CHAPTER XVI
WHAT THE STORM DID
NEXT morning nearly everyone in the town was talking about the storm.Belle said what with the booming of the waves against the breakwater andthe wind rattling the shutters, she hadn't slept a wink all night. Itseemed as if every gust would surely take the house off its foundations.
Old Jeremy reported that it was one of the worst wind-storms ever knownalong the Cape, wild enough to blow all the sand dunes into the sea.They'd had the best shaking up and shifting around that they'd had inyears, he declared. Captain Ames' cranberry bog was buried so deep insand you couldn't see a blossom or a leaf. And there was sand driftedall over the garden. It had whirled clear over the wall, till the birdpool was half full of it.
Georgina listened languidly, feeling very comfortable and important withher breakfast brought in to her on a tray. Tippy thought it was toochilly for her in the dining-room where there was no fire. Jeremy hadkindled a cheerful blaze on the living-room hearth and his tales ofdamage done to the shipping and to roofs and chimneys about town,seemed to emphasize her own safety and comfort. The only thing whichmade the storm seem a personal affair was the big limb blown off thewillow tree.
Mrs. Triplett and Jeremy could remember a storm years ago which shiftedthe sand until the whole face of the Cape seemed changed. That wasbefore the Government planted grass all over it, to bind it togetherwith firm roots. Later when the ring of an axe told that the willow limbwas being chopped in pieces, Georgina begged to be allowed to gooutdoors.
"Let me go out and see the tracks of the storm," she urged. "I feel allright. I'm all over the gas now."
But Mrs. Triplett preferred to run no risks. All she said to Georginawas:
"No, after such a close call as you had yesterday you stay right herewhere I can keep an eye on you, and take it quietly for a day or two,"but when she went into the next room Georgina heard her say to Belle:
"There's no knowing how that gas may have affected her heart."
Georgina made a face at the first speech, but the second one made herlie down languidly on the sofa with her finger on her pulse. She washalf persuaded that there was something wrong with the way it beat, andwas about to ask faintly if she couldn't have a little blackberrycordial with her lunch, when she heard Richard's alley call outside andCaptain Kidd's quick bark.
She started up, forgetting all about the cordial and her pulse, and wasskipping to the front door when Tippy hurried in from the dining-roomand reached it first. She had a piece of an old coffee sack in her hand.
"Here!" she said abruptly to Richard, who was so surprised at the suddenopening of the door that he nearly fell in against her.
"You catch that dog and hold him while I wipe his feet. I can't have anydirty quadruped like that, tracking up my clean floors."
Georgina looked at the performance in amazement. Tippy scrubbing away atCaptain Kidd's muddy paws till all four of them were clean, and thenactually letting him come into the house and curl up on the hearth!Tippy, who never touched dogs except with the end of a broom! She couldscarcely believe what her own eyes told her. She and Richard must havehad a "close call," indeed, closer than either of them realized, to makesuch a wonderful change in Tippy.
And the change was towards Richard, too. She had never seemed to likehim much better than his dog. She blamed him for taking the creambottles when they played pirate, and she thought it made little girlsboisterous and rude to play with boys, and she wondered at Barby'sletting Georgina play with him. Several times she had done herwondering out loud, so that Georgina heard her, and wanted to say thingsback--shocking things, such as Rosa said to Joseph. But she never saidthem. There was always that old silver porringer, sitting prim andlady-like upon the sideboard.
Things were different to-day. After the dog's paws were wiped dry Tippyasked Richard how he felt after the accident, and she asked it as if shereally cared and wanted to know. And she brought in a plate of earlysummer apples, the first in the market, and told him to help himself andput some in his pocket. And there was the checker-board if they wantedto play checkers or dominoes. Her unusual concern for theirentertainment impressed Georgina more than anything else she could havedone with the seriousness of the danger they had been in. She felt verysolemn and important, and thanked Tippy with a sweet, patient air,befitting one who has just been brought up from the "valley of theshadow."
The moment they were alone Richard began breathlessly:
"Say. On the way here I went by that place where we buried the pouch,and what do you think? The markers are out of sight and the whole placeitself is buried--just filled up level. What are we going to do aboutit?"
The seriousness of the situation did not impress Georgina until headded, "S'pose the person who lost it comes back for it? Maybe we'd beput in prison."
"But nobody knows it's buried except you and me."
Richard scuffed one shoe against the other and looked into the fire.
"But Aunt Letty says there's no getting around it, 'Be sure your sinwill find you out,' always. And I'm awfully unlucky that way. Seems tome I never did anything in my life that I oughtn't to a done, that Ididn't get found out. Aunt Letty has a book that she reads to mesometimes when I'm going to bed, that proves it. Every story in itproves it. One is about a traveler who murdered a man, and kept itsecret for twenty years. Then he gave it away, talking in his sleep. Andone was a feather in a boy's coat pocket. It led to its being found outthat he was a chicken thief. There's about forty such stories, andeveryone of them prove your sin is sure to find you out some time beforeyou die, even if you cover it up for years and years."
"But we didn't do any sin," protested Georgina. "We just buried a pouchthat the dog found, to keep it safe, and if a big wind came along andcovered it up so we can't find it, that isn't our fault. We didn't makethe wind blow, did we?"
"But there was gold money in that pouch," insisted Richard, "and itwasn't ours, and maybe the letter was important and we ought to haveturned it over to Dad or Uncle Darcy or the police or somebody."
Aunt Letty's bedtime efforts to keep Richard's conscience tender werefar more effective than she had dreamed. He was quoting Aunt Letty now.
"We wouldn't want anybody to do _our_ things that way." Then a thoughtof his own came to him, "You wouldn't want the police coming round andtaking you off to the lockup, would you? I saw 'em take Binney Rogersone time, just because he broke a window that he didn't mean to. He wasonly shying a rock at a sparrow. There was a cop on each side of him ahold of his arm, and Binney's mother and sister were following alongbehind crying and begging them not to take him something awful. But allthey could say didn't do a speck of good."
The picture carried weight. In spite of her light tone Georgina wasimpressed, but she said defiantly:
"Well, nobody saw us do it."
"You don't know," was the gloomy answer. "Somebody might have been up inthe monument with a spy glass, looking down. There's always people upthere spying around, or out on the masts in the harbor, and if somesleuth was put on the trail of that pouch the first thing that wouldhappen would be he'd come across the very person with the glass. Italways happens that way, and I know, because Binney Rogers has readalmost all the detective stories there is, and he said so."
A feeling of uneasiness began to clutch at Georgina's interior. Richardspoke so knowingly and convincingly that she felt a real need forblackberry cordial. But she said with a defiant little uplift of herchin:
"Well, as long as we didn't mean to do anything wrong, I'm not going toget scared about it. I'm just going to bear up and steer right on, andkeep hoping that everything will turn out all right so hard that itwill."
Her "line to live by" buoyed her up so successfully for the time being,that Richard, too, felt the cheerful influence of it, and passed to morecheerful subjects.
"We're going to be in all the papers," he announced. "A reporter calledup from Boston to ask Cousin James how it happened. There's only been afew cases like ours in the whol
e United States. Won't you feel funny tosee your name in the paper? Captain Kidd will have his name in, too. Iheard Cousin James say over the telephone that he was the hero of thehour; that if he hadn't given the alarm we wouldn't have been discoveredtill it was too late."
Richard did not stay long. The finished portrait was to be hung in theArt gallery in the Town Hall that morning and he wanted to be on hand atthe hanging. Later it would be sent to the New York exhibition.
"Daddy's going to let me go with him when Mr. Locke comes for him on hisyacht. He's going to take me because I sat still and let him get such agood picture. It's the best he's ever done. We'll be gone a week."
"When are you going?" demanded Georgina.
"Oh, in a few days, whenever Mr. Locke comes."
"I hope we can find that pouch first," she answered. Already she wasbeginning to feel little and forlorn and left behind. "It'll be awfullonesome with you and Barby both gone."
Tippy came in soon after Richard left and sat down at the secretary.
"I've been thinking I ought to write to your mother and let her knowabout yesterday's performance before she has a chance to hear it fromoutsiders or the papers. It's a whole week to-day since she left."
"A week," echoed Georgina. "Is that all? It seems a month at least. It'sbeen so long."
Mrs. Triplett tossed her a calendar from the desk.
"Count it up for yourself," she said. "She left two days before yourbirthday and this is the Wednesday after."
While Mrs. Triplett began her letter Georgina studied the calendar,putting her finger on a date as she recalled the various happenings ofit. Each day had been long and full. That one afternoon when she andRichard found the paper in the rifle seemed an age in itself. It seemedmonths since they had promised Belle and Uncle Darcy to keep thesecret.
She glanced up, about to say so, then bit her tongue, startled at havingso nearly betrayed the fact of their having a secret. Then the thoughtcame to her that Emmett's sin had found him out in as strange a way asthat of the man who talked in his sleep or the chicken thief to whom thefeather clung. It was one more proof added to the forty in Aunt Letty'sbook. Richard's positiveness made a deeper impression on her than sheliked to acknowledge. She shut her eyes a moment, squinting them up sotight that her eyelids wrinkled, and hoped as hard as she could hopethat everything would turn out all right.
"What on earth is the matter with you, child?" exclaimed Tippy, lookingup from her letter in time to catch Georgina with her face thus screwedinto wrinkles.
Georgina opened her eyes with a start.
"Nothing," was the embarrassed answer. "I was just thinking."
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