Abel leaned eagerly toward Gama. “It proved exact, Vasco?”
Gama now was leaning toward Abel. “You told me it had steered your soul out of hell. Do you recall, sir?”
Silently Abel assented. Ah, didn’t he!
“I used to think of that,” the other continued, “when things looked dark, and failure seemed surer than success. And in my sorest need, when I could see Paulo slipping away from me, and I myself seemed adrift, then, Master Abel, your compass did more than steer my ship exactly. I came to need it to steer myself by!”
“Ah, Vasco!” Abel’s voice was hardly a whisper. “Who of us doesn’t need something by which to steer himself?”
CHAPTER 25
A Letter
Out of a side chapel of the great Sé Patriarchal; Nejmi and Nicolo stepped into the late afternoon sunshine. Behind them came Abel and Ruth, and then Scander and Ferdinand.
Ruth had been first to kiss Nejmi when the old priest had given his final blessing, and Abel first to call her “Mistress Conti.” Rapturously Nicolo watched her as, a little shy, but smiling, she stood with them all around her wishing her joy. Her dress was one of every day. She had refused to have anything new. But it was one of those golden, clinging things that Ruth had made for her, that put one in mind of soft sunset skies. Banded across her forehead, and braided into her hair, were the pearls Nicolo had given her. More than ever, he told himself, she looked her name: a star, radiant and tender.
“I always knew this would happen some day,” sighed Scander. The burnt gimlet holes rested lovingly on Nejmi. “But now that ’t has happened, I don’t deny it makes me feel odd in the pit of the stomach!”
“And me!” declared Ferdinand. He turned to Ruth. “Aunt Ruth, did anyone cry at your wedding?”
She laughed tremulously. “They say it’s good luck to have some tears at a wedding!”
“I can’t ask anything better for you children than that you’ll be as happy as Ruth and I have been,” Abel quickly added.
Nicolo’s arm went suddenly around Nejmi. “If I make her half as happy as she’s made me—”
An exclamation from Ferdinand stopped him. “Look! I’d almost forgotten.” From under his coat he produced a package wrapped in bright cotton cloth, and handed it to Nejmi. “From Gama—I mean Dom Gama! He said not to open it till you get home.”
“There’s another present waiting for you there,” said Abel, “from Ruth and me. Go along, you two, and find it!”
“Yes, go and find it,” Ruth repeated. “We—we’ve an errand. Those bulbs and things for someone who’s going to start a garden.”
All morning, Nicolo recalled, she and Abel had been busy at something or other in the court. He’d been too blissful to notice what!
“I’ll walk a ways with you, sir,” Scander proposed to Abel, and so would he, too, said Ferdinand.
As they turned away Ruth ran back to Nejmi. “I must kiss you once more, child—you look so lovely!” Her eyes were misty, Nicolo noticed, but she was smiling. Then she was again with Abel, her arm through his.
“You’ll come home soon, Mother Ruth, Master Abel?” Nejmi called after them.
As if they had not heard her question, they smiled back at her; and then hurried on.
Afterward Nicolo remembered that they had made no reply. Always would he remember Abel’s face in that short moment. The eager eyes were those of Abel the Boy! But neither to Abel the Boy nor to Abel the Banker belonged that look of shining peace, of sweet majesty. A seldom used word stirred Nicolo’s memory—Abel the Seer!
The next moment, putting Nejmi’s cloak around her, he forgot everything but her. “Let’s go home, darling!” he whispered, only half believing that this wasn’t all a dream.
She slipped her hand into his, and they started off.
“I’m so glad ‘home’ is that dear house, aren’t you?” she asked him.
“But you’ll love, just as much, the one I’ll build, won’t you?”
As they reached the top of the long flight she said in a low tone, “I love these stairs! They’ve always meant warmth and light and safety after the dark and the cold.”
He flung open the gate. “I love them because they’ve always meant you at the end!”
Together they stood looking about them. All so familiar, yet so rapturously unfamiliar! Into the western windows, and out into the shadowed court, flooded the sunset’s gold.
“Let’s open Master Gama’s present in the workshop.” Nejmi nodded toward the doorway.
“You must say Dom Gama now,” Nicolo laughingly reminded her.
“Then, afterward, we’ll look for our present from Master Abel and Mistress Ruth! Where do you suppose it is?” she said, as they entered the workshop.
Almost as she spoke, a folded paper on the table caught their eyes.
Nicolo bent over it. “It’s addressed to us both.”
“It’s about the present!” exclaimed Nejmi. “See if it isn’t.” Hastily she laid Gama’s package aside, and looked over Nicolo’s shoulder.
He opened the paper and ran his eye over the first lines. “Why—why what does this mean? Listen!”
He began to read:
“THE WORKSHOP,
The morning of Nejmi’s wedding day.
“You two children are in the workshop, and you’re wondering where the present is that we told you to find. You’ve already found it! Yes, when you opened the gate and looked within: the court, the house—your present from Ruth and me. (No need, Nicolo, to build another home!)”
A quick cry stopped him. “Ah, Nicolo—Nicolo!” Nejmi’s hands were suddenly gripping his.
He stared at her in startled alarm. She was trembling, and very pale; and in her eyes was a look of tenderness and grief that wrung his heart.
“I—I know now what the letter means,” she said, very low. “Read on, Nicolo.”
So, with his arm around her, her face against his, Nicolo “read on”:
“We thought you might guess, when we were cutting those slips this morning, and taking up those bulbs! They are for our new garden—child of the one we planted together. So shall we take with us a little of the homeland. (Ruth says she can coax yellow lilies to grow anywhere.)
“How could we tell you before? No, this was the better way: for you not to know till we are gone. But through Rabbi Joseph you will hear of us in our new home—when it is safe for us to send him word. Go and see him sometimes. Perhaps he’ll whisper to you how, one late afternoon, Ruth and Abel Zakuto went in at his front door. How, a little later, a middle-aged carpenter, carrying his tools, walked out of the back door. How, still later, a woman with a basket of vegetables on her head, also walked out of that back door. (They were not to be seen together, you’ll understand.) That is all that Rabbi Joseph actually saw! But, for yourselves, imagine, now, the middle-aged carpenter and the vegetable woman on a trading vessel speeding down river—into the sunset!
“Nicolo, your business will grow with Lisbon’s great, new traffic. You may want more capital. Use mine freely. I meant it that way when I deposited funds with you, my boy. What I need of it you may send me through Rabbi Joseph.
“There will be another workshop! (Ruth says that even if, at first, we have to live in two rooms, one of those rooms shall be a workshop.) Other Ways are waiting for their Covilham, for their Diaz, for their Gama! The rims of new worlds already peer above the western horizon. Columbus has shown us them. So, there must be better compasses, better astrolabes. One of these days Ferdinand will be starting off to discover something. He knows who will make his navigation instruments for him! Bartholomew, too. Who can tell but he’ll be needing a compass for the next expedition to India? (When he comes home to build the new fleet, show him and Vasco the maps Scander helped me to make.)
“Our undying love, Ruth’s and mine, to you both: to you, Nicolo; to you, Nejmi—Star of the Way!
ABEL ZAKUTO.”
1 Magellan’s birthplace, in Portugal’s most northern province, Tr
az-os-Montes.
2 A Venetian cartographer of the fifteenth century.
3 Japan.
4 China.
5 Old Lisbon’s Cathedral.
6 A magnetized piece of iron floating on a raft of cork or reeds in bowl of water.
7 Prince Henry of Portugal called The Great Navigator.
8 Belem. At the mouth of the Tagus River. The site of the chapel built by Henry the Navigator.
9 Shoals formed by the bar at the mouth of the Tagus.
10 A Portuguese military post on the Guinea coast.
11 Cascaes. Fifteen miles west of Lisbon, where ships bound for Lisbon take on pilots.
12 Most southern province of Portugal.
13 One of the Azores Islands.
NEW LAND, by Sarah Lindsay Schmidt
A Newbery Honor Book, 1934.
1
A Dream and A Blow
The Rattleshake, the Morgans’ Model T Ford, chugged on and on through the white dust of endless, deserted roadway. Nobody talked; everyone was too tired. Charley’s square hands steered automatically. Dad, small and spare of person, for once merely passive of mood, sat limply beside his son. As for Sayre, Charley’s seventeen-year-old twin sister, so tightly was she wedged in among the camping equipment and supplies of that back seat that she could not have moved even if she had not been afraid of awaking Hitty, weightily asleep in her arms.
All day the ‘Shake had been jolting them across Wyoming. Mile after mile of desolation. Great gray stretches of arid plain as far as eye could reach. No hint of people anywhere except an occasional glimpse of a sheepherder’s wagon in the distance. No sign of animal life except a snake, probably a rattler, which Charley had pointed out to them sunning itself beside the road.
All day that hot, dry wind, laden with light desert dust, had swept into their faces, parching their skin and torturing their eyes, while overhead a fierce sun had glared down on them out of a sky too brilliantly blue.
Now in the late afternoon it was cooler. Because of the altitude, Dad said. They were coming into inhabited land, too, still flat and treeless, but spotted with large, green-cropped fields, cut with canals and ditches through which slow water flowed. Dad roused occasionally to point out some especially luxuriant stretch. “That,” he would say in a triumphant tone, “is what this land will do when Uncle Sam brings water to it. Builds a big dam—maybe miles away—and a whole irrigation system.
Most of the buildings scattered among these fields were little more than low, flat-roofed shacks, relentlessly exposed to that hot sun and dry, beating wind; yet at the same time lost, too, in the wide monotony of the landscape. Only occasionally did a real house appear with gabled roof, and porches, and sheltering trees. Some of them, Sayre reflected, looked homey, and she wondered which kind Sam Parsons’ house would prove to be when they got there. It was to be their home, their new home, here in the West, and—Sayre’s hope was almost a prayer—their real, permanent home, at last. Her thoughts were busy with speculation as to the future that lay only a few miles ahead of them now. It held uncertainty, and risk, and plenty of hard work for all of them, she realized; discomfort, too, if the Parsons house were just one of these small, tarpapered shacks. Well, whatever the house, the fields themselves were beautiful. Great shimmering masses of tall green, tinged all over their tops with varying shades of purple from delicate, spray-like blooms. This must be alfalfa; Sam Parsons had told them that this was alfalfa country.
Suddenly they were running into a town. “Upham,” Dad chirped. “Biggest town on the whole Pawaukee Irrigation Project. Nearly a thousand people.
Sayre scanned the place from over Hitty’s tousled head. None of the mellow loveliness of those faraway, tree-shaded villages that she remembered as a child. A charm of its own though. Small, but very trim and confident under that lowering sun. Something almost blatant in the newness of its red brick business blocks and the wide bareness of its one main business street, lined with upstart sticks which were as yet scarcely even promises of trees. Sayre did not know these yet for cottonwoods.
Charley brought the ‘Shake to a stop in front of a store before which stretched a wide platform of wooden planks. A tall, angular man was standing there talking assertively to a boy of about Charley’s age. The boy was as tall as the man, but darker and much more heavily built.
Dad leaned out of the ‘Shake’s open side. “I’m looking for a tract of land,” he said to the pair. “An unproved-up homestead claim known as Parsons’ Eighty. It’s seven or eight miles beyond this town, I believe. Do you know the place? Can you tell us, please, which turn to take?”
The man stepped toward them with genial, self-important bearing. “Gladly.” He gave them directions with a courtesy almost exaggerated. “Strangers?” he finished.
“A friend of Sam Parsons. Came out here from Chicago to take over this abandoned homestead claim of his. Name’s Morgan, sir, Charles Morgan.”
“I am Franklin Hoskins. We’ll meet again.”
“That fellow sure thinks he’s somebody,” Charley commented as the ‘Shake sputtered on.
Dad was excited. “Hoskins,” he repeated. “That’s the man Sam Parsons said was the community’s most prominent citizen, the best and most generous friend the farmers on this part of the Pawaukee Irrigation Project have. Wasn’t he pleasant?”
Sayre did not answer. She had noticed the way the man’s glance had flitted over Dad’s small person with a quick interest that had had something “funny” in it. “Almost as if he owned him,” she thought, resentfully.
“It was the young fellow took my eye,” Charley was remarking. “Sure built like a football player. Bet he’s a good one.”
“Looked too sulky to me,” was Sayre’s indifferent response.
The country through which they were now traveling was less attractive than that on the other side of the town, sprinkled less often with settlers’ shacks and showing fewer cultivated fields. Dad and Charley were too absorbed studying Sam Parsons’ directions to notice much, and soon they were turning in at a gateway through a wire fence. The ‘Shake bumped and leaped over deep ruts in a sage-mottled strip of hard, gray soil, evidently a pretense at a driveway; and lurched at last to a stop behind a queer-looking black building, low, long and narrow.
So this was the house. Yes, it was only a shack, built without foundation on the ground, and shaped like an enlarged and elongated freight car. Two doors exactly opposite each other marked the centers of both broad sides. Before each door ran a low step. Windows, fairly large but placed peculiarly high toward the roof, punctured all four black walls symmetrically. The roof, too, was shaped like that of a freight car. At Sayre’s first glance this roof was the building’s most conspicuous feature. For as a means of protection against the ripping of the winds, its tarpaper covering was studded thick with huge metal discs, which glistened now under the setting sun like enormous thumb-tacks.
“Here we are!” Dad proclaimed. He hopped from the ‘Shake with that spryness like a bird’s which always marked in him one of his moods of elation. Charley sprung out feet foremost over an unopened door. Hitty was waking up. Sayre sat still for a moment, looking about her.
Weariness dropped from her like a cloak. Her spirit began to glow and soar to new happiness and new hope. Not even the ugly, crude little house could spoil this place, she thought, under a spreading sunset glow that spread its evanescent tints over all this great world of soft silver distances and touched even that encircling, protecting horizon of haze-hung mountains. It was lovely, she told herself as she set about waking Hitty; and wasn’t this shack a lot better than that dark, dingy flat on West Van Buren Street in Chicago which had been the latest of the Morgan family’s many habitations? And when she remembered some of the others, and how many times they had moved—
Dad was lifting Hitty from her lap to the ground, and Sayre followed. The wind had gone down, and the air was clear now and wonderfully exhilarating. The girl drew a deep breath. It tingled through her
like wine, with a peculiar tang in it, a spiciness which she just seemed to catch at the very moment it eluded her. Must be the sage.
Even Hitty felt it. Her hand fumbled into Sayre’s, the little girl murmuring sleepily, “Oh, doesn’t it breathe nice here?”
Stooping, Sayre swept the frail child to her with an impetuous hug. “Doesn’t it, baby?” she exulted.
The embrace startled Hitty far enough awake to confide in a whisper, “What makes it so awful still? I can ’most hear my thinks tick.” The child slipped away to break into a sharp, glad cry, “Oh, Sayre, see what a nice far look there is!”
Sayre did see. Then for a moment Charley almost spoiled things. He had been lifting baggage out of the ‘Shake, but stopped now to nod at his twin with a wave toward the new shelter. “Guess we can pack the Morgans into the Crate!”
Sayre bristled. Just like Charley, dubbing the place right off with a joke. The house did look like a huge crate—she had to acknowledge that—the way those laths were crisscrossed over the outside to hold the tarpaper on. Laths evidently did on the outside walls the work the discs did on the roof. But what of it? Did he expect to be given a palace? She spun around toward her brother. “Who cares what it looks like? A crate or anything else? If it’s a home crate?”
Snapping at Charley wasn’t the right way to begin, she reflected, though unrepentantly. To see him show signs of that awful changeableness of his right off, just because the place looked dreary! It wasn’t very attractive on the outside, she admitted to herself. The ground around the house was pretty bare; it had queer white patches on it as if it had been sprinkled thick with coarse salt. Alkali, Sayre had already learned. But well behind and to one side of the house reached out great massed stretches of those glorious, green, purple-flowered fields.
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 101
