At the gate, Briggs waved a cheery hand. The doctor, peering after him with strange, sad eyes, shook a boding head. He stood leaning on his stick, till Briggs had skirted the box-hedge and disappeared around the turn by the smithy. Then, shivering again—despite the brooding warmth of the June afternoon—he turned and followed Ezra into the house.
“After fifty years,” he murmured, as he went. “I wonder if it could be—after fifty years?”
Comfortably installed in a huge easy-chair beside the freshly built fire in the “cabin” of Snug Haven and with one of Ezra Trefethen’s most artful egg-nogs within easy reach, the aged doctor leaned back, and sighed deeply.
“Maybe the captain’s right,” said he. “Maybe the boy’s all right. It’s possible; but I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Blinking, his eyes wandered about the room, which opened off from an old-fashioned hallway lighted by glass panels at the sides of the front door, and by a leaded fanlight over the lintel; a hallway with a curved stairway that would have delighted the heart of any antiquarian. The cabin itself showed by its construction and furnishing that the captain had spent a great deal of thought and time and money. At first glance, save that the fireplace was an incongruous note, one would have thought one’s self aboard ship, so closely had the nautical idea been carried out.
To begin with, the windows at the side, which opened out upon the orchard, were circular and rimmed with shining brass, and had thick panes inward-swinging like ships’ portholes. A polished fir column, set a trifle on a slant, rose from floor to ceiling, which was supported on white beams, the form and curve of which exactly imitated marine architecture. This column measured no less than a foot and a half in diameter, and gave precisely the impression of a ship’s mast. On it hung a chronometer, boxed in a case of polished mahogany, itself the work of the captain’s own hand.
All the lamps were hung in gimbals, as if the good captain expected Snug Haven at any moment to set sail and go pitching away over storm-tossed seas. The green-covered table bore a miscellany of nautical almanacs; it accommodated, also, a variety of charts, maps and meteorological reports. The captain’s own chair at that table was a true swinging-chair, screwed to the floor; and this floor, you understand, was uncarpeted, so that the holystoned planking shone in immaculate cleanliness as the declining sun through the portholes painted long, reddish stripes across it. Brass instruments lay on the table, and from them the sun flecked little high-lights against the clean, white paint of the cabin.