Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/56

48 wanted it, therefore, kept a secret from him. Any quiet corner along the coast which they could make into a home." Adding something about M. Jacobus "being fagged out with work, and needing rest," at which Lufflin shook his head. The Captain knew, that, bookworm and picture-maniac though he might be, Jacobus had managed to squander, in some unaccountable way, his own and his wife's fortune. So much of their history had got back to the fishing-town where she had lived when a child. People even hinted that they had been almost starving latterly in New York. However that might be, Old Lufflin knew that the sum she remitted to him was the last they had left; and beyond this, he had a shrewd suspicion that in the shipwreck the Jacobuses had made of life, something of more worth than money had been lost, and that this home she talked of was most probably a last effort to bury some shameful secret.

The Captain, in his disgust at the unknown bookworm, fretted under the whole affair. "It's not in my line," he would growl. "It's a cursed bore. Poor Charlotte! she used to swim like a frog in the inlet there, when she was only eleven. She's little heart for swimming now, it's likely!" And would begin his search with re-doubled vigor.

This house, a gray stone cottage of five or six rooms, in the most solitary part of the lee-coast, had been vacant for some time, and was to be sold cheap. Lufflin bought and furnished it in his own name; and then, as she directed, asked the Professor and his wife down to spend the Christmas holidays with him. He was anxious and awkward as a school-boy when they arrived the night before.

"It was too tough a job for you to set me, Charlotte," he grumbled. "How was I to choose a home for a man that lives, they say, by the sight of his eyes and the hearing of his ears? Water's water to me, and rocks rocks,"—trotting after her as she went through the house in silence, ending the survey with two or three sharp, decisive nods, and a quick, pleased little laugh.

"Satisfied? Yes, I am. Yes, I am. We've had a good many houses, Jerome and I; but this is home."

The Captain understood her.

In the morning, however, he felt all his doubts return. Mrs. Jacobus's quick, firm step sounded above, below him; presently she came in with a jug of yellow cream, and set it on the table, adjusting the dishes, putting a glass of holly in the middle, opening the window-curtains to let the cold, gray, wintry light fall on the white cloth and pretty blue china service.

"Those oysters now?" said the Captain, anxiously. "Ann's a poor cook."

"She's clean as a Shaker, though. But I broiled them myself,"—laughing to herself to see his relieved face.

"They're all right, then, Charlotte?"

"Yes."

She would give her mind to the oysters, he knew. It had been her way to put a little of her brains and blood into all her jobs in life, finishing each with a self-satisfied little nod. No wonder that she was worn, now that she was a middle-aged woman.

"She's lost something, Lotty has since I knew her," he thought, watching the light figure in its dark blue dress moving about; "but she's the right stuff for home use,"—with some vague idea in his old salt-water brain of delicate, incomplete faces suiting best with moonlight and country strolls, and of the sparkle of dinner-lights and brilliant eyes agreeing together, but that a face like Charlotte's was the one for the breakfast-table. The shrewd, kindly eyes, the color on her face, and the laugh came on you as fresh as a child's,—if her hair was a bit gray.

She had gone to the bay-window that overlooked the stretch of coast on which the heavy winter tide was coming in, and grown silent watching it. The Captain called to her; he wanted nothing to put the breakfast back this morning. And he fancied that to a woman who had been a leader in the world of culture and refinement yonder this sky