I thought I should never get to sleep. The moment I drifted off in a doze I fell to laughing and woke myself up. But towards morning slumber overtook me, and I had a series of disagreeable dreams, in one of which I was waited upon by the ghost of Silas Trefethen with an exorbitant bill for the use of his guns. In another, I was dragged before a court-martial and sentenced by Sailor Ben, in a frizzled wig and three-cornered c.o.c.ked hat, to be shot to death by Bailey"s Battery--a sentence which Sailor Ben was about to execute with his own hand, when I suddenly opened my eyes and found the sunshine lying pleasantly across my face. I tell you I was glad!
That unaccountable fascination which leads the guilty to hover about the spot where his crime was committed drew me down to the wharf as soon as I was dressed. Phil Adams, Jack Harris, and others of the conspirators were already there, examining with a mingled feeling of curiosity and apprehension the havoc accomplished by the battery.
The fence was badly shattered and the ground ploughed up for several yards round the place where the guns formerly lay--formerly lay, for now they were scattered every which way. There was scarcely a gun that hadn"t burst. Here was one ripped open from muzzle to breech, and there was another with its mouth blown into the shape of a trumpet. Three of the guns had disappeared bodily, but on looking over the edge of the wharf we saw them standing on end in the tide-mud. They had popped overboard in their excitement.
"I tell you what, fellows," whispered Phil Adams, "it is lucky we didn"t try to touch "em off with punk. They"d have blown us all to flinders."
The destruction of Bailey"s Battery was not, unfortunately, the only catastrophe. A fragment of one of the cannon had earned away the chimney of Sailor Ben"s cabin. He was very mad at first, but having prepared the fuse himself he didn"t dare complain openly.
"I"d have taken a reef in the blessed stove-pipe," said the Admiral, gazing ruefully at the smashed chimney, "if I had known as how the Flagship was agoin" to be under fire."
The next day he rigged out an iron funnel, which, being in sections, could be detached and taken in at a moment"s notice. On the whole, I think he was resigned to the demolition of his brick chimney. The stove-pipe was a great deal more shipshape.
The town was not so easily appeased. The selectmen determined to make an example of the guilty parties, and offered a reward for their arrest, holding out a promise of pardon to anyone of the offenders who would furnish information against the rest. But there were no faint hearts among the Centipedes. Suspicion rested for a while on several persons--on the soldiers at the fort; on a crazy fellow, known about town as "Bottle-Nose"; and at last on Sailor Ben.
"Shiver my timbers!" cries that deeply injured individual. "Do you suppose, sir, as I have lived to sixty year, an" ain"t got no more sense than to go for to blaze away at my own upper riggin"? It doesn"t stand to reason."
It certainly did not seem probable that Mr. Watson would maliciously knock over his own chimney, and Lawyer Hackett, who had the case in hand, "bowed himself out of the Admiral"s cabin convinced that the right man had not been discovered.
People living by the sea are always more or less superst.i.tious. Stories of spectre ships and mysterious beacons, that lure vessels out of their course and wreck them on unknown reefs, were among the stock legends of Rivermouth; and not a few people in the town were ready to attribute the firing of those guns to some supernatural agency. The Oldest Inhabitant remembered that when he was a boy a dim-looking sort of schooner hove to in the offing one foggy afternoon, fired off a single gun that didn"t make any report, and then crumbled to nothing, spar, mast, and hulk, like a piece of burnt paper.
The authorities, however, were of the opinion that human hands had something to do with the explosions, and they resorted to deep-laid stratagems to get hold of the said hands. One of their traps came very near catching us. They artfully caused an old bra.s.s fieldpiece to be left on a wharf near the scene of our late operations. Nothing in the world but the lack of money to buy powder saved us from falling into the clutches of the two watchmen who lay secreted for a week in a neighboring sail-loft.
It was many a day before the midnight bombardment ceased to be the town-talk. The trick was so audacious and on so grand a scale that n.o.body thought for an instant of connecting us lads with it.
Suspicion at length grew weary of lighting on the wrong person, and as conjecture--like the physicians in the epitaph--was in vain, the Rivermouthians gave up the idea of finding out who had astonished them.
They never did find out, and never will, unless they read this veracious history. If the selectmen are still disposed to punish the malefactors, I can supply Lawyer Hackett with evidence enough to convict Pepper Whitcomb, Phil Adams, Charley Marden, and the other honorable members of the Centipede Club. But really I don"t think it would pay now.
Chapter Eighteen--A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go
If the reader supposes that I lived all this while in Rivermouth without falling a victim to one or more of the young ladies attending Miss Dorothy Gibbs"s Female Inst.i.tute, why, then, all I have to say is the reader exhibits his ignorance of human nature.
Miss Gibbs"s seminary was located within a few minutes" walk of the Temple Grammar School, and numbered about thirty-five pupils, the majority of whom boarded at the Hall--Primrose Hall, as Miss Dorothy prettily called it. The Prim-roses, as we called them, ranged from seven years of age to sweet seventeen, and a prettier group of sirens never got together even in Rivermouth, for Rivermouth, you should know, is famous for its pretty girls.
There were tall girls and short girls, rosy girls and pale girls, and girls as brown as berries; girls like Amazons, slender girls, weird and winning like Undine, girls with black tresses, girls with auburn ringlets, girls with every tinge of golden hair. To behold Miss Dorothy"s young ladies of a Sunday morning walking to church two by two, the smallest toddling at the end of the procession, like the bobs at the tail of a kite, was a spectacle to fill with tender emotion the least susceptible heart. To see Miss Dorothy marching grimly at the head of her light infantry, was to feel the hopelessness of making an attack on any part of the column.
She was a perfect dragon of watchfulness. The most unguarded lifting of an eyelash in the fluttering battalion was sufficient to put her on the lookout. She had had experiences with the male s.e.x, this Miss Dorothy so prim and grim. It was whispered that her heart was a tattered alb.u.m scrawled over with love-lines, but that she had shut up the volume long ago.
There was a tradition that she had been crossed in love; but it was the faintest of traditions. A gay young lieutenant of marines had flirted with her at a country ball (A.D. 1811), and then marched carelessly away at the head of his company to the shrill music of the fife, without so much as a sigh for the girl he left behind him. The years rolled on, the gallant gay Lothario--which wasn"t his name--married, became a father, and then a grandfather; and at the period of which I am speaking his grandchild was actually one of Miss Dorothy"s young ladies. So, at least, ran the story.
The lieutenant himself was dead these many years; but Miss Dorothy never got over his duplicity. She was convinced that the sole aim of mankind was to win the unguarded affection of maidens, and then march off treacherously with flying colors to the heartless music of the drum and fife. To shield the inmates of Primrose Hall from the bitter influences that had blighted her own early affections was Miss Dorothy"s mission in life.
"No wolves prowling about my lambs, if you please," said
Miss Dorothy. "I will not allow it."
She was as good as her word. I don"t think the boy lives who ever set foot within the limits of Primrose Hall while the seminary was under her charge. Perhaps if Miss Dorothy had given her young ladies a little more liberty, they would not have thought it "such fun" to make eyes over the white lattice fence at the young gentlemen of the Temple Grammar School.
I say perhaps; for it is one thing to manage thirty-five young ladies and quite another thing to talk about it.
But all Miss Dorothy"s vigilance could not prevent the young folks from meeting in the town now and then, nor could her utmost ingenuity interrupt postal arrangements. There was no end of notes pa.s.sing between the students and the Primroses. Notes tied to the heads of arrows were shot into dormitory windows; notes were tucked under fences, and hidden in the trunks of decayed trees. Every thick place in the boxwood hedge that surrounded the seminary was a possible post-office.
It was a terrible shock to Miss Dorothy the day she unearthed a nest of letters in one of the huge wooden urns surmounting the gateway that led to her dovecot. It was a bitter moment to Miss Phoebe and Miss Candace and Miss Hesba, when they had their locks of hair grimly handed back to them by Miss Gibbs in the presence of the whole school. Girls whose locks of hair had run the blockade in safety were particularly severe on the offenders. But it didn"t stop other notes and other tresses, and I would like to know what can stop them while the earth holds together.
Now when I first came to Rivermouth I looked upon girls as rather tame company; I hadn"t a spark of sentiment concerning them; but seeing my comrades sending and receiving mysterious epistles, wearing bits of ribbon in their b.u.t.ton-holes and leaving packages of confectionery (generally lemon-drops) in the hollow trunks of trees--why, I felt that this was the proper thing to do. I resolved, as a matter of duty, to fall in love with somebody, and I didn"t care in the least who it was.
In much the same mood that Don Quixote selected the Dulcinea del Toboso for his lady-love, I singled out one of Miss Dorothy"s incomparable young ladies for mine.
I debated a long while whether I should not select two, but at last settled down on one--a pale little girl with blue eyes, named Alice. I shall not make a long story of this, for Alice made short work of me. She was secretly in love with Pepper Whitcomb. This occasioned a temporary coolness between Pepper and myself.
Not disheartened, however, I placed Laura Rice--I believe it was Laura Rice--in the vacant niche. The new idol was more cruel than the old.
The former frankly sent me to the right about, but the latter was a deceitful lot. She wore my nosegay in her dress at the evening service (the Primroses were marched to church three times every Sunday), she penned me the daintiest of notes, she sent me the glossiest of ringlets (cut, as I afterwards found out, from the stupid head of Miss Gibbs"s chamber-maid), and at the same time was holding me and my pony up to ridicule in a series of letters written to Jack Harris. It was Harris himself who kindly opened my eyes.
"I tell you what, Bailey," said that young gentleman, "Laura is an old veteran, and carries too many guns for a youngster. She can"t resist a flirtation; I believe she"d flirt with an infant in arms. There"s hardly a fellow in the school that hasn"t worn her colors and some of her hair.
She doesn"t give out any more of her own hair now. It"s been pretty well used up. The demand was greater than the supply, you see. It"s all very well to correspond with Laura, but as to looking for anything serious from her, the knowing ones don"t. Hope I haven"t hurt your feelings, old boy," (that was a soothing stroke of flattery to call me "old boy,") "but it was my duty as a friend and a Centipede to let you know who you were dealing with."
Such was the advice given me by that time-stricken, careworn, and embittered man of the world, who was sixteen years old if he was a day.
I dropped Laura. In the course of the next twelve months I had perhaps three or four similar experiences, and the conclusion was forced upon me that I was not a boy likely to distinguish myself in this branch of business.
I fought shy of Primrose Hall from that moment. Smiles were smiled over the boxwood hedge, and little hands were occasionally kissed to me; but I only winked my eye patronizingly, and pa.s.sed on. I never renewed tender relations with Miss Gibbs"s young ladies. All this occurred during my first year and a half at Rivermouth.
Between my studies at school, my out-door recreations, and the hurts my vanity received, I managed to escape for the time being any very serious attack of that love fever which, like the measles, is almost certain to seize upon a boy sooner or later. I was not to be an exception. I was merely biding my time. The incidents I have now to relate took place shortly after the events described in the last chapter.
In a life so tranquil and circ.u.mscribed as ours in the Nutter House, a visitor was a novelty of no little importance. The whole household awoke from its quietude one morning when the Captain announced that a young niece of his from New York was to spend a few weeks with us.
The blue-chintz room, into which a ray of sun was never allowed to penetrate, was thrown open and dusted, and its mouldy air made sweet with a bouquet of pot-roses placed on the old-fashioned bureau. Kitty was busy all the forenoon washing off the sidewalk and sand-papering the great bra.s.s knocker on our front-door; and Miss Abigail was up to her elbows in a pigeon-pie.
I felt sure it was for no ordinary person that all these preparations were in progress; and I was right. Miss Nelly Glentworth was no ordinary person. I shall never believe she was. There may have been lovelier women, though I have never seen them; there may have been more brilliant women, though it has not been my fortune to meet them; but that there was ever a more charming one than Nelly Glentworth is a proposition against which I contend.
I don"t love her now. I don"t think of her once in five years; and yet it would give me a turn if in the course of my daily walk I should suddenly come upon her eldest boy. I may say that her eldest boy was not playing a prominent part in this life when I first made her acquaintance.
It was a drizzling, cheerless afternoon towards the end of summer that a hack drew up at the door of the Nutter House. The Captain and Miss Abigail hastened into the hall on hearing the carriage stop. In a moment more Miss Nelly Glentworth was seated in our sitting-room undergoing a critical examination at the hands of a small boy who lounged uncomfortably on a settee between the windows.
The small boy considered himself a judge of girls, and he rapidly came to the following conclusions: That Miss Nelly was about nineteen; that she had not given away much of her back hair, which hung in two ma.s.sive chestnut braids over her shoulders; that she was a shade too pale and a trifle too tall; that her hands were nicely shaped and her feet much too diminutive for daily use. He furthermore observed that her voice was musical, and that her face lighted up with an indescribable brightness when she smiled.
On the whole, the small boy liked her well enough; and, satisfied that she was not a person to be afraid of, but, on the contrary, one who might be made quite agreeable, he departed to keep an appointment with his friend Sir Pepper Whitcomb.
But the next morning when Miss Glentworth came down to breakfast in a purple dress, her face as fresh as one of the moss-roses on the bureau upstairs, and her laugh as contagious as the merriment of a robin, the small boy experienced a strange sensation, and mentally compared her with the loveliest of Miss Gibbs"s young ladies, and found those young ladies wanting in the balance.
A night"s rest had wrought a wonderful change in Miss Nelly. The pallor and weariness of the journey had pa.s.sed away. I looked at her through the toast-rack and thought I had never seen anything more winning than her smile.
After breakfast she went out with me to the stable to see Gypsy, and the three of us became friends then and there. Nelly was the only girl that Gypsy ever took the slightest notice of.
It chanced to be a half-holiday, and a baseball match of unusual interest was to come off on the school ground that afternoon; but, somehow, I didn"t go. I hung about the house abstractedly. The Captain went up town, and Miss Abigail was busy in the kitchen making immortal gingerbread. I drifted into the sitting-room, and had our guest all to myself for I don"t know how many hours. It was twilight, I recollect, when the Captain returned with letters for Miss Nelly.