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"And the little girl?" asked Bowdoin. "We can hardly carry her upon the books." "For the benefit of whom it may concern," said the clerk absently. Bowdoin laughed again. McMurtagh looked at her and gasped, but this time silently.
McMurtagh was not five years older than himself, he may have been forty at this period; but his little rosy face was prematurely wrinkled, and his gait was always so odd, and he had no young friends about town, nor seemed ever to have had any youth. Meantime Miss Mercy went on with her piano. She was graduated from the high school the next year, and then had nothing else to do.
Captain How said something to him as the boat stopped, and he looked up and caught Mr. James's eye; and Bowdoin had time to remark that it was blue and very keen to look upon. Young Bowdoin and McMurtagh were standing on the very verge of the wharf, and the crowd around had made a little space for them, as the owners of the ship; Mr.
The second pirate had sought to hand her, too, to Bowdoin, but some caprice had made the little maiden shy, and she had run and buried her face in the arms of the young-old clerk. While young Bowdoin's father, with the file of soldiers, marched up State Street to a magistrate's office, Mr. James and clerk McMurtagh retired with their spoils to the counting-room.
And so McMurtagh, who had taken little Mercedes Silva home that day, continued to make a home for her there, his old mother and his father aiding and abetting him in the task; and he carried her young life, in addition to his other burdens, "for the benefit of whom it may concern." "Whom it may concern" is too old a story, in such cases, ever to be thought of by the actors in them.
Bowdoin cried out to Stanchion, the cashier, "I want to borrow McMurtagh for the day, on business of my own." "Certainly, sir," said Mr. Stanchion. Jamie went. There is no happiness so great as happiness to come, for then it has not begun to go. If the streets of the celestial city are as bright to Jamie as those of Boston were that day, he should have hope of heaven.
After dinner, the three gentlemen sat discussing old madeira, and old and new methods of banking, and the difference between Boston and New York, which was already beginning to assume a metropolitan preëminence. "By the way, speaking of old-fashioned ways," said the New Yorker suddenly, "that's a queer old clerk of yours, Mr. McMurtagh, I mean."
"I was at sea in my father's ship," said Mercedes proudly. "Ah, I didn't know Jamie McMurtagh owned a ship," said Miss Dolly. Jamie leaned closer to the window. "Jamie McMurtagh is not my father," said Mercedes. She said it almost scornfully, and McMurtagh slunk back into the cabin. Perhaps it was the first time he had ever cried himself.... He felt so sorry that he had not thought of gloves!
It had always been the custom of the McMurtagh family to pass the summers, like the winters, in the little house on Salem Street; but this year Jamie rented a cottage at Nantasket. He told the Bowdoins nothing of this move until they asked him about it, observing that he regularly took the boat. To Jamie it was the next thing to Nahant, which was of course out of the question.
He would go to King's Chapel Sundays; and he looked up John Hughson again, and would sit with him, wondering. John had married a stout wife, and had sturdy children. Hughson petted the old man, and gave him pipes of tobacco; for McMurtagh was too poor to buy tobacco, those days. The children on Salem Street feared him, as a miser; which was hard, for Jamie was very fond of little children.
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