第31章

I never see Dick Moore but I want to run a knife clean through him."Miss Cornelia wiped her eyes again and having relieved her feelings by her blood-thirsty wish, took up her tale.

"Well, Leslie was left over there alone. Dick had put in the crop before he went, and old Abner looked after it. The summer went by and the Four Sisters didn't come back. The Nova Scotia Moores investigated, and found she had got to Havana and discharged her cargo and took on another and left for home; and that was all they ever found out about her. By degrees people began to talk of Dick Moore as one that was dead. Almost everyone believed that he was, though no one felt certain, for men have turned up here at the harbor after they'd been gone for years. Leslie never thought he was dead--and she was right. A thousand pities too!

The next summer Captain Jim was in Havana--that was before he gave up the sea, of course. He thought he'd poke round a bit--Captain Jim was always meddlesome, just like a man--and he went to inquiring round among the sailors' boarding houses and places like that, to see if he could find out anything about the crew of the Four Sisters. He'd better have let sleeping dogs lie, in my opinion! Well, he went to one out-of-the-way place, and there he found a man he knew at first sight it was Dick Moore, though he had a big beard. Captain Jim got it shaved off and then there was no doubt--Dick Moore it was--his body at least. His mind wasn't there--as for his soul, in my opinion he never had one!""What had happened to him?"

"Nobody knows the rights of it. All the folks who kept the boarding house could tell was that about a year before they had found him lying on their doorstep one morning in an awful condition--his head battered to a jelly almost. They supposed he'd got hurt in some drunken row, and likely that's the truth of it. They took him in, never thinking he could live. But he did--and he was just like a child when he got well.

He hadn't memory or intellect or reason. They tried to find out who he was but they never could. He couldn't even tell them his name--he could only say a few simple words. He had a letter on him beginning `Dear Dick'

and signed `Leslie,' but there was no address on it and the envelope was gone. They let him stay on--he learned to do a few odd jobs about the place--and there Captain Jim found him. He brought him home-- I've always said it was a bad day's work, though I s'pose there was nothing else he could do. He thought maybe when Dick got home and saw his old surroundings and familiar faces his memory would wake up. But it hadn't any effect. There he's been at the house up the brook ever since. He's just like a child, no more nor less.

Takes fractious spells occasionally, but mostly he's just vacant and good humored and harmless. He's apt to run away if he isn't watched. That's the burden Leslie has had to carry for eleven years--and all alone. Old Abner Moore died soon after Dick was brought home and it was found he was almost bankrupt.

When things were settled up there was nothing for Leslie and Dick but the old West farm. Leslie rented it to John Ward, and the rent is all she has to live on. Sometimes in summer she takes a boarder to help out. But most visitors prefer the other side of the harbor where the hotels and summer cottages are.

Leslie's house is too far from the bathing shore.