第7章

Captain LittlepageIT WAS A long time after this; an hour was very long in that coast town where nothing stole away the shortest minute.I had lost myself completely in work, when I heard footsteps outside.There was a steep footpath between the upper and the lower road, which Iclimbed to shorten the way, as the children had taught me, but Ibelieved that Mrs.Todd would find it inaccessible, unless she had occasion to seek me in great haste.I wrote on, feeling like a besieged miser of time, while the footsteps came nearer, and the sheep-bell tinkled away in haste as if someone had shaken a stick in its wearer's face.Then I looked, and saw Captain Littlepage passing the nearest window; the next moment he tapped politely at the door.

"Come in, sir," I said, rising to meet him; and he entered, bowing with much courtesy.I stepped down from the desk and offered him a chair by the window, where he seated himself at once, being sadly spent by his climb.I returned to my fixed seat behind the teacher's desk, which gave him the lower place of a scholar.

"You ought to have the place of honor, Captain Littlepage," Isaid.

"A happy, rural seat of various views,"

he quoted, as he gazed out into the sunshine and up the long wooded shore.Then he glanced at me, and looked all about him as pleased as a child.

"My quotation was from Paradise Lost: the greatest of poems, I suppose you know?" and I nodded."There's nothing that ranks, to my mind, with Paradise Lost; it's all lofty, all lofty," he continued."Shakespeare was a great poet; he copied life, but you have to put up with a great deal of low talk."I now remembered that Mrs.Todd had told me one day that Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading; she had also made dark reference to his having "spells" of some unexplainable nature.I could not help wondering what errand had brought him out in search of me.There was something quite charming in his appearance: it was a face thin and delicate with refinement, but worn into appealing lines, as if he had suffered from loneliness and misapprehension.He looked, with his careful precision of dress, as if he were the object of cherishing care on the part of elderly unmarried sisters, but I knew Mari'

Harris to be a very common-place, inelegant person, who would have no such standards; it was plain that the captain was his own attentive valet.He sat looking at me expectantly.I could not help thinking that, with his queer head and length of thinness, he was made to hop along the road of life rather than to walk.The captain was very grave indeed, and I bade my inward spirit keep close to discretion.

"Poor Mrs.Begg has gone," I ventured to say.I still wore my Sunday gown by way of showing respect.

"She has gone," said the captain,--"very easy at the last, Iwas informed; she slipped away as if she were glad of the opportunity."I thought of the Countess of Carberry, and felt that history repeated itself.

"She was one of the old stock," continued Captain Littlepage, with touching sincerity."She was very much looked up to in this town, and will be missed."I wondered, as I looked at him, if he had sprung from a line of ministers; he had the refinement of look and air of command which are the heritage of the old ecclesiastical families of New England.But as Darwin says in his autobiography, "there is no such king as a sea-captain; he is greater even than a king or a schoolmaster!"Captain Littlepage moved his chair out of the wake of the sunshine, and still sat looking at me.I began to be very eager to know upon what errand he had come.

"It may be found out some o' these days," he said earnestly.

"We may know it all, the next step; where Mrs.Begg is now, for instance.Certainty, not conjecture, is what we all desire.""I suppose we shall know it all some day," said I.

"We shall know it while yet below," insisted the captain, with a flush of impatience on his thin cheeks."We have not looked for truth in the right direction.I know what I speak of; those who have laughed at me little know how much reason my ideas are based upon." He waved his hand toward the village below."In that handful of houses they fancy that they comprehend the universe."I smiled, and waited for him to go on.

"I am an old man, as you can see," he continued, "and I have been a shipmaster the greater part of my life,--forty-three years in all.You may not think it, but I am above eighty years of age."He did not look so old, and I hastened to say so.

"You must have left the sea a good many years ago, then, Captain Littlepage?" I said.

"I should have been serviceable at least five or six years more," he answered."My acquaintance with certain--my experience upon a certain occasion, I might say, gave rise to prejudice.I do not mind telling you that I chanced to learn of one of the greatest discoveries that man has ever made."Now we were approaching dangerous ground, but a sudden sense of his sufferings at the hands of the ignorant came to my help, and I asked to hear more with all the deference I really felt.Aswallow flew into the schoolhouse at this moment as if a kingbird were after it, and beat itself against the walls for a minute, and escaped again to the open air; but Captain Littlepage took no notice whatever of the flurry.