CHAPTER XXXI
SIX days after Aunt Augusta had dropped Reba's note into the mail-box at the foot of Chestnut Street, a clerk placed it among the C's in the general delivery compartment in the San Francisco post-office. On the same night, in the same city, not many blocks away, in an upper bedroom, where such luxuries pervaded as carefully turned-back bedclothes, the glow of a prettily shaded drop-light, and a Bokhara rug, there lay upon the table beneath the light, three envelopes, directed to Mr. James Perkins, Ridgefield, Mass. There lay also upon the table, two forearms, elbows outstretched, supporting the body of a young man, who sat leaning forward over the table, intent upon some writing.
He was a big-framed young fellow, with sandy, close-cropped hair. His bulk was what impressed one at first glance; but when he looked up an instant in search of a word or phrase, the intelligence on his face, the dreamy look in his eyes, gave one an unexpected surprise; made one wonder if the slight stoop of the broad shoulders was not due to too much leaning over books. He had the prominent brows and goodly brain space above the eyes that indicated a scholar. The choice of books in the rack stretching across the end of the table indicated a scholar too, or a scholar in the making, at any rate.
The young man was not at present, however, occupied with any of the books. He was writing on other envelopes—larger ones than those directed to Mr. James Perkins, and these—three in all—when he had finished them, bore the following inscriptions: "Mail at first port reached after February 15th." "Mail at first port reached after March 31st." "Mail at first port reached after May 15th." Into these envelopes the notes directed to Mr. James Perkins were slipped, and the young man, snapping an elastic band around all of them, placed the packet inside a breast pocket. He then pushed back his chair and got up. He crossed the room to a coat-rack, slipped into an overcoat that hung upon it, took down a soft felt hat, and went out into the hall.
Descending two flights of softly carpeted stairs, he passed, on his way to the front door, unmistakable glimpses of home at every turn—flowering plants here; a bird in a cage there; and through the glass doors of a second-floor living-room, burning logs and a stretch of books in a low case, with photographs in silver frames, on top of it.
The doors were slightly ajar, and as the young man passed them a woman's voice called out, "Is that you, Nathan?"
"Yes," the young man replied. "Don't stay up for me."
He had an expressive voice. Any one could tell that he was addressing a woman, and a woman for whom he felt tender regard.
"Will you be home late?"
"Not very," he called back in the gently reassuring tone which an adult sometimes assumes toward a child.
He let himself out of doors, a moment later, and shoving his hands into his overcoat pockets set out at a brisk walk in the direction of the city's docks.
A little later the three letters directed to Mr. James Perkins had left the young man's pocket, and were locked up in a stout little chest, inside the cabin of a trading-schooner, heavy with cargo. In the morning, while the letters were rising and falling with the efforts of the schooner as it dug its nose into a gale of no small proportions, the author of those letters, far away from salt sea-spray, drenched sails, and wet and slippery decks, was seated in a pretty dining-room, beside a silver coffee-pot, eating soft-boiled eggs from a frail glass cup.
After Nathaniel Cawthorne had left his packet of letters in the little cabin of the schooner, the night before, he had returned directly to the house where the woman had spoken to him as he went out. He had let himself in with a key from his own pocket, called up the stairs cheerily, "Everybody in?" and upon receiving an answer in the affirmative, had turned off the electric light, and slipped the night-bolt across the door.
The woman was waiting for him when he reached the second floor. He could see her through the glass doors as he climbed the stairs. She was seated in a gaily covered, winged arm-chair in front of the open fire.
"Come in, Nathan," she called to him.
He obeyed.
It was a pretty room he entered, typically a woman's, with a couch in one corner piled high with lingerie pillows. There were several rocking-chairs, and the cretonne hangings at the windows were in soft shades of lavender, pink, and light blue. The woman herself was a beruffled little creature, in appearance not unlike the angora kitten, which, head cocked on one side, sat on top of the lady's chair-back, eyes black and alert, in the late evening lamp-light. The kitten was pure white. So was the head of the little lady just below.
"Well, Nathan," she said, her eyes as dark and bright as the kitten's, as she glanced up at the young man, who drew up a chair close beside her and sat down, first laying overcoat and hat aside, "How did it go? And which was it to-night, Latin, French, or your precious modern poetry?"
"Didn't I tell you?" inquired the young man. "Professor Heckelman is away for three days, so I'm having a vacation. I went out simply for exercise to-night."
He sat in characteristic attitude, as he spoke, one hand—his left—pushed into a trousers pocket, the other lying upon a crossed knee. He raised the hand upon the knee, wriggled one of its big fingers in front of the kitten's nose. The kitten surveyed it appreciatively with crescendoing purr.
"I wish your precious Professor Heckelman would stay away for a while," scolded the little lady. "You need a vacation. Both you and Robert do—the way you two work! I must say, Ruffles here," she reached up a hand and drew the kitten down into her lap, "and I are the only frivolous creatures in this house, aren't we, Fluffs? Robert's been locked up since eight o'clock in his study writing on that Lenten series of sermons of his, I suppose, and you," she shook her head disapprovingly at the young man, "you, too, always with your nose in a book! Why, Nathan, you'll get to know too much for her if you don't look out!" roguishly she added.
Nathan reddened at that. He always reddened at the slightest reference to the curious circumstance that had knitted his life so closely into this white-haired little lady's and her son's. He never directly introduced the circumstance himself.
"Pass me my work-bag, Nathan, please," the little white-haired lady abruptly switched off. "Thank you." She opened it and proceeded to lay upon the table beside her some socks done up in balls. "Six pairs of old ones for you—all mended," she announced. "And six new ones, worked with your initial. Dark grays and dull greens, like the ones I always get for Robert. And this tie, to match the green ones."
The young man took the proffered tie. "It's very pretty," he said in confusion. "Mrs. Barton," he murmured, "when I think of you sewing for me like this, keeping me in shape—buying me things just as if—as if" He stopped.
"Say it, Nathan," burst out the woman impatiently. "Say it, child, or I will, for you. 'Just as if I were your own mother.' There!! My dear boy," the little lady's voice became suddenly grave. She put her hand on Nathaniel Cawthorne's arm. "Haven't I told you a dozen times that I feel like your own mother? Haven't I told you a dozen times that your coming into our lives just when you did, just when I found myself very lonely way out here in this big strange city, so far away from all my old friends, was a godsend to me?" She stopped a second. And in a still graver tone, added: "Robert's little brother, who didn't live very long, was just your age, Nathan. Having you like this," she pressed his arm, "has been a little like having him come back to me, to be busy over, and look out for."
"But Mrs. Barton," objected Nathaniel, careful not to move the arm where her hand still pressed, "Robert's little brother wouldn't have been uneducated, nor the rough sort of specimen I was when Robert took me in hand."
"And he wouldn't have been able, either," crisply Mrs. Barton retorted, "to give back to Robert his health again, the way you did on that 'Ellen T. Robinson' of yours, when you took Robert in hand. Oh—oh, come, don't let's get started matching obligations," she said playfully. "It's just a joy to me to have you living with us, and you know it is. And it's been a joy to Robert too to work and study with you. I sometimes think that Robert's creative ability has had more of an opportunity with you than with the church. Why, that first winter, when Robert wrote me that you had decided to let your boat go on without you, and that he was going to stay on here in San Francisco for a few months and see you get started on your new quest, I could just feel his interest and enthusiasm."
"It's been a fine quest, too," commented Nathan reflectively, his eyes upon the glowing ashes in the fireplace. "Quest," he repeated. "I like that word—search after something we haven't got, and want very much. It's what makes life a splendid experience, I think. Effort—endeavor," contemplatively his voice trailed off.
"Robert would make a sermon out of that, I suppose," sighed Mrs. Barton. "Robert says you're always giving him ideas for sermons. And Professor Heckelman says that you're always giving that genius brother of his, ideas for poems. He says that some of these daily exercise themes he has you write are little gems of unrhymed poetry themselves—full of wind and sails, and the foamy salt sea sometimes, and sometimes full of woods and damp moss, and animals, and things. I just wonder what you're going to be one of these days, Nathan," she exclaimed brightly.
"Well," Nathan replied with a slow smile, "it doesn't look as if I were going to be very much of a money-king, anyhow, with hardly enough income from the 'Ellen T.' to clothe myself on, and pay Professor Heckelman with."
"The young lady at home won't care, Nathan, whether you're a money-king or not, from the looks of the expensive dress she was able to buy to be married in," boldly Mrs. Barton flung out.
What if it did make him flush. ("It's just silly the way he won't ever talk about her or let anybody else," she had told the kitten earlier in the evening.)
Nathan shifted his legs uneasily at Mrs. Barton's reference, and remained silent.
"Oh, Nathan, Nathan!" she burst out at him stormily, after a minute. "Why won't you ever talk about her to me? Why won't you ever tell me who and what she is, and how you met, and where? I declare you act as if you were ashamed of her sometimes, and she so sweet and pretty, too!"
"You know it couldn't be ashamed of her I am, Mrs. Barton," he murmured miserably.
How could he tell this lady that his knowledge of Rebecca was almost as meager as hers? How could he expose facts, lay bare discrepancies that would make her respect his marriage less? The irregularity of his meeting with Rebecca, his stealthy courtship, the straw-wedding that had followed so abruptly, were all thorns in the sensitive Nathaniel Cawthorne's side, that pricked deeper and deeper, as he became more familiar with the illuminating ways and manners, social laws and customs of the world of Mrs. Barton and her son.