Chapter VI: What Would Steady Silas

But when approaching her home, Mary controlled her countenance and was quite demure. The happy ones do well to hide their felicity, lest the envy it would beget should make the world intolerable. And about Uncle Thatcher's house there was an atmosphere that made very easy the repression of joyous emotion. It was a square frame dwelling, two stories high, in a bare sandy yard surrounded on three sides by a rickety fence of rails and on the forth--the front--by palings, with a gate in the middle of them. There were no shutters on the windows, that looked like great staring dead eyes, sometimes with a blaze of fury in them when the sun, low in the west, glared upon them; and there was no porch, but only a big stone for a step at the door. There were no vines trailing against the walls; no flowers in the yard, but only weeds in the fence corners; and no trees. Everything that might have adorned or softened the expression of the place was lacking. The birds always flew swiftly by it and never stopped there to sing.

At one end of this cheerless home was a crumbling well-curb, to which came often, to draw water, a tall, gaunt, sallow and slatternly woman, who continually wore a sun-bonnet and had her sleeves rolled up on her lean sinewy arms. A tangled wisp of unkempt sandy hair never failed to dangle below the curtain of the sun-bonnet on the back of her neck. That woman was Aunt Thatcher.

Behind the house, and separated from it by a stable-yard, knee-deep in time of rain, with muck and foul green water, stood an old barn, from which was diffused a dull but quite perceptible odor of animal decomposition, arising out of a great pile of crude whalebone, or "ballein", and some barrels of whale oil. Uncle Thatcher was captain of a shore whaling company, and in his barn those articles were generally stored until they could be sent to market. The "ballein" needed to be kept some time, for cleaning, scraping, and splitting before it could be sold.

As Mary reached the gate, she stood still for a few minutes, contemplating the scene of thriftlessness and apparent poverty before her; a picture for which, as she well knew, no good reason existed in fact, for Uncle Thatcher was by no means a poor man. As captain of the whaling crew, his annual gains were considerable. Then he owned a fishing smack and a large share in a big coasting schooner that plied from Sag Harbor, both of which paid him well. But better than either of those to him was an industry, the nature and importance of which Mary little understood, although she suspected something of its mysteries. At certain times each month Uncle Thatcher and one particular neighbor used to go fishing in a stout whaleboat rigged with a sail, on moonlit nights, and upon those occasions they were almost always lucky enough to find one or two casks of rum--doubtless washed overboard from some vessel homeward-bound to New Haven from the West Indies. (It was wonderful how many casks of rum were thus lost overboard in those days, just off Napeague Inlet.) Or, by the accidental use of a grapnel, they would chance to fish up some bottles of valuable "bay-oil" from the bottom. Uncle Thatcher used to bury that treasure-trove in the sand, back of his barn, and it always mysteriously disappeared at night, when nobody was watching it. Yet he never seemed to take those losses to heart, but would find and bury more rum and bay oil, in the same place, to be lost in just the same way. "Smuggling, eh?" Well, yes. But they didn't call it that. They spoke of it as "finding and saving things."

While Mary stood at the gate, Uncle Thatcher himself sat upon the stone door-step, sharpening with a whetstone the edge of a "blubber-spade"--a sort of huge long-handled chisel, used to cut a whale's blubber from his carcass and into strips. He was a tall man, wirily and powerfully built, past middle-age, but still bearing well his years. His gray eyes were overhung by exceedingly bushy iron-gray brows; his nose was large and beak-shaped; his lips, thin and straight; his ears wide and thick; and his hands big and bony, with thick fingers, flat at the ends and having great joints.

Looking up from his work, he demanded of the young girl, in a tone of querulous surprise, "Where on earth have you been? I've been looking everywhere for you to turn the grindstone."

"I'm ready to do it now, uncle," responded Mary, evading a reply to his question by the prompt proffer of her services.

"Oh, I don't need you now. Your aunt turned it."

He gave a few rubs of the whetstone on the shining blade, in an absent-minded way, and then laying the long spade across his knees, and looking sharply at Mary, said slowly, as if carefully choosing his words:

"You don't get used to our way of living out here on the beach, do you, Mary? You'd rather be back in the city, where you lived when you were a little girl, wouldn't you?"

"Oh, no, uncle. My memories of the city do not make me wish to return to it. Papa and mamma died there, and after we lost papa we had to live in a very poor part of the city, where the tall houses hid the sunshine, and the air was always bad, and there was so much misery, and dirt, and sickness all about us. Oh, I loathed it as a child, and it makes me almost sick to think of it now. No, I do not wish to go back to the city. I like best the bright sunlight and the pure ocean breezes. I love even the storms."

"But if you could live in a nice place in the city?"

"No. I think I would be afraid to go back there now." While talking she had advanced from the gate, and now stood near her uncle.

"Sit down here beside me, Mary. I want to talk to you a little," said he.

She obeyed, trembling slightly, for she felt a vague presentiment that he proposed pressing a subject that she dreaded. But he was slow to begin, seemed to hesitate, and relapsed into thought while he pared his already stubby nails upon the sharp edge of the blubber-spade. At length, he "made out his bearings" and opened the attack.

"You know," he said, "that Silas has been a little wild, perhaps, in days gone by, as a young man of spirit is most likely to be; but I hope you have no hard feelings against him on account of his foolishness that time. You know he was only a boy, then; and he was, as you may say, carried away with you, and all struck of a heap when you gave him the mitten so plainly. Maybe he deserved all he got that time, and I guess it done him good; so we'll call that square and let by-gones be by-gones. Is that your idea?"

"Yes, uncle," answered Mary timidly, in a low voice.

"Give us your hand on it."

With a little smile the girl extended her hand, which Uncle Thatcher took very seriously, and treated to a solemn pump-handle-like shake.

"And now here's the point," he went on, still holding her fingers; "Silas is going to settle down and be steady. He wrote to me about three months ago, from Boston, and said he'd got work there as a ship-carpenter, and had quit his wild ways, and wasn't going to call on me for any more money. Well, he has kept his own word about the money, and by that I judge he's all right, earning an honest living, and doing as he said. But he likes living in the city better than down here on the beach. And now do you know what would do more than anything else to keep him steady?"

Mary shook her head. She had an idea of what he meant, but did not wish to encourage him in the direction he was tending.

"A good wife would," said Uncle Thatcher very decidedly.

"Then I hope he will succeed in finding one in Boston," replied the girl, with purposeful evasion of the direct attack.

"That's not my idea. I don't want him to marry a Boston girl. I've got my eye on a girl who I know is all that a good wife should be, the very one that Silas ought to have. You know who I mean. It's you, Mary."

"A girl should never marry a man she doesn't love, uncle, and I don't love Silas."

He bit his lips, was silent for a moment, and then resumed: "You're only a girl, yet, and can't rightly be expected to know your own mind; and besides, it's three years since you have seen Silas. You don't know how you might feel towards him if you were to see him again now."

She shook her head, for she thought she did know very well, as she mentally put Silas and Dorn in contrast, but did not answer.

"I hope," he continued, viewing her with a little growing suspicion, "that you've got over that childish notion you had once about that young Hackett chap. He's gone, the Lord knows where, and I'll be bound, never thinks of you any more. Now, if you marry Silas, I can give you a good start in life. I'm not poor, and if you and Silas prefer to live in the city, why I'll furnish a house for you there nicely, and start him in some business, and--"

"Oh, no, no, uncle! Please do not talk any more about it. I can't marry Silas. Indeed, I can't."

Uncle Thatcher's face crimsoned with anger, but he restrained himself, and said: "Ah, I suppose you still think that young Hackett will come back of the same mind that he went away. Aha! Not he! Those young sailor chaps have a wife in every port. And he'd better not come snooping around here, if he does come back, or I'll--"

Suddenly breaking off his speech, he sprang to his feet, clutched his hat from the ground, and started off for the beach, running at the top of his speed. His quick eye had seen, afar off upon the bluff overlooking the sea, a man on horseback, who waved, with excited gestures, a small red flag.