A bad penny

THE rooms in the top story of Hollis Hall are not considered very desirable by the young Harvard men of the present day. But there is a charm, a delightful Harvard flavor, about these low-studded collegiate chambers, which the rooms in the modern dormitories sadly lack. It is pleasant to sink deep into an arm-chair and to think that in that room generations of students have sat like yourself in a reverie over the fire. You find yourself conjuring up the images of these former occupants of the room, and as dreamers have as wide a license as poets, you may place all the distinguished students of the last one hundred and fifty years in your arm-chair and feel the most intimate personal connection with them. The room has never been vacant in term-time since those red bricks were laid. The solemn young men in small-clothes moved out for Washington’s army, to be sure; but the human continuity remains unbroken.

It is in such reveries that the Harvard man has learned to love his college and to feel an intimate kinship to her and to her sons. The step worn by our ancestors’ nimble feet is a memorial more stirring than many a tablet; the elms are our friends and did not our grandfathers love them too? Who was the bold youth who, surprised at some mischief with the college-bell, leaped from Harvard Hall to Hollis, over the yawning chasm? I wonder whether he ever sprang thus from one treacherous gutter to another, as was related to us; but whether he did or not, he is a figure in the past, whom we cannot lose.

Years ago, one autumn day, a Freshman looked out of the small-paned window of one of these lofty chambers; out at the branches of the elms, denuded of their leaves. The chamber was bare enough, with its whitewashed ceiling of knobby plaster, its white paint and striped wall-paper. A wood fire played in the open fireplace; and there were two beds, two wash-stands, a table, a rack for books, and four mahogany chairs to furnish the room.

The Freshman was James Woodbury, who had been led, all unwilling, by his father to drink of the Puritan fount of learning a few weeks beforehand. He had been provided with the academic costume of sober black, then prescribed by the makers of the college regulations; and his father had returned to Oldbury after giving him a blessing, secure in the belief that four years of academic life would transmute the careless boy into a man, ready to become a fit descendant of a Puritan divine.

One other boy had entered college from Oldbury that year,—Thomas Devereux, a paragon of decorum and scholarship. It seemed natural that the two boys should become room-mates, as they came from the same town, yet it is certain that geographical origin was all that the two boys had in common. They certainly did not like each other, that was apparent, and though they slept side by side in the bare college chamber and daily studied the same tasks, they were each day growing more and more apart. Thomas shone in the class-room, James among the contestants in the football field. Thomas was as regular and precise as James was procrastinating and careless. The social boy, who loved sailors and longshore-men, knew already almost all the seventy Freshmen whom the college had gathered under her wing that year, while the scholar knew only a chosen few, who met together for prayer on every Friday evening, and those of his chum’s friends who had disturbed his studies in their quest for his more jovial room-mate. Still the ill-assorted pair did not quarrel; each took his path in life and saw but little of his mate.

This afternoon Thomas was out taking his “constitutional” walk,—to Fresh Pond and back in the company of an improving companion; and James was trying to prepare his Horace for the morrow’s recitation. He had just received a letter from his father full of improving advice, and inspired by the words of the kindly old man, he had betaken himself to his books. The Horatian ode was half translated and he had arisen to look out of the window in the vague hope that something would happen in the yard which would justify his leaving the genial poet, who seemed to him so dull, though his verses were crisp with the condensed wit of the great Roman world. But there was nothing stirring outside save a few brown leaves which the wind whirled along the brown sward. The Dictionary and the Horace were upon the window-seat, inviting him to work; there was no reason why he should not set about it. But it seemed so distasteful to him. He began to think about Oldbury, of Alice, whom the old Deacon, her grandfather, had forbidden to speak to him since the night of his uncle’s escape from tardy justice; of his father, solitary in his grand new house; of his aunt, with her shrewd tongue and set ways; and of the wicked uncle, speeding down the bay in the Scud. What had become of the boat and its freight? His father had never spoken to him of them again; but he was sure that he had heard from him; for, three days after the exciting day of the foiled arrest, the Captain had received a letter and had taken the stage to Boston the next morning. On his return to Oldbury he had said nothing to any one about his journey.

What had become of Uncle Tom?

Was he on one of the privateersmen of which there was so much talk, now that there was war? What joy it must be to tread the deck of one of those adventurous craft, to sight a rich merchantman flying the Union Jack, and to haul up on her weather-gauge, and fire a gun across her bow!

That was life! but this round of distasteful studies; these hours spent in chapel and the recitation-room while his country was beset by enemies; was this an existence which a proud-spirited lad would lead?

These reveries were interrupted by a knock at the door. James hastily picked up his Horace and called to the visitor to enter. And in came the lost uncle, with a queer smile on his grim face.

“Uncle Tom,” cried out James, dropping again his task-book. “Uncle Tom! I was just wondering where you were.”

“The Scud’s lying in Marblehead harbor,” remarked Cheever, as he slung himself into a chair. “Studying, James?”

“Trying to,” replied James, who was burning with curiosity to find out about this uncle’s doings.

“Do you like your school?” asked the other, looking around at the apartment. “It seems a quiet spot, to me; a good shelter—I suppose that you are straining at your cable, though? That’s the way—boys will be boys, and that means, bad boys. They never know what’s good for them. My father meant me to come here. But, Lord love you, James, I couldn’t any more have stuck to my books when I was your age than a sailor can stick to a ship where he is well treated.”

“What have you been doing? What happened to you that night?” questioned James.

“I told you that the Scud was at Marblehead. I made that port in the morning after our parting. ’Twas the day that war was declared, and before night fell I had shipped as first mate on the privateer Lion, of Marblehead.”

“What, uncle, are you on a privateer?” asked James.

“I am not only first mate but part owner of the schooner Lion, my boy, and we were one of the first to get afloat. Why, they had begun to caulk the old tub for service before the messenger who announced the declaration of war to the Marblehead people had time to wet his whistle. I knew that I could count on your father’s word, and I engaged with Captain Vickery to supply the armament. We put into Boston after our first cruise a day or two ago, and I pushed my way out here to Cambridge to see you. It’s the first time I have ever been in the old town, though my father was a Harvard graduate and meant me to go through the college. It’s many a start parents would get if they could look up from the red-cheeked baby in the cradle, spewing up curdled milk, and see its future; but I am moralizing again. You can’t get this old Puritan taint out of the blood. I take to sermons as naturally as I do to mischief.”

The privateersman, after this unusually long speech, swung himself into a chair by the fire, and was silent. After a few minutes he looked up and asked: “Was the old Deacon mad when I gave him the slip? It was a close shave, and if he had caught me it would have gone hard with me. I owe you a debt of gratitude, my boy, and it’s a debt of honor, the only kind of debt I like to pay.”

Just then the college-bell rang out, and James looked regretfully at his Horace.

“It’s recitation time, Uncle Tom,” he said.

“And you ain’t learned your lesson? What will the master do to you? You can tell him that an extinguished divine turned up to call on you.”

“I do not suppose that I shall suffer very severely, though I cannot say that it is my first offence. I shall be back in an hour. Will you be here when I return?”

“Yes; I will sit here by your fire and see how it feels to be at college. My early opportunities I neglected, and it would not have been possible to keep me four years in the same place. There’s quicksilver in my blood and in my pocket, too, for that matter. Quick to burn a hole there, anyway. But run along to your recitation. I shall enjoy myself here if I am allowed to smoke. Is it against the rules?”

“You will enjoy smoking the more, if it is,” answered James, as he ran away to his recitation.

Cheever heaped some logs on the fire, filled his pipe with tobacco, and lighted it from an ember. Like most men who have knocked about the world and have seen “all sorts and conditions of men,” he was a solitary; happy enough to be left alone with a good pipe of tobacco, and yet ready for a carousal or a fight at a moment’s notice.

There was a charm to the world-weary man in the stillness of this college chamber. It seemed to him, as he had said to his nephew, a good shelter, grateful to a storm-tossed waif.

He picked up a Latin dictionary and turned the leaves at random. It had been years since he had looked into so serious a volume, and yet it was not a sealed book to him; for he had been well grounded in the classics during the futile attempt to make a parson out of a ne’er-do-well.

He smiled when he saw the irregular verbs, and the nouns, puzzling as to gender, which had been his tormentors when a boy, and he mumbled to himself over a list of prepositions and a rule from a grammar.

These useful bits of knowledge cannot be dislodged from the mind which received them when it was young and plastic. They remain forever embedded like the pebbles in a conglomerate stone. The beautiful lines of Shakespeare, learned with enthusiasm, are forgotten; the music of the exquisite lyrics of Shelley dies away, but the rules of the Latin Grammar are too firmly rooted to be lost.

Cheever was repeating to himself rapidly “Hic, hæc, hoc, hujus—” when the door opened and another young man entered,—Thomas Devereux, James’ ill-matched “chum,” a lank, pale lad, with a high forehead and small features. He paused at the threshold when he saw the stranger taking his ease before the fire.

“Come in,” said Cheever. “James has gone to recite, and has left me on watch.”

Devereux entered, eying the stranger with suspicion. The tobacco smoke which filled the room from Cheever’s pipe was not a pleasing perfume to the nostrils of the prim young scholar. He stood at the threshold a moment.

“I am an old friend of James’ father,” explained Cheever.

“I am Woodbury’s chum, Thomas Devereux.”

“Devereux? That’s an Oldbury name.”

“Yes; and I am an Oldbury boy,” replied Devereux, as he took off his overcoat, keeping a watchful eye all the time on the suspicious-looking stranger.

“So you are an Oldbury boy, and James’ chum! I am glad to make your acquaintance. My name is Marks, and I am first mate of the Lion, privateer, of Marblehead; and as I take an interest in James through long knowledge of his father, Captain Woodbury, I have come out here to Cambridge to see him. I chartered a chaise, and worked my course out. I suppose that you boys have a devil of a time here, don’t you?”

Devereux’s pale, girlish face flushed, and he shifted uneasily in his chair; but Cheever did not notice the effect of his remark upon the young Puritan. The college presented itself to his lawless mind as a conglomeration of young men, and therefore as a place for roystering and deviltry. He could not for a moment imagine that a boy in whose veins ran young blood could think and act as did young Thomas Devereux, who could be guilty of a meanness, perhaps, but could never let slip an oath. “Of course you do,” he continued. “Boys will be boys! With such a lot of you together, away from home, things must be lively here.”

“I regret to say that there are many who are heedless enough to neglect their opportunities and indulge in wickedness,” said Devereux, with a solemnity beyond his years.

Cheever looked at him sharply, and smiled. A glance at the bloodless cheek, beardless as a woman’s, the thin-lipped, solemn mouth, made him remember that there were some boys who never were boys.

“You never neglect your opportunities, I hope,” said Cheever, in a graver tone. “There is no one so much to be blamed as a young man who is careless of his advantages. I hope that James is studious and well-behaved.” There was a twinkle in the old reprobate’s eye as he spoke.

“I fear that James is neglectful of his studies, and truly too ready to seek wild company,” replied Devereux. “I have tried by precept and example to lead him to better ways, but it has been of no avail. But if you will excuse me, sir, I must be settling to my task. I have a recitation the next hour, and I have not fully prepared myself for it.”

“If that’s the case,” said Cheever, “I shall not stay here to disturb you; but I shall take a turn over the grounds until James is through his recitation.”

As soon as the elder man had shut the door, Devereux opened the windows to rid the atmosphere of the room from the dreadful odor of his pipe-smoke and of iniquity.

James, coming out from Harvard Hall, saw his uncle sitting on the fence by the Massachusetts Hall.

“Young Squaretoes was too much for me, James, and I came out here by preference. It’s a little cold, though; but it’s nothing to the young ice-berg you bunk with. We had better go to the tavern, James.”

Over across the square they went.

“We must go into the back room, uncle,” said James. “The rules of the College are very strict against the frequenting of taverns.”

“Rules, my boy, were made to be broken,” observed Cheever.

They soon found themselves in a bare room, where a wood fire smouldered in a Franklin stove. Cheever ordered his glass of “flip,” a blend of hot iron and alcohol, and then lighted his pipe with due deliberation.

“I was looking over your Latin Grammar while you were away, James,” he said, while the landlord was absent to get the “flip.” “It’s many a day since I have seen one, though Mr. Livermore’s switch beat some of the rules into me so that I have never forgotten them. I was to have been a parson, you know.”

“I’m to be one, too,” said James, smiling.

“Yes? Well, if they hadn’t tried to make a saint out of me, perhaps I’d have been less of a sinner. ’Twas only last month, when we sighted a British brig, that I was thinking about the old gentleman—whose life I shortened, James, my boy—and I said to myself: ‘Now, Tom Cheever, you have a good deal on your soul, but the old man used to say:

You’ve got to capture that brig, Tom, and your share of the prize-money, added to the sum you’ve tucked away in the bank, will make you independent. You’ve acted on the square for two years, and you may be a decent man yet. You can leave all your old self buried in that empty grave at Oldbury and start with a clean bill of health, just as if you had received absolution from the Pope of Rome.’ That’s a handy belief, James, that Roman Catholic. We haven’t any method of casting off old sins. Why, they stick around our necks all our lives like a dead hen tied around the setter dog who killed it—”

“How many vessels has the Lion taken?” asked James, who did not fancy his uncle’s moralizing so much as the imperfectly repentant sinner liked the sound of his own voice.

“The brig Dreadnaught I was speaking of, was the biggest one, three hundred tons, but besides her we carried into port three other brigs and four schooners, in the last year. We found the Dreadnaught a hard nut to crack, and if it hadn’t turned out that we could out-weather her and were better gunners, she would have taken us. As it was, we lost three of our crew before we boarded her, and we had the toughest kind of a hand-to-hand fight before we got them under hatches. Those Marblehead men can fight, James! They’re true grit. The Englishmen were as good, but we outnumbered them, and they had to give in; that is, all that were left of them.”

“When was this fight?”

“Last month, in the Old Bahama channel, off Cuba. We left the prize at Baltimore on our way to Boston.”

“Oh, I wish I had gone on the Scud with you, Uncle Tom,” cried James, “and I should have been one of the crew of the Lion.”

“I would rather cut off my right hand, my boy, than take you away from the course of life which your father has laid out for you. I’ve finished my seafaring, James, and I’ll settle down in Boston and lead a decent life, if that old rascal in Oldbury will let me alone. The silver’s under the lilac-bush, James, in his back yard. That’s what I have come out here to tell you about.”

“What silver?”

“What! don’t you know?” groaned Cheever. “Haven’t they told you? The silver I took from Deacon Fairbanks the night before I left Oldbury. You know now why I had to run from the office. I’ve got a map here of the place where I buried it, and that’s why I’ve come out to see you. I want you to dig it up when you go to Oldbury and put it back into the old man’s sideboard without his knowing it.”

He took out a worn leather pocket-book and extracted from its heterogeneous contents a piece of paper, dirty from much handling and broken in the creases. James watched him intently, much shocked at this avowal of crime; he had never imagined that his uncle had added house-breaking to his other youthful follies.

“There, James,” explained Cheever, as he smoothed out the ragged plan, “that represents the Deacon’s house, the side next your father’s new house, you know, and the X is the dining-room window. Ten paces straight out from the window stands the lilac-bush. It’s there still. I looked for it when I came to the house that night, and two feet to the south of it, if you dig down a foot, you’ll come to the silver. It was in a basket when I buried it, but I guess that there’s little left of the wickerwork by this time. You go there some night and dig the stuff up, then polish it up, and see that it’s conveyed into the Deacon’s sideboard—but don’t you let him know that you did it. It will be a weight off my mind if you do it, James. Let’s see, you should find, if I remember right, two dozen spoons, big and little, a silver tea-service, and two tankards. It wasn’t much to lose your life for, James, but you’ll find that men swap off their honor and their reputation for very little, very little, my boy. You’ll do this for me? That’s right. Now, here comes the ‘flip,’ and we’ll drink to the old Captain’s health. He wouldn’t drink mine, I will bet; but then he’s no kin of mine and you are, my boy. Your mother was my only sister, James, and even a blackguard loves his sister.”