resthaven were rare, and at the end of this one lay the pride of the Ingrams.
Jane's progress that day at Mrs. Titcomb's Select School was far from satisfactory to its mistress. Jane's eyes, for the most part, were fastened on the dock, instead of on her lesson books. This puzzled Mrs. Titcomb, who was a clever and discerning old lady. She was accustomed to her pupil's gaze straying harborward through the long bow-window of the school-room, but this sudden interest in the face of the tall mantel-clock was unusual, and she could not fathom it. So far as she had been able to observe, time meant very little to Jane.
Jane wondered why she had never paid attention to the clock before. It was a genial affair with a smiling golden countenance, and a ship under full sail was painted on the case. Captain Titcomb had brought it to his wife, and the ship was his own Honoria which he had caused to be painted upon it. The only trouble with the clock, Jane decided, was that it idled through the hours twice as slowly as most clocks. "Because of its age, I expect," thought Jane—not in the least deceiving herself about the real cause of its slowness, which was that Mark was to return on the 5:40 and it was now only noon. So the clock ticked, and Jane didn't study her geography, and Mrs. Titcomb withheld her reproof, for she knew that something out of the ordinary was troubling this strangest of her pupils.
But even centuries pass, if we wait long enough, and Mark's train did come in at last, and Mark himself arrived—in an extravagantly hired cab across the bridge—rather late for supper. His face told the outstanding fact of his story before he said a word.
"It's gone," Jane said quickly.
"Yes," he growled, "it's gone, all right. Somebody bought it just after Ned saw it."
"I fear we could hardly expect the luck to turn at this late time," murmured Miss Lucia.
"But didn't you find out who bought it?" Jane cried, shaking Mark's arm.
"Of course I tried, silly," Mark said. "They had no record of it. Just that it was sold. Some man,—he carried it off in an automobile. Some beastly collector, I suppose."
"Mark, not 'beastly,'" Miss Ellen protested gently.
"Well, he'd no business collecting our ship," Mark muttered. "Not that we could have afforded to buy it, though, if it had been there. What do you suppose he paid for the thing? Eight hundred dollars!"
There was an incredulous gasp. In Resthaven it was hard to imagine the rising value of curios once so plentiful.
Supper was a silent one. The aunts, I think, regretted the wasted fare-money more than the loss of the model. Jane was wondering whether she, in her brother's place, could have brought to bear any cross-questioning or torture upon the antique man which would have revealed the new owner of the Fortune of the Indies.
Jane, who had been quite composed over the news of the model's discovery, was seemingly most calm over the tidings of its second disappearance. But after supper she went and ensconced herself gloomily in the office, with her chin in her hands and her elbows planted belligerently on the old desk. In the darkness the smell of the musty old leather-bound log-books was somewhat consoling; but whether she cried or not I can't say, because no one was there to see. She was an Ingram, however, and I doubt it.
But if Mrs. Titcomb had had reason to be displeased over her pupil's behavior in school before, she now had twice as much cause. Jane's conduct was really unbearable— staring out of the window, counting unseen things on her fingers, and drawing up fictitious documents demanding the return of the Fortune of the Indies to her rightful owners. These documents she wrote with many flourishes and ornamented with large seals executed in red and blue crayon—all openly, without even the pretense of a sheltering geography book. Her lessons she recited in a half-hearted manner—what she knew of them—and seemed to care not at all for her teacher's remonstrances.
But Mrs. Titcomb was a wise old lady, after all. She kept Jane after school one day to finish a problem, and, when all the others had clattered out into the sunshine of Ash Street, summoned her to the window. Mrs. Titcomb had no hard-and-fast rule for the place from which she directed her school. She might sit at her dark old desk where she kept her ebony ruler and silver bell, or she was just as likely to be found sitting in a high-backed splint chair by the window, knitting, with a book on her knee and her keen eyes watching her class above the flickering needles. So to the chair by the window Jane went."This can't go on, you know," Mrs. Titcomb said, coming to the point at once, as was her way. "You'd better tell me what's the matter with you, and then I'll know what to do with you."
So Jane, who feared Mrs. Titcomb not at all and respected her on account of her good sense in once marrying a sea-captain, told the whole tale.
"How nice it would be," reflected the old lady, polishing her spectacles, "if ever you'd recite a lesson that way! Now sit down, and let's talk."
Jane sat down, and they did talk. And it appeared that although Mrs. Titcomb was only four years old when the Fortune of the Indies and the first Mark Ingram sank in the China Sea, she remembered very well indeed the stir in Resthaven. The soft rustle of crinoline in her mother's shaded parlor as a quiet little knot of ladies talked over the tidings; the Ingram Wharf with its sober group of sea-faring men, and the Gloria lying there with her company flag at half-mast. She had docked only that morning with her tragic news to give Resthaven.For the first Mark Ingram had been a man well loved and highly honored, and there was a hush over all the little town when the cruel word came. And it was to be remembered, too, that Mark Ingram was not the only loss. Resthaven men, for the most part, had made up the crew of the Fortune. Now no man of them was alive, and it was not for the Ingram mansion alone to be a house of mourning. Mrs. Titcomb did not remember Great-grandfather Mark himself—that last voyage had begun while she was still in the cradle—but of Grandfather Mark on that day she had a clear recollection. How he had come walking firmly up from Ingram Wharf, a spare, sober, young man, in black clothes with bright buttons upon them. Under his arm he had carried his ship's book, and he held his hat in his hand, in recognition of the salutes of Resthaven. Yes, Mrs. Titcomb could see him very distinctly.
"I remember even how his hair blew away from his face—men wore it longer then than now—and I was a thought afraid of him, he looked so stern and white. He had your blue eyes, Jane, and he looked bigger than he was, always, because of his gait and the masterful way he held his head."
He had passed on up from the wharf, and had mounted the steep, gray cobbles of Chesley Street, and the door of the waiting house had swung open between its pillars to admit him and had as quickly closed. Mrs. Titcomb remembered passing the still Ingram mansion and looking up to that closed door with a sort of awe, holding her mother's hand the tighter. She was silent now, looking out through her flower-bright bow-window, thinking, perhaps, of a time much later when another battered ship crept in with the bare news that the Honoria had been sighted, a derelict in the Agulhas, and that Matthew Titcomb would never make port again.
And now, with all these memories, it was well on into the afternoon before Jane and Mrs. Titcomb realized it, so then Jane must stop for tea. Not in the schoolroom, but in the little, low, front parlor—cinnamon cakes, and candied lemon-peel, and fragrant China tea. And, with it all, something indefinable had happened in the relationship between these two.
"I don't blame you for thinking about it," Mrs. Titcomb said, gathering her scarf around her at the windy hall-door, while Jane stood on the step. "Keep your eyes and ears open and your head and heart clear, and you may find her yet."
And, strangely enough, Jane was the most diligent pupil at Mrs. Titcomb's Select School from that day forth.