The Green Dolphin
“An’ it’s the same with the seed catalogues,” went on Althea, reaching
for another loaf of bread. “He an’ Lemmy Gill send all over the face
of the earth for ’em an’ read ’em threadbare; then they collect an’
collect on the sittin’-room table. I wait till the pile gets so high
I can’t see the lamp over the top of ’em, an’ then up the whole batch
goes to the garret. I used to scold about them an’ the clippin’s when
I first got married; but gradually I learned better. I found there was
no makin’ Asaph over. Furthermore, hectorin’ as he was his sins were
harmless. I decided a husband might be doin’ far worse things. Every
man, I reckon, has some faults--every woman, too, for that matter. It’s
far more peaceable to get on with ’em than to keep arguin’ about ’em
all the time.”
Cordially Rebecca nodded. She did nothing more at the moment. But one
day not long afterward she casually suggested:
“Why don’t you bring that box of perennials round under my bedroom
window, Mr. Holmes? There’s fine sunshine there an’ they’ll be less
liable to get stepped on or tipped over than on the back stoop.”
Gratefully Asaph welcomed the plan.
How pleasant to find somebody interested in the well-being of his
beloved progeny!
As for Rebecca’s passion for seed catalogues, it almost equalled his
own! With what marvellous dispatch and understanding she grouped
together the spring and the fall volumes and neatly tied them up! Ah,
the price of this woman was above rubies!
“I don’t see how we ever managed ’fore ’Becca came,” said the
simple-minded Asaph to his wife after a day in which the virtues of
this paragon had shone with especial resplendence.
“Nor I,” echoed Althea.
CHAPTER XIV
It did not take long for the intuitive Rebecca Crosby with her keen
scent for romance to detect the delicately poised and altogether
delightful state of affairs twixt Peggy Davidson and the young doctor,
and vastly interested was she therein.
“It’s easy enough to see how matters stand there,” commented she to
Althea after her first meeting with the young people. “He’s so in love
with her he scarcely knows which way he’s goin’. I don’t wonder at it
either, for she’s pretty as a picture; sensible, too, an’ common.” (By
common Rebecca meant democratic.) “Moreover I like him full’s well as
I like her. A fine, upstandin’ young chap as you’d find anywheres.
Sometimes, though, I pity him he’s so harassed. I s’pose it’s a girl’s
way to hector; but there’s moments when it almost seems as if she
carried it too far an’ pushed him beyond the limits of endurance.
’Twould serve her right were he to turn on her an’ hand out a bit of
her own teasin’.”
“You think she’s too sure of him?”
“Yes. He gives his hand away too plain.”
“Why don’t you put a flea in his ear?”
“I? Law! Why, I hardly know the man. He’d rate me as a meddlesome old
maid, I guess, were I to dip my finger into his pie; an’ rightly, too.
Besides, there’s no real need for interference. In the long run Doctor
Eric will win Miss Peggy without your help or mine, even though she is
a mite skittish at present. The two were made for one another.”
“That’s what I told my husband. A blind man could see that. An’ yet,
will you believe it, Asaph was as took aback as if I’d put a bomb under
his chair when I first mentioned their bein’ in love. He hadn’t even
suspected it, an’ here the affair has been goin’ on for weeks right
under his nose. He’s awful innocent that way.”
“Men are. My brother Thomas, now, never took in fallin’s in love.
There was times when he ’peared stupid as a codfish. The way he’d
open his eyes an’ stare at me when I’d tell him a morsel of gossip
actually turned me red an’ made me feel pryin’ an’ vulgar to have been
suspectin’ what warn’t on the surface.”
“I know,” asserted Althea.
Ah, how perfectly Rebecca understood humanity and what comfort there
was in having a person of her wisdom and perspicacity to confide in!
Althea wondered she had ever been content with an environment that
entirely barred out feminine companionship.
Oh, the satisfaction in discussing with a representative of her own sex
whether the cake wouldn’t have been a mite tastier if flavored with
burnt almond instead of vanilla; and talking over what the tea-shop
patrons wore! Many a time she would tiptoe back with a tray and beckon
her associate to peep through a crack at some unsuspecting guest who
had figured conspicuously in their conversation.
“That woman settin’ back-to at the middle table is the one I was
speakin’ about last night,” she would whisper. “The rich one from out
West. Lemmy Gill is positive the man with her is her husband; I say
he’s her son. His eyes are the same color as hers an’ his hair, too.
Take a look, do, an’ see what you think.”
Or Mrs. Holmes would hurry into the kitchen and remark _sotto voce_:
“’Becca, I could trim my black straw hat over exactly like that pink
one on the piazza without it costin’ me a cent. There’s nothin’ on it
but a rosette of ribbon.”
Nor were these trifling confidences the only ones that passed between
the discreet Miss Crosby and her employer. Many matters less trivial
were poured into Rebecca’s sympathetic ear and with the unburdening the
weight of their annoyance vanished. When Asaph was more disorderly,
absent minded, and phlegmatic than usual, and continually placed boxes
of sifted loam under foot, what could be more consoling than to
discover that during his lifetime Brother Thomas had been addicted to
this identical mania.
Indeed, this relative of Rebecca’s appeared to have run the gamut of
experience, and duplicating each emotion, fault, and virtue to have
embodied the total in an all-embracing philosophy applicable to every
issue that could possibly confront human clay.
Was the wheelbarrow left out over night to rust in the fog? Brother
Thomas had had to be reminded times without number to bring his in.
Or were the eggs forgotten, Brother Thomas, it proved, when present
in the flesh had been prone to forget the eggs. Then would follow an
amusing recital of what had been done to dry out the weather-beaten
wheelbarrow and counter-balance the tragedy of the missing eggs. Such
tales, when set forth with Rebecca’s dramatic skill, never failed to be
entertaining, dwarfing by their interest present misfortune and wooing
one into the best of humor.
Or was the issue less prosaic in content--a filament of ethical or
imaginative nature, Brother Thomas had either felt precisely that way
or had uttered wise counsel concerning a similar dilemma.
The phrase, “Brother Thomas used often to say,” was perpetually on
Rebecca’s lips, until her listeners were forced to the conclusion that
if a quarter of the observations credited to this worthy had actually
been vouchsafed, Brother Thomas during his earthly pilgrimage must have
been a deplorably garrulous talker.
Indeed, so frequently did this absent relative come to the fore that by
degrees he became a presence as real as Rebecca herself, lurking like
Banquo’s ghost in the background of all the Dolphin affairs, and making
at its tea parties the fifth member of the household. Blessed with
every virtue, damned with every fault, his modest soul would have been
aghast could it have returned to earth and beheld the cenotaph reared
to him by an adoring sister.
Yet despite the laurels that wreathed his brows, Brother Thomas was a
likable shade, so likable that Lemuel Gill affirmed had he stumbled
upon the spirit in the dark, or rounded some corner and found him
unexpectedly standing there, far from being alarmed he should clap the
apparition on the shoulder and hail him with delight. Unquestionably,
Thomas was a cheery phantom. A practical one, too, if Rebecca’s rating
of him was to be trusted. One could not picture him in wings and a
halo. Instead, it seemed certain that unabashed by the celestial light
that played forever on the Great White Throne, Brother Thomas was still
arrayed in his blue overalls hitched up by the particular make of
suspender he had so vehemently advocated in life.
It was the knowledge of Brother Thomas’s preferences in these intimate
matters that made of him so vivid and living a spirit and drove from
his personality every taint of the supernatural. One knew exactly
what kind of shoe, collar, and razor he had patronized; what make of
underwear; what color sock. And so excellent were his ideas concerning
these articles that both Lemmy Gill and Asaph gradually found
themselves creeping into the specific varieties he had made immortal,
and constantly projecting into the other world their congratulations on
his unparallelled good taste.
Lemuel, for example, gave over fastening on the buttons of his clothes
with wire or catgut, as had been his custom, and proceeded to sew them
to his garments with the especial make of linen thread Brother Thomas
had discovered to be enduring. He even went farther, and tested out the
paragon’s pet cut of tobacco.
As for Asaph, he in turn adopted as his own innumerable methods
practised by the departed. Certain of these, it is true, were forced
on him by Rebecca, who darned his socks, patched his coat, ironed his
shirts after the manner Brother Thomas had preferred.
A kindly creature was Rebecca; one who was always doing some thoughtful
act for others. Before she had been at the Holmes’s a day she had
remarked:
“As I was passin’ through the entry I noticed the rug needed fixin’ so
I took a stitch in it.”
She was continually taking such stitches. She took them here, there,
and everywhere. From her belt dangled a red tomato cushion stabbed
with needles threaded with black, white, brown, and grey cotton,
and whenever she espied a feebly attached button, an escaping hem,
the first subtle ravages of a rent, out of her pocket came her blue
celluloid thimble and grasping one of the needles adorning the tomato,
Rebecca “took a stitch.” Asaph declared no better characterization of
her could be given than that afforded by these few significant words,
and asserted the phrase should be graven on her tombstone. The stitches
were humble, understanding, sympathetic ones, and never failed to
promote happiness.
She mended Asaph’s frayed cuffs; shortened Althea’s petticoats; even
went so far as to volunteer to darn Eric Hollingsworth’s stockings. It
was noticeable, however, that she never presumed to suggest meddling
with Lemuel Gill’s precariously constructed wardrobe. Whether she
curbed her altruism because of diffidence, or whether the omission
resulted from a sense of maidenly propriety, the slight was evidently
intentional, for no one of Rebecca’s quick observation could have
failed to be aware of the legion of stitches the Captain’s garments
required.
To be sure, she occasionally performed for him some especial service,
such as offering to secure for him a slip of the hydrangea growing
on Brother Thomas’s grave. It had been a signal honor, and Lemmy had
been overwhelmed by it, since to get the cutting had meant a trip to
Truro. But for all that, a reserve she had not at the outset displayed,
almost imperceptibly began to rear itself ’twixt her and the little
man. Lemmy, sensitively attuned, sensed the barrier and screwing up
his courage tried now and then to surmount it by consulting her about
a tailoring problem that outdistanced his amateur skill. But though
courteous, Miss Crosby did not encourage these advances, and it was to
Althea he subsequently came with his difficulties.
“Seems to me Lemmy’s gettin’ terrible puckered up an’ queer with
’Becca,” remarked Asaph to his wife one night when the two were secure
within the fastness of their bedroom.
“Is he?” Althea went on indifferently, braiding her thin pigtail down
to its very tip, appearing vastly interested in the process.