A bad penny

With our modern habit of huddling together in cities, fair urban gardens, together with many other pleasant things of an age which loved elbow room, are now rare: yet in some of our New England seaboard towns, which commerce has deserted and the hands of modern improvers left unmarred, such gardens still exist, to rest the spirits of men, tired of living at lightning express rate.

In one of these unprosperous Massachusetts towns, Oldbury, on the broad High Street, there stands a great square brick house, with a broad comfortable lawn stretching down to a high fence. A pathway leads from the street, between two rows of giant elm-trees, to the front door of the house; an entrance dignified by a portico of wooden Corinthian columns painted white. The house itself is severely simple, as befits a mansion, built by a Yankee ship-owner, but there is about it a comfortable air of solidity, which makes it more attractive than the gimcrack villas, which our successful men build nowadays. It was evidently built to last, and to be lived in by the builder and the children who should come after him.

On a day in June, more than eighty years ago, this house was new, and its owner, Captain John Woodbury, was standing, his hand on the shoulder of his son, in the garden at the back surveying with pride his mansion. He was a short, square-built man, his legs were encased in knee-breeches and stockings, although long trousers had already begun to shroud the symmetry or cover the defects of most male legs. But the Captain’s legs were stout and well developed, and were stretched apart, as their owner stood gazing at his new house, as if he had been used to standing on the quarter-deck and to giving orders to his crew. His red, weather-beaten face, with its strong aquiline nose, firm mouth, and keen black eyes, indicated that he was a seafaring man; though his service in the land forces of the Provincial Congress in the war against the British entitled him to the title of Captain, as well as did his command of a ship.

There was no rollicking air of the sea-dog about the Captain; life had been a serious business to him, although he had been used to value it little in times of danger. New England, at the first part of this century, was a peculiar community; the old Puritan stock, unmixed with foreign blood, yet strengthened by founding a nation, was beginning to break through its narrow shell, but the old faith was strong in the land. The Captain, as he stood on his demesne, believed that he owned it deep down to an actual Hell where the wicked and unbelieving were in eternal torture, and that he read his title clear to his estate far up to Heaven, where a talent for leading hymns could not be hidden during the eternity of paradise.

A shrewd and skilful trader, as well as a navigator, was the Captain, and during the great wars with which Napoleon fretted the world, he had seized the opportunities offered to Americans to make money in the carrying trade, and the new house, at which he was gazing with pride, was the monument of his success in life; a success which had come too late to be shared in by his wife, who had died some dozen years before.

The light-hearted boy standing by his side did not notice the tears which filled his father’s eyes at the thought of the dear face whose image time had not dimmed in the sturdy Captain’s remembrance. Indeed, the boy’s laughing blue eyes, joyful mouth, and fair curly hair recalled the mother to the old man; and the love which he bore him was made the deeper and tenderer by the resemblance.

It had been her darling wish that her son should be educated for the ministry; for her father had been a distinguished divine in the last century. His name was handed down to posterity in a volume of sermons wherein unbaptized infants and unpredestined fared but badly. Young James had been intended from infancy for the church, by his father, and since his mother’s death the boy had been left by the Captain, during his voyages, in the charge of his unmarried sister, Elizabeth, who lived in a small house on a street in Oldbury leading from the aristocratic High Street.

The life of Aunt Elizabeth had not been made happy by her charge, nor had he been happy with her. The good lady was an uncompromising Puritan, rigid in bearing and severe in visage, whose life was spent in a constant struggle with the powers of dirt and ungodliness. She was such a noteworthy housewife that it was a saying in Oldbury that the ministers whom she entertained at tea might have eaten off the dining-room floor as well as off her polished mahogany. Of course James’ muddy boots sadly disturbed his aunt’s peace of mind. Indeed, the boy, after that brief period of infancy when he was declared by his female relatives to look like an angel from heaven, had little excepting his good looks to recommend him to his aunt. He did not, like a good boy, love his books, and he was continually in mischief, so that he gained with surprising facility the distinction of being the bad boy of the neighborhood. The ill-natured remarks which reached Miss Woodbury’s ears as to “old-maid’s children” made the affliction hard for the old lady to bear. The boy was continually wandering off to the wharves, where the ships were laying, so that he might chat with the old salts over the wonders of the world. There he climbed up the shrouds of the vessels and skylarked over the decks and into the holds, returning home late to tea, covered with an unpleasant mixture of tar and molasses, which never could be removed from his clothes, and which would only wear off from his hands by slow attrition. Or, he would be missing till late at night, and return declaring that his boat had run aground on some one of the shifting sandbars of the harbor and that he had been compelled to wait for the tide to float it off; but I doubt whether he was really the unskilful navigator that he claimed to be. The mantle of the Rev. James Cheever did not seem to have fallen upon his grandson. The world seemed to the boy to be a beautiful place, full of color and adventure, as indeed it was, at the time when the great Napoleon was pulling down the old kings and setting up his unroyal brothers upon ancient pedestals.

At church, the boy used to sit through the long dreary sermons, wriggling in his seat, greatly to the annoyance of his aunt, and a quiet smile would play over his mouth as he thought that he was destined by his family to occupy such a pulpit and to be as dreary and as long-winded as good old Dr. Canterbury. His mind was always full of schemes to avoid this painful predestined fate; of plans for stowing his little body away in the hold of a ship, to appear upon deck in a few days after the vessel had left port and take up the important duties of a cabin-boy. In that happy estate of life, there would be no more Latin lessons for him, and, best of all, no Aunt Elizabeth to scour his face, and no long sermons on the Sabbath, to say nothing of the escape from the lesser evils of prayer-meetings and Sabbath-school catechism.

More than once he had stolen towards the wharves with a bag of biscuits and a brown jug of water to sustain life while a stowaway, only to go back home when he remembered what his father’s sorrow would be upon returning from a long voyage to find his son gone. His father’s short stays at home in the intervals of his voyages were the pleasantest days of the boy’s life, for there were friendly though somewhat formal relations between the two Woodburys; and now the old gentleman had retired from seafaring and for the last year had been rearing the fine mansion at which he was gazing with such sorrowful pride. His son had been growing during this last year almost as rapidly as the new house, and now at fifteen was as tall and as good-looking a youngster as Oldbury could boast.

He stood by his father’s side that morning, a little ill at ease. He was nearly ready for college and would be sent up to Cambridge for examination in a few weeks, unless he could obtain his father’s consent that he should go to sea. All day long he had had the words upon his tongue’s end, which should frame the arguments by which his father would be persuaded to relieve him from the dreadful life of a scholar and let him take to his natural element,--the water.

But as he looked at the Captain’s stern face, it became every moment more difficult to broach the subject, and his arguments became more and more unconvincing to himself. Finally he mustered up courage to speak:

“Father,” he said in a faltering voice, “I wish to have a talk with you. You know that I am almost prepared for college?”

“Mr. Dillaway tells me that he hopes you can pass your examinations, but that you have been very idle. It was not by idleness and skylarking that your good grandfather became such an ornament to his profession, James,” said his father, patting the boy’s shoulder as he reproved him, to show him that the words were meant in kindness.

“I know that, sir,” said James; “I am anything but a good scholar, and indeed, sir, I do not think that it is worth while for you to waste so much money upon my education.”

The Captain looked for a moment into his son’s face, and then said with a gesture of command: “Come into my room, my son, we must talk this matter over.”

The interior of the house was like that of other good houses of the period; a long broad hall stretched through it from the front door to the back; from this hall rose a staircase with carved and twisted balustrade; on either side of this hall were two large square rooms, the two sunny back rooms being for a dining-room and living room, while the two front parlors were kept sacred to dark respectability, samplers and furniture covered with hair-cloth, and were rarely used except for weddings, funerals, or other entertainments. They went through the back door into the sitting-room, in the corner of the house overlooking the garden. Over the high, white mantelpiece hung the picture of the Captain’s last ship, the Arethusa, a gem of nautical art, depicting the staunch craft, ploughing her way under full sail, through waves of gray-green paint as regular as the teeth of a saw. The carved teak-wood furniture gave the room a romantic charm, and the great lips of two blue china vases told to the receptive ears of the boy, sweet tales of the remote earth, just as the large pink shells sang of the Spanish Main. In a sandal-wood chest in one corner were rich stuffs and laces which the Captain had brought with him from the voyage to France for the wife whom he found dead on his return. The boy’s wife should wear them some day, the good old man thought as he packed them away. They were too sacred for any one else, though Aunt Elizabeth knew of their existence and coveted them; for even a Yankee old maid is a daughter of Eve.

In another corner of the room was a great iron box studded with heavy nails and fastened by a padlock, in which the Captain kept his valuables. James always looked at this with awe. He supposed it to be full of gold and silver and precious stones, and that his father was rich beyond the dreams of avarice. I could not in many pages describe all the contents of this wonderful room; it would be as hard as to enumerate the contents of a boy’s pocket; but I must not pass by the musket which the Captain carried through the war of the Revolution, nor the cutlasses which were in a rack in the corner, with the pistols and a great brass blunderbuss used for repelling pirates from the Arethusa, nor the curious old decanters filled with New England rum or port wine, which were in a little locker in a corner of the room.