PART THREE
Chapter One
The shadows of westward-rolling cloud obscured the calm of Polaris and the other stars, and the May moon. Reuben Cory had looked out not long ago from John Kenny's window, noticing a ground-mist over the lawn, ghosts of it rising toward his eyes; a feeble thing like the random smoke of a fire dying out, but later it might increase, filling all the still air above the village, above the city in the north, above the harbor and that house in Dorchester where Charity at this moment might be watching the sea through her own window of loneliness. John Kenny's voice had drawn Reuben back to the island of lamplight by the bed, and Reuben had resumed his watch there, trying to interpret the sound. It was vast labor for John Kenny to speak at all; the effort flushed his sunken cheeks, twisted his lips loosely downward to the side; after such toil it was necessary to wipe his mouth, and Mr. Welland had recommended cooling his face with a damp cloth. Reuben had done this, skilled with months of practise; now he sought to analyze in memory the blurred fragment of speech. It had carried the inflection of a question. The word, most probably, was "long." Certainly within the stricken flesh a mind and a self were poignantly awake, needing an answer. The brown eyes retained much alertness. Sometimes, when the old man was asleep—as he was the greater part of the time—one could imagine that he would wake naturally, frown, say something half-kind and half-sharp, clearly, looking down the nose.
Trusting to insight—since thought must move in the atmosphere of doubt, and is often free to claim that this guess is truly a little better than that one—Reuben spoke slowly and plainly: "It is a year, Uncle John, since Ben went away." A thought of the ground-mist touched Reuben again as he settled in his chair and reached for the book on the bedside table. Doubtless it would increase; men would grope in it cursing; the tower of South Church would dissolve away, shadowing forth some remote day of demolition, and in the harbor no ships would move.
Uncle John could still make some motions of his head within a narrow range, enough to indicate yes or no, agreement or denial, satisfaction or protest. Reuben saw it stir, the waxen chin lowering a fraction of an inch, the gray owl tufts rising the same tiny distance from the dent in the pillow—a nod. The guess must have been fair. Reuben saw the flush fading, the deep wrinkles around the eyes relaxing after travail. Uncle John could also move his right leg and arm, and until about a month ago had used the right hand to feed himself. Kate fed him now, or Reuben: the paralysis of his stroke had not advanced, but that right arm seemed too weary, too skeletal, and the old man had finally appeared willing to be delivered from that exertion.
"Uncle John, I've thought all winter long that Ben might come back this spring. It is May. The wild flags are out in the marshes. I know we cannot put any trust in a mere hope, but I keep the thought in my mind. I feel certain he is alive, and will come home when he can."
The eyes watched, with intelligence; as Reuben was aware, nothing in response to what he had said was worth the effort of speech; acceptance of the message was enough. Reuben held a volume of Montaigne near Uncle John's right hand, so that if it wished the hand could rise and turn the pages, indicating a part to be read. When sleep would not arrive, Uncle John seemed to enjoy such reading, and Montaigne was his usual choice. At times Erasmus, Locke, Sir Thomas Browne, Virgil—more often Montaigne. The blurred eyes lowered, the hand groped among the pages for a while, and tapped the beginning of the essay "Use Makes Perfect," as Reuben had almost known it would, and fell away.
Familiar with the text, Reuben could read without much thought for anything but slowness and clarity in his voice, remembering to keep his face turned toward the old man. Reuben and Mr. Welland were convinced that since the stroke of last July, Mr. Kenny's deafness had thickened; he could hear plain speech and hear it well, but it was apparent how closely his eyes followed the motion of a speaker's lips.
"'... A man may by custom fortify himself against pain, shame, necessity and such like accidents, but, as to death, we can experiment it but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it.'" Natural enough, Reuben thought, and perhaps good, that Uncle John should so often wish to hear this essay, in which Montaigne would have it that one must train for death as for a voluntary act. Not unnatural anyway, for one whose task of dying had begun months ago and might continue yet a long time. "'... with how great facility do we pass from waking to sleeping, and with how little concern do we lose the knowledge of light and of ourselves....'"
Kate would have been distressed by it. She clung, at least outwardly, to the thought that John Kenny would recover. Reuben supposed that when she was alone with herself, not sustained by those who loved her enough to reinforce the fantasy, she knew better.
"'Of this I have daily experience: if I am under the shelter of a warm room, in a stormy and tempestuous night, I wonder how people can live abroad, and am afflicted for those who are out in the fields: if I am there myself, I do not wish to be anywhere else....'"
The eyes watched. It was possible, Reuben felt, that the hidden self was listening to his voice as much as to the voice of Montaigne: this would remain in the region of doubt, a thing not to be known. He read on without weariness to the end: "'Whosoever shall so know himself, let him boldly speak it out.'" But Reuben thought: Who under the North Star hath ever known himself to the depth? May one not most nearly approach it by gaining a glimpse of the self in the thought of one other?—but this will happen only in the rarest moments of the journey.
John Kenny could sometimes speak with considerable clearness—clearness at any rate to one who had spent much time in learning to translate the thwarted sounds. He did so now. Kate might have been confused; Reuben found no difficulty in receiving the message: "If you will, Reuben—at the proper time—let it be known—with what peace—an infidel can die."
Reuben knew that the light convulsion of the distracted lips thereafter was a smile, in itself a major achievement. He smiled in response and set Montaigne aside. "I'll read from Religio Medici—shall I, sir?" The eyes pondered; the right hand moved gently back and forth, which meant: "Yes, read at random or as you wish."
Reuben read, seeking out words he desired because he had known them at other hours and in another voice, but not unmindful of his listener's preoccupations so far as a boy of sixteen could hope to guess at them: "'Further, no man can judge another, because no man knows himself: for we censure others but as they disagree from that humor which we fancy laudable in ourselves, and commend others but for that wherein they seem to quadrate and consent with us....
"'... It is an act within the power of charity, to translate a passion out of one breast into another, and to divide a sorrow almost out of it self; for an affliction, like a dimension, may be so divided as, if not indivisible, at least to become insensible. Now with my friend I desire not to share or participate, but to engross, his sorrows; that, by making them mine own, I may more easily discuss them; for in mine own reason, and within myself, I can command that which I cannot intreat without myself, and within the circle of another....
"'... I love my friend before myself, and yet methinks I do not love him enough: some few months hence my multiplied affection will make me believe I have not loved him at all....'
"Elsewhere in the essay," said Reuben, and closed the book, "I think Sir Thomas was somewhat entranced by his own music at the cost of reason." The eyes watched, probably with kindness; Reuben searched for the motion of another smile and decided, but doubtfully, that he had seen it. The eyes grew less alert; soon the old man might fall asleep. "I once asked Mr. Welland how good a doctor Sir Thomas Browne is thought to have been. He didn't know. But he hath told me, sir, how in the time since Sir Thomas wrote, less than a hundred years, the art is much advanced. I can't but think it must go further in another hundred, as more of the unknown yields to inquiry." The eyes were patient, interested, kind; and drowsier. At length they closed, Mr. Kenny's face settling into the tranquil imitation of death, his breathing shallow, not uncomfortable. Reuben returned to the window. The mist had grown to a veil over all things.
Light from this window penetrated the whiteness as far as a budded maple on the lawn. Whorls of thicker vapor passed through the light, small disturbances in the ocean of mist that would now be over all the village, perhaps over all the coast as far as the Cape and out beyond. As in the larger ocean, life groped about on the bottom in a purposeful blindness.
On a May night a year ago, when Reuben and Gideon Hibbs and Mr. Kenny had searched the water front, such a mist had hung low on the sullen water of the harbor. That mist too had grown after a while, a white tide rising over the warehouses and idle docks, blotting vision, smothering and diffusing the nervous beams of lanterns and the sounds of frightened voices wiry in the throat. Every plank bore a slime of dampness; the cordage of sleeping ships was dripping with a whisper of slow tears. Night transformed the water front to a labyrinth dreary, foul and perilous. Seldom any freshly illuminated face looked back at you bravely there at night, unless it might be that of a drunken man too sodden to be afraid. The smooth fogbound water of the bay had possessed no voice that night except at the piling of the wharfs where, fumbling and muttering secretly, it encountered the transitory obstruction of the works of man.
Where are you? Where are you?...
Constable Derry had lent the searchers a sturdy man from the Select Watch. It was that man who discovered the floating corpse, its arm caught in a tangle of rope that had most unreasonably been knocked or thrown off a dock not far from Mr. Kenny's, and he identified the broken old man as a watchman hired by that wharf's owner Mr. Harkness. Waked and summoned in the saddest hours of the night, little Mr. Harkness danced up and down on the dock in rage. "She was here!" he fumed. "I paid forty-six pounds for her, and that only last week." "This man, sir——" "Yes yes, my watchman, poor devil. I tell you she was here! Went aboard of her myself." Tactfully Mr. Derry's man extracted the information that Mr. Harkness was referring to a sloop, a swift rangy craft of twenty tons—gone, but by Mr. Harkness not forgotten.
Reuben had taken no part in this inquisition. Until that hour it had been possible to imagine that Ben had ridden away somewhere—say into the countryside, to think, cool off his disappointment; he could even be waiting for them at Roxbury. Hibbs and Uncle John seemed still able to cling to something like that, to suppose that the poor dripping ruin on the dock, its head crushed in the back, had nothing to do with Ben and that devil Shawn. Reuben could do so no longer. Where are you? The question could be directed nowhere except into the rolling fog and the dark.
The following day, after dragging out the remainder of a crazed sleepless night, Reuben felt it merely as the confirmation of something known, when he learned that a stevedore had brought Mr. Derry the decisive scrap of truth. This man had been near Harkness' wharf a little after sunset when a well-dressed youth and an older man in a green coat had come by, the boy leading a brown mare. The man was talking a spate, and cheerfully, about some good luck. "No great thing, a fishing venture, but I'm content, I say it's the smile of fortune on me, now that's no lie, so come aboard a few minutes anyway and drink to it." He chattered much more the roustabout could not remember, and the boy said very little, but presently offered him a shilling to mind the horse, saying he would be gone not more than half an hour. Then the two had gone out on Harkness' wharf or maybe the one beyond it. The stevedore had been puzzled by that boy, who seemed downcast and confused; might have been weeping not long before; drunk, the stevedore thought at first, but he smelled no liquor when the shilling changed hands. It had grown quite dark by then, the lamps of Ship Street lighted but not sufficient to make the strangers' faces plain; the stevedore would know the man in the green coat again, he thought, but maybe not the boy—handsome though, his lip a bit in need of a shave, and very young. "When they was going the man in the green coat winked at me, Constable—you know, meaning-like, like as if he meant to say it was a boy's troubles and we was all young once and took things hard...." More than the half-hour had passed; the stevedore found a hitching post for the mare and went in search, finding nothing at Harkness' wharf except a lumber-barge, although he thought he remembered noticing a small sloop moored there during the day. He took the mare to a public stable and returned to search further, but learned nothing and gave it up in disgust until the morning brought him the news of the watchman's murder.
That, for nearly three months, had been the sum of knowledge....
Soft-voiced in the room behind him, not moving now with the bounce and ease of a year ago, Kate Dobson was saying: "Do you go and sleep now, Master Reuben. I'll bide with him the rest of the night."
"Did you sleep enough yourself?"
"Well enough. Ah, the doctor!" she said, and smiled at his finger tips pressed on her fat wrist. The message from her elderly heart was slow and sound. Once or twice Reuben had detected a fluttering in it; tonight he found nothing out of the way except that variability of pace which Mr. Welland described as not unnatural. Kate accepted this sort of thing as a game to be played with the tenderness of maternal indulgence. Yet again it might be that when she was alone with herself, thinking perhaps of Reuben Cory in the here-and-now and not so much of the twelve-year-old boy who once collapsed in her arms at the end of a long journey, she knew better.
Reuben's hand sought the sampler that hung by the door in line with Mr. Kenny's vision, touching the truth of the dark leaves, the fine-stitched perfection of the slanting letters: Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori. Kate had not been able to finish it until after the old man was struck down. Mr. Kenny could see it there, had held it, groped at it with the right hand, smiled in his distorted fashion, mumbling blurred sounds of pleasure and thanks. It seemed to Reuben that for this labor of years she ought to have received his elaborate courtly declamation mingled with airy nonsense and a pat on the rump; she never would. She was not wholly satisfied with the sampler even now: she said some of the ivy leaves were too big in contrast to the letters. Omnia vincit amor—but love is a wider region than was spoken of in the Eclogues. Reuben wandered downstairs with no desire to sleep, and closed the front door behind him and walked out alone into the mist....
Remembering Deerfield. Mist lay there sometimes in the early mornings of the end of winter or the beginning of spring, over the low ground by the river, or within the palisade, until a strengthening sun dissolved it away from the brave small houses, the training field, the little dooryard gardens; and Mother liked gray mornings, but Jesse Plum said they worsened the Pain in his Back, and Father looked on them mildly as no worse, no better than others-because, said Joseph Cory, every day was a new-minted shilling to be spent as reasonably as one might....
Remembering—one sometimes winces at the scar of a minor wound—a house where the judgments of the Lord were true and righteous altogether.
Remembering a narrow gray face advancing in the snow:—If I had died then, who would walk in this fog in this year's May? Mm-yas—a might-have-been universe for each event that might have been. Should I reach out to that maple, the cosmos will wag one way; another if I do not. Notice, gentlemen, the astonishing power of Reuben Cory! Philosophy, I vow Mr. Hibbs would enjoy it in all solemnity, bless the man, but likely it'll slip my mind before I see him again. A boy ties a string to a pulled milk-tooth and keeps it a while in his pocket, then somehow loses it....
Remembering a midsummer evening—July, the windless heat a burden of fever; lightning, too distant to be heard, startling the black sky over Cambridge or some farther place in the northwest—and the coming of a messenger on a lathered horse to Mr. Kenny's house. Good news comes often quietly, arriving like dawn; bad news like a rabid beast leaping for the throat. That horseman was merely gentle Sam Tench, the clerk who had labored so long and dustily in Mr. Kenny's countinghouse that he seemed like an outgrowth of his three-legged stool, but scrambling down from a sweaty horse and panting his news on the doorstep, he was Fate, if you like, since the word he bore came direct from Her Majesty's frigate Dread, newly arrived at Boston for provisions and sundry errands of state and war.
On a morning in early July, in open waters west of the Bermudas, the Dread had picked up one Pieter Van Anda, single survivor of the sloop Schouven out of Amsterdam, who had clung all night to the smashed fragment of a mast. The Schouven had been attacked by a fast ketch flying no flag, boarded, plundered, her captain and most of her crew butchered in a rapid engagement where no quarter was given—but later, before the sloop was set afire, the mad captain of the ketch had harangued, even pleaded with the three who still lived, to throw in their lot with him, for he was bound to the other side of the world as soon as he could acquire two or three other vessels as good as his own, and was in need of good men. The sloop was worthless except for her provisions and so must be burned, but would they not go with him? One consented; the other and Van Anda, then expecting nothing worse than being set adrift, would not; they were thrown into the sea. This, the tall, sweet-voiced, black-haired captain told them—they being crushed against the rail of the sloop by four men who seemed not mad but merely rabble of the baser sort, pirates—this was an evil thing he did and he knew it, but the end he served was beyond their understanding, and could he allow them to bear witness to his acts before the time was ripe? Perhaps the sea would be kind, at any rate he must do as his inner voice commanded and could do no other. As he told them this, he rubbed a copper coin, and his blue eyes spread into black, burning into them. "And since I cannot be trusting you now, Mother of God, the time's past for any change of heart, and so God keep you, gentlemen"—and the sea (said Van Anda) in its most furious mood was surely kinder than such a man.
The ketch carried two small guns—six-pounder falconets, Van Anda thought—handled with great skill or great luck, for the first shot, delivered with no warning as the ketch glided to windward of her, sliced off the Schouven's mast and left her in a welter of confusion while the ketch's boat shot across the gap and the pirates boarded her like starved rats. The Schouven carried only seven hands; it was soon over. An infernal vessel, Van Anda said—the airs had been light that evening, the Schouven making not much more than steerage way, yet the ketch ran down on her out of the eye of the late sun as if the Devil himself had lent her a capful of wind. Clinging to that fragment of the mast, Van Anda had seen her for a while, speeding southward, in the light of sunset and of the burning sloop. A beautiful, wild, unnatural thing, her bowsprit low-slung, her figurehead a white maiden, her name Diana.
The Dread's lookout had seen the fire, too, from several leagues' distance, and the frigate hurried off her course to inquire about it. The blazing sloop filled and sank during the night; it was dawn, the breeze still fitful and contrary, when Van Anda was found. His story told, the frigate beat to southward a while in the wrath of vengeance. In the evening a fore-and-aft mizzen was sighted, far south, and found again in the morning. At that sunrise the Diana—if it was she—cracked on all sail and by evening was hull down, though the Dread was bearing all canvas, a mastiff groaning in pursuit of a greyhound. The Dread found empty sea next morning and was obliged to put about for Boston.
John Kenny asked: "Did this Dutchman speak of others?"
"He spoke of a big red-haired man jabbering to himself in French, and a fat, short man they called Tom, and—and a gray-haired man with a broken nose and a great purple patch covering all the left side of his face. Sir, I asked myself, could that be anyone but Matthew Ledyard that was carpenter of the Artemis? No one of theSchouvenwent aboard the ketch except that one man who agreed to join them. Some must have remained aboard the—Diana. My God, sir, I had thought Ledyard loyal as any man could be——"
"The devil with Ledyard. He described no others?"
"No others."
"Did he say if any of them was young?"
"Sir, sir, I asked him that, and he said—he said no." Then neither Sam Tench nor Reuben was quick enough to catch the old man, who fell like a broken spar and struck his head against the doorframe, and for more than a month thereafter could not speak at all.
Reuben walked in the mist, remembering. No stars; the May moon, not visible, lent a faint pallor to the enfolding vapor, or he imagined it, so that he walked in a darkness not complete. He could have followed this path through the back fields, he supposed, if he were wholly blind. He moved slowly, pausing many times, though not in need to assure himself of direction, remembering.
The war went on of course, in its far-off way; it always had. It seems we snatched ourselves a helping of glory at some place called Ramillies; but that was very long ago, two years ago, 1706. Throughout the fighting weather of last year, one heard, my lord Marlborough had put in the time in the Low Countries doing nothing in particular....
A certain order had been established at the house in Roxbury by the end of the summer months of confusion. Four friends—Reuben was well aware of it—had built a sort of wall of defense around a youth who was legally not yet a man and an old man who could scarcely move or speak: Amadeus Welland, William Heath the captain of the sloop Hebe, Sam Tench, and Gideon Hibbs. Reuben was formally apprenticed to the doctor; Harvard, by Reuben's wish, vetoed. On a morning when, according to his own tortured speech, his mind was very clear, John Kenny wrote out in a wild but readable scrawl his desire that Welland, Heath, Tench and Hibbs be appointed trustees for his affairs while he remained disabled; the court allowed it, giving Tench a limited power of attorney. The warehouse and wharf were mortgaged, and rented to Mr. Riggs of Salem, the most merciful of Kenny's creditors.
Reuben discovered with no surprise that it was quite simple to get along without five pairs of shoes; also to tend the garden and scythe the lawn at odd moments without the aid of Rob Grimes. Hibbs too had been obliged to find employment with another family at Roxbury whose son and heir required cramming, but he continued to live at Kenny's house, insisting on paying for his room and board, nagging Reuben to continue his Greek—was not Hippocrates a Greek?—and trying to drive a little more general learning into the boy, but underhandedly as it were, under the pretense that he was merely keeping up with his own studies at the borders of philosophy. The sloop Hebe, unmortgaged, ran her small profitable errands between Boston and Newport like a dog who will go on herding sheep or guarding the house into the shadows of old age, not even asking for a pat on the head. Even Rob Grimes strolled over occasionally, pecking peevishly at odd jobs and refusing pay for it; he ceased perhaps only because Kate was singularly short and cold with him.
It seemed to Reuben that by spending a lifetime in contemplation of human love and loyalty, you might learn one or two things about people, but not their limits. One could simply note: under certain conditions, certain members of the human race—most, maybe—are capable of supreme goodness. The Preacher Ecclesiastes was old, weary, holding some unreal scale of value; disappointed, like enough, because these bewildered passion-ridden beings fell so far short of his private image of the godlike. You could not watch Amadeus Welland making grave monkey faces under his wig for the hilarious comfort of a sick child, and say that all is vanity. That was no fair example, because Amadeus was not as other men; so consider—well, Kate Dobson, who called herself common and stupid, and would be spending uncalculated kindness to the day she died.
The Preacher's namesake was loyal too. Through all vicissitudes he remained a beat-up yellow tomcat, charging not a farthing for the privilege of scratching him under his evil chin....
The same human race included that devil Shawn, the bronze butchers who fell upon Deerfield, a smiling murderer with one eye. Of course.
Sometimes also Reuben speculated: If they—Heath, or Hibbs, or Tench, or even dear Kate—if ever they knew that I am a monster, a lusus naturae, a two-headed calf, a moral leper so outlandish and beyond hope of forgiveness that, were my nature known, even the children in the street would be a bit afraid to throw dead cats and dung—what then? Would there then be any part of this earth where Amadeus and I might go, and not be hated, driven, feared, utterly condemned?... The thought came only in the darkest hours; seldom if ever when he was with Mr. Welland, the world excluded, the ugly pockmarked face an unfathomable essay in the beautiful, the moment blazing or peaceful as sun on summer grass. Here in the mist, the fear touched him as an almost trivial thing, an arrow missing the mark, a fire burning somewhere else, a lesson glimpsed further on in the book. Blessed be the mask—and yet I hate it, will ever hate it, wearing it only because I wish to live, remembering it was not worn in the time that some have named the Golden Age.
If I am a monster—who seem to myself a young man not incapable of the earthly virtues, who love the sun and rain as well as any man and would never willingly do a dishonest thing or hurt anyone, who need and rejoice like any man in all the harmless glory of the senses—then who made me a monster? If I am evil, who set the standard whereby men and women are to be judged? Let Mr. Cotton Mather tell me God did so and will punish the transgressor: I am not interested, nor is Amadeus, who doth believe in God after his own fashion.
Reuben knew he was near the beech tree. He put out his hand to find the amiable tower of it and leaned against it in the mist, remembering. I stood here last year, having made certain discoveries. A good day—April, I think. Ben rode home smiling. A long time ago.
It was never possible to hold away for any long stretch of minutes the knowledge that Ben was gone. One schooled the mind to repeat that lesson, though it might whimper and snarl miserably in repeating it: He is probably lost. Then, the lesson driven home once more, he turned usually to Vesalius, or Micrographia, or Neurologia Universalis (Ben's gift!), or the collected works of Ambroise Paré, or the Severall Surgical Treatises of Richard Wiseman, because Mr. Welland said it was time for him to acquire a small preliminary hint of the enigmas of knife and suture.
"But why do so many die after trifling minor surgery? Don't we all suffer small cuts and bruises repeatedly and take no harm by it?"
"We don't know. Doctors despise surgery; send 'em to the filthy barber surgeons, and they die. I no longer send anyone to the barbers, Reuben. If surgery can't be avoided I stumble through it myself, trying to follow the methods you'll read in that book of Paré's, with these grim little tools—that's splendid steel, by the way, I care for 'em like an old housewife—and I've lost very few under the knife, but I can't tell you why. Why, maybe they're so bemused by the wig that they stay alive so to have another look at it...."
At other times it was scarcely possible to drive the lesson home at all. Then in partial retreat from the unbearable he permitted the dream of Ben's return—telling over this complex year as it might be told to him, polishing those whimsical or naughty inventions that used to be rewarded by the startled stare of his gray eyes and his rocketing laughter. Reuben knew such fantasy to be a drug, but yielded in times of need. "You see, Ben, not to put too sharp a point on it when likely it was dull——" No no! Not that way, seeing he may have truly loved her. "You see, Ben, doubtless because their fortunes went down with ours, Captain Jenks being lost or presumed lost—why, she married. Some ancient December blossom"—revise!—"some man named Hoskison, a merchant of Salem where she now liveth, but her mother and Charity dwell with the mother's brother at Dorchester, the said Charity being a most sweet maid, little Benjamin, and greatly changed, who hath not forgotten thee."
And so she is, he thought, strolling sure-footed away from the beech in the deep quiet of the mist—so she is; and he wondered in passing whether any self ever lived that was not divided by contrary hungers. Occasionally with Charity—when she sat close by him, or pushed at his chest with friendly impatience, or rubbed her cheek on his shoulder in her impulsive way that was half child, half woman—occasionally Reuben could be reminded of those needs the world allows. Never enough, he thought; never complete; never the sure and hearty answer that Ben, for example, would have known.
And never, in fact, quite free from a sense of the pressure of the world, of the command to conform and be like all others; and since to yield to that nagging, to conform and be like others at whatever sacrifice, is to lose oneself in the meanest of all vanities begotten of fear, it is not acceptable to the lonely.
Charity came often to Roxbury, lending Kate a hand in the kitchen as well as the sickroom. She did so even more often after the move to Dorchester, for her uncle allowed her to ride about a good deal—much more, some said, than was at all fitting, safe or decent for a young girl. She was calmer at fourteen, not so much given to fits of temper, at least not at Roxbury. Reuben seldom saw her in her mother's company, since Madam Jenks at Dorchester had submerged in a stately retirement, letting it be known that she was not long for this world, the which was merely a place of trial for the life to come, and blessed reunion with One Who Was Gone and, though the best of men, had never quite understood the palpitations of her heart, and was even given at times to profane thoughts and actions, for the which he doubtless repented in the end, and was taken to the Lord, a good provider with all his faults, and sometimes fluttered in her chest so that she could scarcely breathe at all, but were in no sense connected with her overweight, which was slight and for that matter incomprehensible since she ate like a very sparrow, and suffered also from insomnia and risings from the stomach.
Some day, Reuben thought—oh, some day perhaps that other world ought to be explored, if only for the sake of the slow, strange enterprise of trying to learn a little about the human race. Amadeus would probably say that it ought.
Never with Charity of course. Reuben was aware that Charity, very much a woman this last year, did not regard him as a potentially aggressive male, but as a friend who could be trusted to listen with kindness, share a moment of mirth, speak with intelligence about the fantastic pictures she still liked to draw, and even take her part against those restrictions of a woman's world that chafed her to rage. Besides, there was that day in November, soon after the move to Dorchester, when Charity Jenks threw her snarled-up sewing all the way across Kenny's library and flung herself crying into Reuben's arms, to speak of a sorrow until then unknown to him. A servant of theirs, a French-born slave Clarissa, had been sold to New York when the household was broken up, seeing there was no place for her at Dorchester—and that girl, said Charity, had been her real mother for years and years, and was the only friend she would ever have. "You have me," said Reuben, and was startled to watch her considering that, sniffling, accepting it and seeming remarkably comforted. A few minutes later she was speaking, for the first time freely and shamelessly—about Ben. And then of the house at Dorchester, which was near the shore. She had found a place where tumbled rocks made three walls excluding the land, the fourth side open to the sea—you could look out for miles on a clear day, and could hardly fail to see any of the ships that came into Boston out of the south; she'd draw him a picture. She did so; and then this spring, about a month ago, Reuben had seen that lookout for himself, making a harmless conspiracy of the secret approach to it, since otherwise tongues would have wagged and clattered. It had seemed to him, in the fair sun of that spring afternoon, beyond reach of a thunderous high tide but not beyond the reach of the spray, that Charity was almost happy, though not in the same way or to the same degree that he had been happy himself for some moments, even hours, in the past year....
Well, it would be no simple or pleasant thing, to tell Ben about Faith's marriage. Do it quickly, lightly, ready to go along with whatever mood took Ben at the news. Then later, maybe, the wedding could be described in—in harrumphitatis Reubencoribus. "I did endeavor, little Benjamin, to place my spirit in such posture as to snap up any unconsidered morsels of hymeneal sanctity that might be flipped my way when the good and just Eliphalet Hoskison re-entered that holy state in manly pride and a gingery-yallery weskit"—Revise! Leave out most of Hoskison; to Hell with Eliphalet Hoskison and the ivory buttons on that hemi-spherical weskit!—"but my chaste resolution, sir, was overruled, and barely indeed could I repress the cachinnations of a lewd nature and subsume the concupiscent, when my perspiring attention was led astray by observation of a touching yet not wholly tragical prodigy—prodigal tragedy—of nature. Nay rather, in these latter years I have come to regard it as a pastoral or even, mm-yas, a comical-historical-pastoral interlude, the which I will elucidate if you perpend. The dominie who wedded those twain was not, little Benjamin, a tall man, and on the top he was bald as a baby's bottom—for this I can summon witnesses if need arise. Now as he stood before us in the ultimate or perhaps the penultimate prayer, it was required of him to lower that benevolent denuded skull, and I did behold, advancing unto the pinkish radiance thereof, a small fly. A fly, sir, buffeted by the gathering winds of October and, I think, lonely. He circled the dull glow thrice, I saw it, and thrice flew away, and yet once more returned—drawn, do you see, to the services in spite of original and later sin—and circled a last time resisting the call, unrepentant, naughty in mortal pride and unredeemed, but in the end lit softly upon the holy ground. There did he scrub his forelegs, Benjamin, and listen, taking thereafter a few sprightly steps toward a certain silvery fringe, the which must have indicated to him: 'Thus far and no farther!' Strait is the gate and few that enter, mm-yas. Frustrated and remote indeed from a state of grace, he did flirt his saucy wings, and listen, and scrub his middle legs, and bravely attempt another region of the fringe where he was again baffled and cast down. Fiat justitia, ruat caelum! I watched him returning to the center, broken (as I thought) in spirit, not one of the elect yet loathing his sins and mourning after the pardon of them, but there most delicately—O Ben, Ben, as a fellow sinner I foresaw this and my bowels yearned for him—there most delicately did he lay down a mild brown memento of his presence as a representative of the secular arm. Thereat he shuddered but the act was done, ad majorem lignocapitis humani gloriam. He listened then as it were with an absent mind. He cocked his red head at me as we listened, and I knew then, Benjamin, I knew from the shameless manner of his conversation that mercy and salvation had passed him by. He sampled the pink surface with an heretical tongue and thought little of it. Lost even to the sense of decorum, he r'ared up behind and scrubbed his ultimate legs—furtively, however, you understand, like any other boy in church. And then at last (in fact at very long last) he rose up and buzzed away—relieved but not saved, not saved at all, by the resonance of an Amen."
Later. Mm-yas—much later, if at all....
He walked in the mist, no longer remembering but in the here-and-now, coming at length to the cottage, where he would have tapped on the window, but Amadeus Welland came to him across the lawn out of the mist. "I slept a while but was restless. A turn around the garden—sends me off sometimes. Is it one of his bad nights, Reuben?"
"Nay, not bad, in fact I thought him rather cheerful, as far as one can guess. I read to him, his usual Montaigne, and then a little from the Religio because he seemed to be listening and enjoying it. When Kate relieved me I think he was not far from sleep. Ah, how long, Amadeus?"
"No one could possibly say. I once knew the apoplexy to leave a woman quite motionless and yet alive for six years. Others go in a few moments, a few weeks. And there are remissions, don't forget. It's no mere word of comfort to say that he might recover his speech, even the use of his left side, or partial use. I've seen that happen. Or it might be that when he falls asleep tonight, or some night, he won't wake."
"He said once—if I rightly understood the words, but he was excited, trying too hard to speak, and so they were difficult—he said he could not die until Ben comes home."
"Well.... The mere thought of it might do much to keep him in this world a while. Nobody understands the power of the mind over the flesh—or ought I to say, over the rest of the flesh? Or the power of flesh over the mind. We don't know, we don't know."
"I know it is May, and a misty night."
"Yes, and thou art here."
"And I think I enjoy the misty nights, Amadeus, mm, even the nights when the moon's down as much as the others, and I've wondered why, and I think I know the reason. I enjoy them because I know that, while others are sometimes afraid of the dark, I am not. I can tell you, I can tell you surely, I'm not afraid of anything in nature. Am I speaking nonsense, I wonder? Why, before a lion my flesh would cringe and squeak, I don't doubt it, but somewhere, Amadeus, somewhere in here there's a part of me would hold calm and yield nothing even to the thought of mine own death."
"Have I not alway known that, in thee?"
"You have?"
"Yes."
"So again I learn something.... I'm tired."
"Come in then and rest."
"Yes, that's my wish," said Reuben, but he knelt and took Welland's hands and rested his forehead in the warmth of them.
"Art thou in need of me?"
"You've taught me how tomorrow is another region, so let it be—I'm not part of it tonight. I shall be forever in need of you."
"But there will be years...."
"When you die before me, a thing I do accept because I must, I shall be in need of you still, and will bear the need, and laugh sometimes, and work as you've taught me, and grow old—I swear I'm not afraid. I told my brother once I would sail with him to the Spice Islands. Where do children go, Amadeus?"
"Matthew, you may call me an old fart, you that's no bloody lamb yourself, but I can remember when I was a boy in Gloucester. More and more I remember it, the decent way of living there and the little houses—no easterly ever shook them houses, Matthew, tight to the ground the way they was, they a'n't got the wit to build no such way in Boston. Good, that it was. Eh, I remember that low-tide smell in my mother's kitchen, year 'round, call it a stink if you like, not me, you might say I was born to it. That was a good life—if a man could live Godfearing, not go whoring after strange inventions, listening at the Devil in his left ear."
"Oh, 'vast preaching, Joey, I got no heart for it."
"I a'n't preaching. Oons, I was only crowding thirteen when I first went on my father's sloop. We was to the Banks, good luck all the way, home with cod to the gun'ls. Weight of one more fish scale would've sunk her, my father said, and said it was me brung him the good luck. Me! That's a futtering laugh, that is, all the same he said it. I'll trouble you for that bottle.... Dried-up scarecrow, five good teeth in my head, you got to remember I was young one time.... I can't think how I ever come to listen at that man, and me a watchman, all done with the sea or should've been. Now don't betray me, Matthew Ledyard. Don't never let it out I said such a thing. I got no wish to die at his hand, and far from home."
"You look young now—being it's that dark a man can't see his fingers."
"Now that's not comical, Matthew, that's not kind.... Matthew."
"Yah?"
"Moon'll be up in an hour.... What if we don't go back to the ketch?"
"You fool, he means to clear out of here on the morning ebb."
"I know that."
"Well? Orders was to row back no later 'n moonrise. It was a favor, to leave us stay on the beach this long so to stretch our legs and catch a nap off shipboard—knows we got a bottle too. He wants them water kegs no later 'n moonrise and the fruit too, though I can't say that's good for nothing but to make a great slosh into a man's belly, let 'em say it keeps off scurvy if they like, I won't eat the bloody muck and never had no scurvy.... Joey Mills, don't be more of a damn fool than you can avoid."
"A man could hide on this island. He'd maroon us—willingly."
"And him breaking his heart for a year because he's short-handed?"
"But Matthew, he's jumpy here as the Devil in a gale of wind. He's got no love for the Bahamas. Call him mad, but he means all he says. Could he get him another vessel good as Artemis—ha! Diana—and enough hands for safety, he'd be off and away after his daft dreams to the other side of the world. He'd hunt for us here, yah, but not long."
"Long enough to find your gandy-shank back'ard end sticking out of a bush and sink a hook in it. And we'd live on what? Fruit and clams?"
"I seen goat tracks back there a piece this afternoon."
"Luff, you bloody beggar! You're stern-heavy. Got your old arse spread to a following wind, let 'er freshen and down you go by the head. Tell you what he'd do. He'd say to that fat swine Tom Ball: 'Down!' he'd say, and down would Ball go on all fours and come rooting up the whole island for you like the hog he is."
"You sure to God hate that man, don't you?"
"Two gods he has, his belly and his other purse. Why wouldn't I? Wasn't it Ball mostly that set me against the Old Man? Begun it the day after we come into Boston last year, and now I know that him and Shawn was old friends reunited and Shawn had set him up to it, but then I thought Ball was an honest cod. Sought me out, he did—come to my house, drank up with me, praised the wife's cooking, things like that. And begun dropping little things in my ear to turn me against the Old Man. One evening he told me Cap'n Jenks laughed behind my back about my—my face, my mark. Lies, all lies, but it wasn't till it was far too late that I knowed it must be all lies, and Shawn set him up to it so to win me over to his God-damned venture. I could run a knife in Shawn, but that Tom Ball, he ought to be tried out in one of French Jack's kettles—slow, for the lard.... Suppose we don't go back to the ketch. Suppose we stayed alive, and sometime an honest ship took us off. You think there's any place in the world for us now? Boston? Gloucester? Can we go anywhere and not be hanged? Gi' me that bottle back."
"I was thinking of Virginia."
"Virginia, he says. Her Majesty's law don't reach there, ha? Why, word of Artemis will have gone all up and down the coast for a year."
"Maybe. Suppose.... If we got to go back to the ketch, suppose we might—do something?... Matthew, it come to me, that man Shawn made one big mistake in his bloody life."
"Keeping the Old Man alive?"
"Ay, that, but that a'n't what I meant. Sure, only a madman would have let Jenks live. Tell you something about that too, something I seen the other day when I was into the cabin to carry out slops. But the big mistake Shawn made was when he stole that boy. I'm old. I watch, I see things. They say you can't kill a witch but with a silver bullet. I tell you plain, if anyone ever does for Shawn, it won't be one of us."
"Why, that boy couldn't harm——"
"I know. Gentle as a May morning, and that's all you see. I see more. A'n't Shawn tried to break him for a year now? Make him over into something the Devil himself wouldn't own? Has he done it?—tell me that. A'n't I heard 'em talk together, devil and angel? I say, Matthew, some time, maybe soon, it'll come to life and death between them two, and I'm prophesying: it won't be Ben Cory that dies."
"It could be."
"I want you should take that back. Ben a'n't for dying."
"He a'n't even full-growed.... Ah, Christ, count him in then, and what could he and the two of us do, three against French Jack, and Ball, and Marsh, and Shawn himself?—not to say nothing of poor Dummy, that don't know nothing except the devil is kind to him? I'm a stout man. Break me in half with one hand, Dummy could, grinning like a dog the while he done it."
"Ben is kind to him."
"Ah? You think——?"
"I—don't know. But hark 'ee to this, Matthew: could somebody steal the key to that leg-chain and turn the Old Man loose——"
"God Almighty, who'll bell the cat? Don't the key hang on a cord at the devil's neck, and is it ever off him?... What was it you seen in the cabin, Joey?"
"Ah.... Only him, the Old Man, that ha'n't touched a drop the whole year long, and that devil keeping it ever at his hand—only him, not paying me no heed at all, I could've been a breath of wind in the cabin—only him, Matthew, lowering himself to his heels, slow, and then grabbing the table and pushing himself up, clean off the boards, chain and all, and down again, slow. Against the day, Matthew, against the day. Did he ever go within four foot of the end of that chain? Could three men, four men, ever hold the Old Man, if somebody was to steal the key?"
"He'd be match for three or four, grant you that. When it was over, you he'd only see hanged with time to pray, but he'd snap my neck with his own hands. I fit out them irons myself, Joey. I wouldn't wonder but I'll wear the like in Hell, if there be justice. Forty years honest, that's me. Nay, Lord, ha'n't I been in irons myself, my life long, with this purple face? Forty years honest, and Chips for seventeen of 'em—nine and more on the old Hera, seven on the Iris, eight months on the Artemis. I'm not counting this last year, she's the Diana, he'll break her heart like mine. Forty years honest—oh, I was in anger already at the Old Man for slights and curses a good sailor would've ignored, so I listened to Tom Ball, Shawn's pet hog, and then to Shawn himself, his singing tongue—listened in my anger and said I'd do it, and I did it. You think God forgives such a thing? I killed Hanson, shot him dead, never harmed me. You God might forgive, not me. I wish I was dead."
"Nay, Matthew, you old sod——"
"I mean it. I don't see why God didn't strike me down a year ago. I a'n't sunk yet, but the tiller's gone. Wa'n't Shawn broke it, it was me. I should've thought—why, should've hove to, but Christ, I let her broach, and the sea come over me, the tiller's gone, it's clean broke off. Anything in that bottle?... Sometimes it's on me to march into that cabin, say: 'Here, sir—that neck, you been wanting it.' He'd take it. With him loose, we might win back the ketch, grant you that. Then you for Copp's Hill and my neck cracked a mite sooner. Don't forget it."
"All the same, Matthew, it won't be the Old Man that does for Shawn. Nay, it won't be the Old Man."
Chapter Two
Driven by a southwest wind of the upper air that stirred as yet no breath here at the island, a cloud moved toward Polaris, and would conceal the star a while, and pass on. Ben heard no voice except of the sea, and that unconcerned with him, a hiss and groan of breakers on the beach, and somewhere, beyond the southern arm of the cove, a larger mourning as incoming waves lashed an outlying part of the island's body and fell away sighing.
The ketch now named Diana had been careened for scraping, a labor completed yesterday, wearisome in the sun. Comfortable again in the deep water of the cove, she rode at anchor, waiting on sunrise that should summon a breeze, and rouse the man who ruled her (if he ever slept) and send her out wherever his desire commanded. The tide would be running fair an hour after dawn.
Her shadow begotten of the May moon stretched long across the still surface, in nearness sharply edged, then vague, then melting in the blackness of open water far out. The May moon, approaching the full, would be illuminating the letters on the starboard side. If Ben leaned over the rail he could glimpse the black sprawl of them: DIANA. But Ben Cory still thought of her as Artemis.
This was one private way to keep alive the integrity of a self. Another was to inquire: Where does the self end and the universe begin?...
Manuel was aloft. Manuel loved sleep, and could sleep anywhere, he shyly told Ben once—even at the masthead. But his fawn eyes would likely be open at present, searching the harmless night. If he drowsed up there, or if Captain Shawn or the second mate Marsh merely imagined he had, Manuel would be whipped, and then obliged to swab away any red drops that might have spattered on the sacred deck. A year ago Shawn had been quite kind to stupid Manuel. That ended after Cornelius Barentsz of the sloop Schouven had been hanged, and Manuel had furtively tried to cut the body down from the yardarm.
However balmy the weather, however empty and flat the sea, a twenty-four-hour lookout must be kept on the Diana: Shawn's law. Even in harbor the men stood watch and watch, having learned not to grumble in the presence of Captain Shawn, who might seem not to hear the words at the time spoken, but would nurse them in his bosom a week or so, and bring them forth and quote them gravely while Ball or Marsh corrected them with a rope's end. The deck must shine spotless as a duchess's drawing room; the brass must be dazzling, the ropes coiled exactly so, and the powder dry.
Judah Marsh and the hunchback mute who possessed no name but Dummy were somewhere aft, idle as Ben. Marsh never invented work when nothing needed to be done. This was not from laziness, certainly not from any charity: human beings were simply not so important to Judah Marsh that he could derive much joy from dominating them. He executed Shawn's orders for punishment with satisfaction; the sight of Manuel bleeding deepened his fixed smile; but he seemed to find no pleasure in ordering big soft Manuel about and watching him fumble at meaningless tasks.
It was not in nature, Ben thought, that a creature could be devoid of all common impulses to mirth, compassion, generosity, recognizable lust, interest in his fellow men, and still walk about on two legs; but there Marsh was, unquestionably spewed up by the human race. Some man must have begotten the thing, some woman borne it in pain and maybe loved it a while. Marsh would not even eat like a man, but like a peevish dog, gulping the tedious food and returning to his one-eyed vacancy. For Daniel Shawn Ben had been obliged to learn hatred, a waiting, despairing hatred that even now might hold some tormenting elements of love or at least of searching. Before the stalking dead man Marsh, Ben could only recoil, watchful, glad that, except for the necessary rule of the starboard watch, Marsh let him alone.
Ben expected nothing to be required of him till after sunrise when the tide turned. Then it would be up anchor and away, if Shawn's intention held. It often changed. Shawn was in no triumph these days, after a year of frustration and trivial actions with nothing gained.
The tide should turn at about seven bells. The mate's watch would tumble up early to lend a hand at breaking out the anchor and making sail—unavoidable since, after a year, the ketch was still woefully undermanned. As always at such times, the mate Tom Ball would remind the men that better times were coming with the next prize—more hands, better food, another vessel maybe, riches to burn, and best of all probably a bit of amusement at the expense of the Spaniards and their women, say at Campeachy or Merida. They paid scant attention to that noise now when it came from Mr. Ball, though the mere word "money" gave Ball's thick Devon voice a special fruitiness as if the taste of it comforted him all the way down to the gut. ("Money is the thing, Ben boy," he said once with damp and genuine friendliness, pawing amiably at Ben's shirt. "Got gold, you got everything, take an older man's word for it—good food, good smocks, safe old age. Gi' me the money, other cods can have the glory." Then finding Ben's stare to be an incomprehensible cold lance, he grunted with the pained astonishment of a man who wants to be liked, and spat overside, and pushed his hands against the sides of his paunch to settle it better on the burdened pelvis, and waddled away.) Manuel might giggle at Ball's belching oratory, but French Jack would only shrug without chattering, and Matthew Ledyard's purple-stained face would freeze into a peculiar quiet. When Captain Shawn said nearly the same thing (without the women and Spaniards), standing tall in his green breeches and green sash, in that favorite spot of his where his left hand could stroke the larboard falconet while his other rubbed the copper farthing, they still listened. Or they seemed to. While pronouncing such words as "our company," "our enterprise," Shawn's splendid voice could briefly make it seem that the men gathered to hear him were indeed a company of some consequence, and not a tatterdemalion handful of sharkbait committed to the guidance of a lunatic dreamer.
Ben tried to lose himself in the tranquillity of black water out yonder, to make some temporary truce in the private struggle. A battle with arithmetic, in a way: how does one youth steal a vessel from seven grown men—not counting Manuel, who was rather less than a man?
Ledyard was a man; little Joey Mills had at least a memory of manhood. One or even both might be allies, if there were any way to reach Ledyard. But all year long, Ledyard had seldom acknowledged Ben with more than a grunt, a stare and a turning of the back. He offered no other unkindness; he merely made it plain that Ben's existence distressed him somehow, while chattering Joey Mills tried to explain to Ben that Matthew was a grieving man who meant no harm by it. Ledyard, Ben knew, was deeply involved in Shawn's declaration of war against the world. Ledyard had shot the mate Hanson and one of the seamen in the taking of Artemis. Ben could imagine how Matthew Ledyard might still cling to the thought of the new lands in the western sea, and might forget (sometimes) that if ever he arrived there his own conscience would arrive there with him, to speak with him in the night and burn down on him in the noonday sun.
Ben had grown acquainted with a saving reasonableness in the very monotony of shipboard, in the endless daily things that must be done for the vessel's survival and one's own, without much thought, certainly without argument. Not too unlike the labors of a frontier farm—but the earth can be kind, with many shelters for one in extremity. In the open sea you've only to glance over the rail, and understand.
There is another sort of reasonableness in the status of a slave. Maybe, Ben thought, most men accept a little of that status because they must: but when you begin to accept it willingly, you begin to die.
("Benjamin Cory, I would wait for you a thousand years....")
After eight bells, breakfast. Hardtack, and stew built on a wild slimy formula unknown to any mortal but French Jack, and a dark tragic fluid that Jack called café arabique. The stew originated in Bahaman goat and wild pig, shot by Ledyard and Ball not long ago but too long for comfort. Nothing remained of the good provisions taken in a midnight raid two months ago on a coastal settlement at Martinique. Shawn might try another such raid before long; if not, back to the salt cod.
Shawn had not even considered trying to dispose of that honest cargo of Mr. Kenny's at one of the Caribbean ports where he could have sneaked in to bargain with no questions asked. Tom Ball had urged him to do so, waving his stumpy arms, his voice climbing to a reckless howl of despair. Shawn merely grinned at his copper farthing, and let Tom sputter out like a fat candle, and then remarked that one day soon they might be most happy to own such a handy supply of dem'd wonderful fish. Ben Cory had never regarded himself as a poet, but he thought sometimes that if he ever saw home again, there was one original composition that he could recite to Reuben in a decent glow of authorship. It went like this:
Old boiled cod.
O God!
As for the café arabique, Captain Shawn had been heard to say that he supposed Jack made it from a secret crock of hog manure hidden in the hold. Ben more charitably suspected an infusion from scraps of old leather salvaged maybe on the field of Blenheim.
Red-haired Jack claimed to have fought gloriously there under the banners of Marshal Tallard until the surrender, when a great light burst around him, and God told Jack that Louis the Fourteenth was no mortal king but an incarnation of the fiend Asmodeus who cut up little girls and ate them. Well—Jack could have been at Blenheim; far more likely he wasn't. Peter Jenks, captain in 1705 of the ship Iris, had happened on French Jack in Barbados, and being in sore need of a cook, had signed him on, with Jenks' usual massive disregard of authorities and formalities—Jack doubtless had the status of a prisoner of war, but he was somehow at large on the island, he seemed to be declaring that he knew how to cook, and that was good enough for Jenks. ("I say to dat captain, I am so big man, so good man, me, I am coq du village, coq de la paroisse, me. He say strong, 'You coq?' I say coq, he not know nut'n, nor me not more. I fool, I crazy, me—he big fool, strong crazy, go to hell.")
Somewhere, before then, Daniel Shawn might have known the man. At any rate French Jack, as well as Ball and the carpenter Ledyard, had been a part of Shawn's conspiracy. When Shawn took Artemis by deceit in broad daylight, it was French Jack who loomed up behind Peter Jenks with a capstan bar and struck him down.
Ben could still see that—Jenks reeling, clutching at the mizzenmast, missing it and going down—as almost a year ago he had seen it in reality across a gap of shining water, the sunlight of that May sparing Ben nothing of it as he writhed at the rope that held him and gnawed the gag in his mouth. Everything had been well planned that day, in the clear Atlantic, the island of Nantucket just over the rim of the world. If Ben had been able to struggle free, a scream of warning would likely have done no good: Jenks was down. The strangely methodical skirmish came to an end with the prim grace of a minuet—but that was no dance, that shifting and interweaving of pigmy man-figures over there in the sunlight. That was plain murder, like the death of Dyckman.... Then Manuel lashed the tiller of the sloop and came to Ben, removing gag and rope, patting his hands, troubled in his soft way by Ben's unhidden loathing, but grinning with a dazzle of white teeth and explaining: "Iss good, got ship now. All be ver' rich, much gold, much women. You like women, boy, so pretty? You like gold?..."
Very shrewdly planned, even to the tarpaulin spread over Ben and covering him up to the eyes.
The sloop from Harkness' wharf had stolen a long time without lights through the depth of a May night until fog closed in around her. Then she crept on most gently, slowly, under mainsail and jib, head on to a leisured march of smooth rollers, her captain aware that Artemis would be fogbound too. Ben had known nothing of that. Ben was asleep.
He woke late that morning, his head throbbing wildly, in the stench of a dark hole in a universe which was swaying impossibly back and forth, and from side to side too, with a grand inexorable calm. In this pocket of dimness he found he was alone with a human-like thing that could bob its misshapen head, and grin, but not speak. He dimly remembered this creature from some faraway evening: it was harmless. Steps led out of the cavity to a grayness of daylight. The cavity—oh, it was harmless too, it was the tiny cabin of a sloop, one that Mr. Shawn had been hired to sail to the Banks for somebody named Harkness, all fair enough. But why, Ben wanted to know, why was she at sea now, and why was his head one great blind snarl of pain? Toward the daylight he reeled, asking questions. Up in wet salt air, he learned that everything was gray—under him a gray sliver of deck, above him muttering and sobbing canvas gray with damp, before him a shaft of gray wood—that was a solid mast, harmless, and he grabbed it frantically to save himself as gravity dropped away from his feet, and he could see all around him one heaving gray of ocean to the end of the world. Behind him a cackling voice inquired: "Mr. Shawn, sir, Mr. Shawn—be that there thing a sailor?"
"Why, steady as she goes, Joey Mills! I shall make it one, Mother of God, and you kissing his boots one day."
Ben forced himself around. In the act he lost the mast somehow, the sloop gravely but mirthfully tossing his feet elsewhere. He fetched up against the larboard rail and grasped it with all his power, retching. The cackler was another mass of gray, small, hunched at the tiller, an old man and shriveled, who observed Ben's situation with an uncommunicating, not unfriendly eye, and cackled again and spat astern.
Shawn—the same Shawn and somehow not the same—was coming forward, the green coat flapping about him as he swayed with perfect casual ease to the sloop's leaning and rise and fall. "Your head'll be paining you, Beneen, I know it and sorry I am for it, but without a bit of persuasion you'd never have consented to come with old Shawn at all, I could see that, the way I was forced to it entirely. O the poor landside dreams that do hold a man, the pull of a hearthstone and the clutch of women! You're free, Beneen—old Shawn hath set you free. Never you mind all that now. Back below, man dear, and tell Dummy I said to give you a jolt of rum. You'll not be standing watch the day. Tomorrow you shall, beginning with the forenoon watch, that'll be eight o'clock of the morning the way you measured time in the old days, man dear, the old days you was a landsman, but now you go with Shawn, now you go with old Shawn that knows the brave heart of you, and that better than you'll be knowing it yourself, now that's no lie."
The Irishman was virtually singing. It penetrated the whirling agony of Ben's head—a little. He mumbled uncomprehendingly, not understanding with his brain, but understanding the event in his marrow maybe as clearly as he had ever done in the year since then. Shawn watched him, smiling, firm on the crazy deck like a weighted doll: let the world swing upside down, that'll stay upright, no fear. "It was the drinks. You drugged me," said Ben, not believing it, praying for denial.
"Ben, go below!" Shawn said that firmly but softly, not unkindly, and moved away forward in rolling ease, the green back vanishing beyond the mainsail, the dark riddle of him immediately replaced by the black riddle of someone else. This also Ben would not believe, this gaunt thing striding aft, its black eye-patch and its frozen smile. With no effort, the one-eyed man of the Lion Tavern detached Ben's hands from the rail. "Captain said go below," said Judah Marsh, and struck him in the face.
Ben tumbled sprawling into the cabin. There Dummy supported him kindly and fed him rum. There, presently, Ben understood how Jan Dyckman had died. He began, a little, to understand why.
The gray haze of that day wore itself out to evening with no questions answered except in the privacy of Ben's mind, and those without finality. Rain was falling when he went on deck again. The headache was receding, his body learning balance. He could not find the sun that would have told him what way the sloop was bound. Now and then Shawn passed him on the deck as if totally unaware of him. No one indeed acknowledged his existence at all except a bulky black-haired man, smooth-faced and young, who grinned at him in vacuous amiability. The others called that man Manuel. But when Ben dared to ask him: "Where are we bound?" Manuel shrugged and grinned and spread his hands, and shook his head until Ben feared he might be another mute, and then said at last: "Rain stop soon."
Manuel was right. Toward evening the drizzle ended, the overhanging clouds receded, and a white ball appeared—low in the sky and standing, as Ben faced the bow, on Ben's right hand. Manuel at that time was at the helm, and Shawn stood near him, arms folded, disdaining any support. He had been gazing off to the southwest, but now, since the blue-eyed stare had swung around to Ben, Ben asked: "Mr. Shawn, are we tacking?"
Shawn cocked his head at Manuel in some understanding, and Manuel grinned. "Now why would we be tacking, Beneen?"
Ben's nerves crackled and snapped. "Don't call me that!"
"I may not then?" Shawn displayed no anger, though Ben had almost hoped for it. The blue eyes dilated a little, perhaps in hurt, but he did not cease smiling. "Well—well, Cory, why would we be tacking, and a good little westerly breeze on the sta'board quarter that do be sending us where we wish to go?"
"And where is that?"
"Why, tomorrow, Cory, I fear you'll see little except water—a great deal of it—but you'll see tacking enough if that's your wish, and you'll be learning something about the handling of sail on small craft in the forenoon watch, I'm hoping, and later. And now and then, man dear, away far off up in the northwest or sometimes due north, you'll find me a wee blue lump on the horizon—why, so faint and small that sometimes your eyes will say it's not there at all, but it'll be there. And it'll be there the following day, and maybe the day after that, for we'll be standing off and on. Now that's a way of waiting, Cory, that's the way a vessel must wait if she's in the open waters and biding her time for a certain thing to happen—it's the way of a hawk in the air, if you like, the way he must move about continually up there in the great sky, biding his time for a certain thing to happen." He was coming to Ben, and his broad hands fell heavy on Ben's shoulders. The blue stare dilated to black; Ben met it, refusing to shrink away. "That blue lump will be an island, Cory, a sprawling island where it happens I've never gone ashore, but I know how it lies. I'm of no mind to go there on my errand, do you see, because on land—why, on land I'm compassed about, I have enemies, Mother of God, and some of them are agents of—puh!—Her Majesty Queen Anne."
"What's that you say?"
"Easy, Cory, easy! You have a new allegiance. That I will explain later, not now."
"I have no new allegiance."
"Later, friend, I said. The name of the island is Nantucket. Now sooner or later—on the second, the third day, it doesn't matter—a lovely small vessel will put out from Sherburne. We shall speak her, the island then being over the horizon."
"I think I understand your meaning," Ben said. "I think I understood it when that murderer struck me in the face."
"I'm hoping he did not harm you," said Shawn mildly. The eyes were altogether black; the smile remained. "No murderer, Ben. He acted at command of a certain voice—more of that later too, you wouldn't be understanding it now. As for striking you—mere shipboard discipline, Cory. You might be thanking him for that one day, when you've come around to learning how to obey a captain's orders."
"If I understand your meaning, I will have no part of it."
"Can you walk on water? Swim among the fishes?"
"That's not worth an answer," said Ben, and he heard Manuel suck in his breath as if in pain, but would not look his way. "I met you last night in friendship. I came aboard here, and drank with you as a friend because I supposed you to be one. Oh, my brother...."
"Your brother?"
Terror stabbed at Ben, and caution gave him wisdom. He had almost said: "My brother was right, and you no friend." It was possible that some day Shawn would be ashore again, where Reuben was. "Nothing about my brother," said Ben—"merely that he told me I ought not to set my heart on sailing, as I did. I told you how I had hoped for it, and you knew last night, you know this moment that I meant it honest—not this, not this—I say I'll never have no part of it."
"But," said Shawn peacefully, "I must have an answer to what I asked. Do you wish to live?"
"Yes, like any man. Not at cost of betraying my own people or doing what my heart refuses."
"Why, that's very bravely spoken."
"You thought I'd help you take Artemis?"
"Oh," said Shawn, and took out the copper coin and frowned at it. "Who's to know all the whims of a green boy?"
"Whims, Mr. Shawn? Well, not that or any other dirty piracy."
"Oh!" said Shawn again, and held up the coin, turning it about in the gray light. His forehead was damp, perhaps from the spray. "A St. Patrick farthing, Beneen. From Dromore. Sometimes I'm wondering why I keep it. Not much there, ha, to make a man think of the green land?... Well, you'll forget you said that—in time, time. Your heart, is it? And so, do you see, it's your heart I must teach. I must change it, the way you'll be breaking the old bonds and will sail with me to the new lands. Time—that's all. The old gray mother'll give you the truth of it, and I'll change your heart."
"That no one can do."
"But I can," said Shawn, and strode away smiling....
Artemis was overtaken on the third day.
The weather shone fair, the winds themselves giving Shawn their favor, mild westerlies holding, shifting on the third day a little toward the northwest. The island, as Shawn had said, was a faraway thing, at times not visible, reappearing as the blue fragment of a dream. It was early morning, and Shawn, fortunate in this too, had tacked well away to the southeast of the island when the clean white of new sail first appeared. Shawn needed only a moment's study through his glass. His face, that had been smiling, changed to an ivory stillness, and he took the helm.
Artemis, gliding out of Sherburne, had clapped on all sail—jib and topsail and mainsail bellying taut, her fore-and-aft mizzen a great wing of purpose and of splendor. For her the northwesterly was a following wind, not her best wind but good enough; her low-slung bowsprit leaned joyfully to the sparkle of harmless whitecaps, outward bound.
Shawn's little sloop danced about, settling into the long starboard tack; it would intercept the course of Artemis—but not until the island was well below the horizon, and none to observe but the gulls that still dipped and wheeled above and around Artemis, careless angels in the sun. Shawn gave one order in one roared word: "Judah!"
It must have all been arranged long beforehand. Ben at that moment was trying to understand a snapped order from Judah Marsh. Trim something or other—he hadn't quite heard or understood, and was undecided whether to obey as he had tried to do yesterday or to choose this time for hopeless rebellion. Startled by that thunder from the helm, he turned his head to glance at Shawn—and was face down on the deck, his hands wrenched behind him and bound fast at the wrists. His threshing legs were secured at knees and ankles. The creature Dummy was doing most of this, as Ben knew from the moaning slobber at his ear.
He was tied then at the foot of the mast, by back and ankles, legs bent under him so that he could not lift his knees, a rag jammed in his mouth, a tarpaulin flung over him up to the eyes. He struggled a while, not in hope, merely in refusal to surrender, and dislodged the tarp. Judah Marsh noticed this, and fastened two corners of the canvas behind the mast. Ben could do nothing then but go limp, trying to lessen the torture of bent legs and keep the edge of the tarpaulin from slipping against his eyelids. He faced the starboard rail. He could glimpse Artemis from time to time as the sloop rolled. She grew larger through the morning.
He saw the sloop's dory readied to go overside, long before Artemis was in hailing distance, the life aboard her only a motion of midgets. Dummy, swift and excited as an ape, tossed into the dory a broad sheet of canvas. Judah Marsh and dry little Joey Mills climbed into the dory and disappeared. They would be a bundle under a rag; Ben ceased to wonder....
"Ahoy the Artemis!"
"Hoy!" The answer came back large and brazen over the mild water, Jenks with his megaphone no midget now but recognizable, massive at the rail and calm.
"I'm bearing a message from Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury."
Ben tried to yell. Nothing penetrated the gag—a strangled gurgling that would not be audible ten feet away. He gave it up, hearing a part of Jenks' answer: "—'bliged to you. Let me have it."
"A sealed message, sir—must be delivered to you safe hand, says he, no other way. Will you heave to, sir? I'll send me boat and delay you as little as I may."
The heavy clang of Captain Peter Jenks' voice cursed once or twice amiably for the record, and consented.
Shawn was right. He delayed Artemis very little indeed.
Her shortened sail holding her to a crawl, the sloop was rolling more. Her rising starboard side would close away Ben's view, and then it seemed to him, not that his own bound body was being moved, his eyes turned in spite of him to the sun and empty sky, but that the sharp bright field of agony across the water had been thrust down, rejected and overwhelmed: sea and sky would not own it nor allow it. He supposed he was not quite sane. Then with each contrary roll the vision would return, plainer than ever, and he was sane enough.
Printed on his memory was a moment when Shawn and Jenks stood together on the deck of Artemis in what seemed to be innocent palaver, the megaphone dangling idly from Jenks' hand, while the dory with Dummy at the oars was sliding astern—and then a roll of the sloop to larboard. Another moment—why, Jenks and Shawn had hardly moved, and Ben could recognize fat Tom Ball, and the carpenter Matthew Ledyard—but the dory had been made fast. Three rats like men were climbing. Surely the helmsman could see them! Or the red-haired man—yes, but what the devil was the cook doing on deck at a conference of captains, and with something black hanging from his right hand? Another roll to larboard—the sloop in her whimsy hung there, tormenting him through a time of sunny blindness and no breathing.
Then Ben discovered why the red-haired cook was present. The same glance embraced the helmsman—anyway a human creature wearing a green kerchief around his head such as the helmsman had been wearing—tumbling strangely from the stem of the beautiful slow-gliding vessel, striking the water with no great splash, floating briefly with no struggle as of life, and disappearing. The sloop rolled to larboard.
Ben in the sunlight could remember Reuben in the red gleam of burning houses, stricken and condemning himself because he had not prayed. And I have not prayed. But—but....
From the pain in his legs or the beating sun, Ben might have fainted for a while. Later he could recall no more of the dance of death; nothing until he was aware of the dory skimming back toward him, no one in it but Judah Marsh. Manuel came to release him.
Marsh troubled himself with nothing aboard the sloop, not even the sails; his only errand was to bring the dory for Ben and Manuel, and herd them into it with the lash of a word or two. Manuel was obliged to drop Ben into it, his legs being still numb and useless.
An hour later, as Artemis sped southward, the sloop was still visible, yawing this way and that, making poor silly rushes downwind, dropping in a trough and swinging until caught aback. When Ben last glimpsed her, he and Manuel and Dummy were employed in holystoning the deck of Artemis, and Manuel laughed to see her, and nudged Dummy so that he might enjoy it too, even though Judah Marsh was standing by with a belt. Very comical was Mr. Harkness' sloop stumbling about back there, a puzzled pup ordered to go home. Ben could see that. To protest this present labor was to receive the buckle end of the belt; Ben could see that such a cause was not worth a protest—any deck should be made decent, one granted that. The stains were already browning in the sun, difficult to remove, but Captain Shawn would not gather his crew to hear, approve and sign the articles until that deck was clean....
"We here gathered, who have hereunder set our names, do declare ourselves prepared to undertake all such enterprises of discovery as our Captain shall design, and all acts of seizure, search, requisition, defense and warfare that may be needful thereto.
"We here and now and forever forswear all allegiance to any crown, republic, dominion, principality on the face of the earth.
"We here and now and forever swear loyalty unto one another, and to our Captain obedience in all things, and unto the following laws we do agree:
"1. That man that shall refuse any order of our Captain, or of those to whom he may assign command, shall for a first offending receive Moses' Law, that is forty stripes less one on the bare back; for second offending his punishment shall be as the Captain may direct; but for a third offending he shall suffer present death.
"2. Of prizes taken, the Captain shall have one share and a quarter; the mates, the gunner, the carpenter and the boatswain shall have each one share and one eighth; and every man one share; but that man that shall display devotion beyond the common unto our endeavors, he shall have such additional reward as the Captain may decide.
"3. That man that shall utter blasphemy or foul speech in the presence of the Captain, or suffer any filth or uncleanness to remain on the deck of the vessel or in the hold, shall receive ten stripes.
"4. That man that shall snap his arms, or smoke tobacco in the hold with pipe uncapped, or carry a lit candle without a lanthorn, or strike flint or carry flame within three paces of gunpowder except he be the gunner, shall receive not less than twenty and not more than thirty stripes on the bare back.
"5. That man that shall offer to meddle with a prudent woman without her consent shall suffer the loss of his tongue and both hands, and shall be set adrift, or marooned, as the Captain may direct.
"6. That man that shall secretly bring a lewd woman aboard this or other vessel of our company, with intent she shall remain aboard, the vessel being at sea, shall be bound to his doxy by wrists and ankles and they both be cast into the sea beyond sight of land.
"7. That man that shall be found in liquor during his hours of duty or in the presence of an enemy, shall receive Moses' law for three succeeding days; but for a second offending he shall suffer death.
"8. That man that shall display cowardice in battle shall be hanged by the neck from the yardarm until dead.
"9. That man that shall practise the vice of Sodom or other unnatural lust shall be hanged by the neck from the yardarm in presence of the entire company, his body there to remain for the space of three days, when it shall be quartered and cast into the sea.
"10. If it shall become known that any man, woman or child hath entered aboard this or other vessel of our company as a spy or agent of the Crown of England or any other foreign power, such spy or agent shall be put to death in whatever manner the Captain shall direct; but if such spy or agent be one who hath signed these articles and presented himself to be an honest member of our company, he shall before his dispatch be nailed by the hands to the foremast for the space of five days without meat or drink.
"This shall be your Decalogue," said Daniel Shawn, "and you agreeing. And yet if any man among you be not agreeable, I do not rightly know what we shall do with him the day, seeing I cannot spare a boat, and the distance to the mainland may be something tedious to the best of swimmers."
They laughed. All seven, even Judah Marsh, for the dry grunt that came from him was certainly meant for a laugh. The laugh of Tom Ball, who had taken over the helm during the ceremony, rolled forward like greasy bubbles. Ben Cory, an eighth man who stood apart from the group by the larboard gun and had not been summoned by Shawn to join them, was reflecting that though the life of his body might continue for a while, the part of it that had known laughter was surely ended; reflecting also that his presence here was, in part and obscurely, a result of his own actions. Drugged and kidnapped, yes, but ever since the morning when Reuben had spoken out against Shawn, some part of Ben had understood that his brother was right; another part, swift to deny it, had been stronger in him at the time, and so—so the drinks in the cabin of the sloop, and the waking.
And so perhaps a man's every act is but in part his own, in part a yielding to the thrust of other forces. And perhaps a man is strong in just so far as his actions may be called his own; and so—little gray Joey Mills had begun to sputter words, no one preventing him—and so where is the way where light dwelleth? "Gawd, sir, that part there—I mean——"
"What part, Joey Mills?" Shawn asked that not loudly, and he spread the paper against the bulk of the mainmast, his left hand restraining it against the breeze. Manuel stood by him holding an inkstand and goose quill from the cabin. So much, Ben thought, for the fireside legends that such documents were signed with the heart's blood. Or maybe they were. "Some article you wished to question, Joey Mills?"
"Oh no, sir, nothing like that, sir. I only thought—that there part about forswearing allegiance—well, sir——"
"You wished it more strongly expressed, belike?"
"Well, sir, you see, sir——"
"Ah, I have it!" Shawn beamed in a great glow of generous satisfaction. "You're not the big man, Joey Mills, though sure it's the heart of a gamecock under your old hide, so do you make yourself the greater by coming forward now and being first to sign, ha? Come, Joey! Let me behold your handwrite plain and large!"
Ben noticed no tremor in the grimy fist. That might have been because Joey Mills clutched the quill like a rope, his whole arm toiling in the grave task of shaping the letters, his tongue protruding from clamped lips, his brows a cat's cradle of distress, while Shawn's right arm spread kindly over his sparrowy shoulders. "There, sir! And now, sir——"
"Whisht, man!—time to speak of all things, but now you've signed, and happy am I to have your pledged word in writing, but now, man dear, you must step aside for others."
Joey Mills gave it up and stumbled away, his glance meeting Ben's rather wildly. He seemed almost to be imploring Ben, of all people, for something or other, an impression soon blotted out by a weakly apologetic chuckle. As Joey Mills then scuttled aft to relieve Tom Ball at the helm, Ben thought of Jesse Plum....
Matthew Ledyard the carpenter, last to join the group, had stalked forward—from the captain's cabin, Ben thought—and had halted, demoralized with astonishment at sight of Ben. Ben had supposed Ledyard was murdered with the others, yet there he stood in the sunlight, gaunt face flushed to the eyes under the broad birthmark, lips moving without words. Shawn had drawn him aside for a word or two that seemed to calm him. He had listened to the articles with a sleepwalker's gaze at nothing, and now was the second to sign, shaking his head afterward like a man who hopes to understand something sometime but cannot do so in the present.
After him came Manuel and Dummy and French Jack, these three guided by Shawn's hand to make their marks, and he wrote their names for them with amiable flourishes. Tom Ball then signed, a remarkable lightness and delicacy in his fat fingers.
Judah Marsh wrote slowly but steadily with a savage gouging, his writing a pattern of cutlass gashes. Shawn took the quill from him, regarding the point in sorrow and the man who had nearly ruined it. Some current of understanding was flowing between them, no affection in it and no mirth. Shawn signed his name, handsome and large and bold, pocketed the folded paper, and flung the quill dartwise over the side. "Stay as you be, men," he said—"we'll choose the watches presently." He jerked his head for Ben to follow him, and went forward to the bow, leaning there idly at the rail, the wind at his back. "Cory, I did not require you to sign. Men go with me of their own will, one way or another."
"And so I'm to go overboard?"
"You seem not to be shaking.... I've not been so instructed."
"Instructed?—I don't understand you."
"Never mind. Time, time."
"We are strangers, Mr. Shawn, who never met before. You could have forced my hand to take the quill, maybe. I'd never sign such a thing any other way, and I will not serve you on this venture." Shawn's face did not change. "Are the others all dead?"
Shawn watched the ocean in the south. "Several died and no help for it," he said quietly. "Peter Jenks lives—not harmed, I dare say. A thick skull. He'll share my cabin for a while at least."
"Share——"
Shawn laughed, not musically but almost soundlessly, a thing Ben had not seen him do before. "Under restraint, Ben. Like all good vessels, Artemis, who must now be named Diana, carries irons for malefactors. I have had Chips staple a chain in the floor of the cabin for the leg irons. Unpleasant, but I'm obliged to question Mr. Jenks in certain particulars. Then no doubt he can be released."
"Released to go overside."
"Time, Ben, time. And so you will not serve me?"
"I will not."
"I like that stubborn will. Mother of God, what a power of strength it might be when you're a man!... Ben, those fellas back there, they are servants. Good men—chose 'em with much thought—but servants, cattle. You are not as they."
"If I did you any service aboard this vessel of Mr. Kenny's I'd be no better than they are."
But it seemed impossible for Ben to make Shawn angry. The man continued strangely gentle and reflective in all he said. "I grant I may have done Mr. Kenny some harm, but he's a wealthy man." About to protest that Mr. Kenny would be so no longer with Artemis lost, Ben held his peace. "I do regret it. If you will not serve me—as yet—perhaps you will serve the ketch? A vessel hath many needs, Mr. Cory. An idle or unskillful hand may do her much harm, come tempest or other misfortune. You cannot expect to share in any prizes——"
"Do you fancy I ever would?"
"Shall we hope to soften this Puritan virtue to some degree?"
But Shawn was not at all angry. "I say, you cannot share in prizes, but while aboard you will be fed and clothed like the others, and for this perhaps you might make some return in labor, if only for Artemis' sake?"
"I suppose I must, as a captive slave, if I wish to live. But I will do no act of piracy, I will do no violence to anyone except in defense of my life, and I will escape you when I can. I believe any slave has that privilege."
"Then I'll require of you no act of violence, only the labor of a foremast hand—can I say more? You have my word on it. And tell me something—have you ever spoken in this fashion to any man before?"
"I never did. I never had cause."
"Knowing quite well that by a lift of my finger I could have you put to death? Human life is nothing to these men, you know. And there'll be muttering a-plenty because you haven't signed."
"Knowing that, of course."
Shawn's hand swung out and gripped Ben's upper arm, not with intentional cruelty, Ben guessed, but he could feel the nerves of his forearm going numb. "Ben, Ben, do you not also hear a voice, sometimes behind your shoulder as it were?—saying now for instance, 'Resist old Shawn, resist him even if you die for it!'" Shawn shook him impatiently. "Is there not such a voice?"
"I don't understand you."
"Tell me the truth!"
"I hear my own mind—heart, conscience, whatever you wish to call it. It serves me as well as it may, and I listen to it."
"Strange! You are not a believer, I think? Do you pray?"
"I haven't truly prayed since my father and mother were murdered.... Is not conscience enough?"
Shawn released him and sighed and turned away. "You spoke of slavery. Ah, Beneen, don't you see, all this is but prologue? I serve a great end. I spoke to you of the western sea and the new lands, and I did see the thought strike fire in you, don't try to deny it. Why, I'd not go on the account, nor meddle with this rabble, nor do violence to anyone, if I could help it. Mother of God, two or three fine ships, a handful of brave men, say fifty, sixty—it needs no more. We need no women—we'll take us native women in the new lands and raise up a new breed of men, and they shall be like gods. You must see it, Beneen, the way I have no choice?"
"I do see—as my father and my mother taught me, as I learned from my tutor and my great-uncle, and above all from my brother, whose understanding is better than mine—I do see, Mr. Shawn, that you cannot serve a good end by evil means."
"Ochone!—a Puritan indeed but very young, now that's no lie. I know that talk, that doctrine, Ben, know it of old, a stick to beat the young and no truth in it, and so I deny it altogether."
"I will affirm it while I live. Damnation, Mr. Shawn, it's no article of faith, only a plain observation any man can make. Your great end lies in the future, but the future grows from the present. The evil you do in the present can only generate evil in the future and not the good end you dream of."
"Puritan and philosopher! Now I have seen flowers growing from a dunghill."
"They grow from the seed of other flowers and would do so in common ground. The dunghill itself only makes a stink."
"Feeds them, does it not?"
"I dare say nothing's purely good or purely evil. What's good in the dunghill feeds them, the rest is a stink."
"Damn the thing, blind and stubborn as you are, I like you, Ben Cory.... Do you play chess?"
"A little."
"I found a set of men in the cabin. We must play now and then."
"If you like...."
"Nothing left then, Beneen, of the friendship I hoped there was between thee and me?"
"I don't know how to answer that. I don't see how there can be friendship if one man enslaves another, if one man does what another must hate and reject."
"You're very bitter, boy."
"I don't possess my own life, if it can be destroyed at your whim, a lift of your finger. I think his life is all any man owns. I think that's cause for bitterness, Shawn. I refused as soon as I understood, the first day. There've been three nights when you could have stood in to shore and let me swim for it." Shawn laughed a little, silently. "I know—you couldn't have me spreading word of you. And it's true, I would have done so at once."
Shawn said slowly: "I could not destroy your life, I think. I spoke as if I might, only in hope of persuading you, opening your eyes. I keep you with me for the same reason, now that's no lie. The friendship abides in me, though you've turned against me. And now you have my word on this: when I have won my little fleet, and my men, and am ready for the regions where none will follow me, I will be finding some means to set you free, and you still unwilling to go with me. I'll put you aboard some other ship, or leave you in a foreign port if I can. You have my word on it—yet I think you may go with me. And for the present I do be asking nothing of you but a seaman's labor, no violence. No violence, Beneen."
Ben knew somehow that, even in that moment, when brown stains were still visible on the deck in spite of all the scrubbing and washing down, Shawn's sorrow at Ben's rejection of him was quite real, quite honest and deep, and so was his belief that Ben's mind would change and that he himself could change it. A most divided man, who could condemn war and practice it. One could picture him sheltering a fallen nestling in his hand, while his heel pressed on the bloody corpse of one of his own breed. But Ben was forced to understand after a while that such insane division is not, by most men, called insanity. They call it necessity.
For a year now, Shawn had kept his word. No violence was required of Ben. When action approached, as it did hardly more than a dozen times in the whole year, Ben was tied, not cruelly, down in the forecastle, and saw only the aftermath.
It seemed to Ben now as he watched the tropic glory of the May moon—this fading slowly, for morning was not far away—that it was true enough, as was said in the Book of Proverbs: For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he—and maybe, Ben speculated, any madman is merely one who believes a thing which the one who names him mad is forced to call a lie.
Shawn's blunders in chess were of a curious kind. Ben could beat him as a rule, with effort, and Shawn took it graciously except for a compulsion to curse at his own mistakes. Ben was reminded each time (but did not say) how Reuben could have given the man a handicap of a rook or better and still have beaten him in fourteen or fifteen moves. Shawn would prepare a good enough attack—squatting by the board in the sunlight of the quarterdeck, on days of small wind when the Diana held an even keel and no work needed to be done—and he would be cheerful in the beginning, a little excited, humming in his teeth, moving his pieces with a mirthful flourish. One could not think of him then as anything but a kindly, humorous, thoughtful man, almost a young man, a man on holiday. But in the decisive moment, when he must push through the attack or be damned to it, the humming would cease, the copper farthing would appear in his fingers, and Shawn would either abandon the attack for some meaningless scrimmage in another part of the field, or make one of his blatant errors—a piece left hanging unprotected, a reckless sacrifice gaining nothing. After that, Ben's limited knowledge was sufficient to demolish him. Daniel Shawn would never seem to understand just how this had happened, and Ben did not tell him.
The Diana won no big prizes in that year of prowling up and down the Caribbean. True, she was woefully undermanned, reason enough for risking no lives on anything less than a flat certainty. All the same (said Judah Marsh in Ben's hearing), John Quelch would not have chased a French sloop for three days and then turned tail merely because the little rascal put about in despair and uncovered a gun she shouldn't have possessed. Shawn heard that too, and stared blankly at Marsh, rubbing the coin, until Marsh turned away; but Shawn turned away too, without a reply.
There were braver occasions, such as the breathless evening in July when the sloop Schouven died. That was an open battle with everything risked. Tied securely in the stifling forecastle, Ben could hear as much for himself—the coughing thunder above him of the Diana's larboard gun, presently a distant animal howling, a banging of small arms, a piercing squeal like a stuck pig that was French Jack's war cry. When Ben was released to come on deck the Schouven was already afire, the Diana leaving her behind in the gathering night. Tom Ball and Dummy and Jack were gaudily bleeding from minor wounds, but the Diana had lost nothing. She had won about fifty pounds in silver, a month's provisions, a little long-tailed black monkey and a man—a tall, gray, soft-spoken scoundrel, Cornelius Barentsz, who was even then scrawling his name on the Diana's articles with Shawn's blessing. The terrified monkey clung frantically to Dummy and found a friend....
Ben saw little of Barentsz, who spoke almost no English and was assigned to Mr. Ball's watch, relieving French Jack of his occasional double duty for a week or so until Barentsz was hanged. Ben never altogether understood that. The execution was carried out with no ceremony in the silent hours of the first watch, when Ben was asleep below. Manuel at that time was serving on the larboard watch, and Joey Mills on Marsh's watch with Ben; the two changed places after the hanging, at the request of Mr. Ball, who said he didn't wish to be tempted to do violence to the dirty Portagee when the ketch was so short-handed. It was Matthew Ledyard, in one of his rare impulses to communication, who snarlingly explained the incident to Ben. Barentsz had been discovered in the darkness of the first watch trying to embrace poor giggling weakwitted Manuel like a woman. The articles of the Diana were specific. A week later, though, after the body had been disposed of in the manner prescribed, Shawn asked in the middle of a chess game: "Do you know the true reason why that Dutchman was hanged?" And he set down a Bishop where it could not legally go.
"The piece can't be played there," said Ben.
"Ha?" Shawn stood abruptly and pushed the board aside with his foot. "Devil with the game, my mind's not on it." He had already made his blunder. "You heard my question?"
"I can't say I know the true reason for anything you do."
"I did not hang him, Ben. His destiny hanged him. Nor I don't make much of poor Manuel trying to cut the body down, for 'tis Manuel's destiny to remain weak in the wits and no harm in him, except he may be used for harm by others. But—ah well, 'tis true enough what I told the men, I did find Barentsz so, and I'll have no such Devil's foulness under my command, now that's no lie. But"—he glanced about the sunny deck, where no one else was in earshot—"there was another reason, one I didn't wish the men to know. On second thought—on further instruction—it doesn't matter. You may even tell them if you see fit." He waited, the silence forcing Ben to look up at him at last. "It might be of especial importance to you, Ben Cory, to know that I know Barentsz's true reason for coming aboard my ketch."
"His reason! He was brought aboard a captive, that or be drowned."
"That was the seeming," said Shawn, rubbing his coin, looking gravely down with the sun behind him, his eyes all black. "Yet Barentsz could have gone with the others. They thought (not understanding the end I serve) that I would give them a boat. But no, this Barentsz chose to make a show of favoring my enterprise, so to deceive me and get himself aboard my ketch. Then soon enough, hearing what he muttered under his breath, I understood why."
"I could make nothing of what he tried to say in English."
"That's no matter."
"Do you speak Dutch?"
"Enough."
"Well?"
"You wouldn't care to say 'Well, sir?' or 'Well, Captain?'"
"Well, Shawn?"
"How you do play with your own life, the way it might be a thing of no value!"
"While I'm a slave it's of no value," said Ben, knowing that this was not at all true.
"Mother of God, it's your very impudence that saves you. If you were what I've sometimes feared you might be, your conversation would not be so. You'd be sly, I think. You'd try to please me, I think, and not spit back at me like a little wildcat.... Well—Cornelius Barentsz was an agent, and that in the service of Queen Anne of England."
"I don't believe it."
"It doesn't matter. You haven't my ways of discovering truth. But now that you know I know this, will there be any particular thing you wish to tell me, Ben Cory?"
"No, Shawn."
"If you be what I devoutly pray you are, you've nothing to fear even in your impudence. But those who betray me I do not forgive."
Ben knew—and had known for some time, he supposed—that he was in the presence of madness, whatever that is. It seemed not to be the simple, half-supernatural thing that the common speech heard in Ben's childhood had made of it. Shawn did not rave or babble or foam at the mouth; he never acted as one possessed of a devil ought to act, and besides, are there any devils? If so, what are they, and how was one who had lived three years with the calm skepticism of John Kenny to believe in them? One remembered Reuben snorting and gurgling and sometimes cursing over Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World, and then reading with greater joy the burlesque of it written by the merchant Robert Calef of Boston, whom Uncle John admired. Never mind about devils.
Ben knew his own life could end at any moment. At that time, however, he had already lived three months with the nearness of sudden death—his own defiance, he sometimes thought, the sheerest bluff. Like living in the same den with a tiger who, for his own reasons, has so far refrained from destroying you. You can cringe and shiver for only a limited time; then it becomes tiresome, and you must look after your own occasions of eating and sleeping and waking no matter what the tiger does. And doubtless a tiger is more likely to pounce on a creature that cringes than on one who spits back at him. And in spitting back, in turning his face directly toward the lightning and to hell with the consequences, Ben had found, no doubt of it, a hot pleasure as definite, almost as keen as in the surging moments when Clarissa had loved him.
Shawn played few chess games with Ben after that day, appearing to lose interest in them. He seemed to Ben to be changing in some gradual, obscure fashion—more aloof, more silent except for the occasional furious monologue after some ship had been sighted, and followed a while, and then allowed to slip away over the horizon because Shawn's voice told him the moment was not ripe and his forces not sufficient. Several times Shawn had robbed small interisland vessels—trivial occasions when Ben was not tied below but allowed to remain on deck with Manuel and Dummy and the monkey. The Diana swooped down on these helpless chickens like the wrath of God, but having taken what little they held of provisions and valuables, and having learned that no man aboard them was willing or worthy to go with him, Shawn showed contemptuous mercy and let them depart unharmed. What they could tell, he said, was no threat to him—he had already satisfied himself, after the pursuit by the frigate Dread, that the Diana could outrun anything afloat.
Vessels in the Diana's class or larger were always too well manned or too well armed, or sighted too near the land or in the presence of other shipping, or simply rejected by the inner voice. Something—("I am compassed about," said Shawn—"compassed about")—something was always not quite right.
Shawn spent more and more time in the cabin, where Ben had not been allowed to go the whole year long.
There was an October afternoon of aching sunlight in the waters off Grenada, when Ben noticed a thick scattering of silver at Shawn's temples and wondered how long it could have been there....
No one entered that locked cabin except Shawn, who kept its key and one other key on a cord at his neck, and Judah Marsh, and Joey Mills. Mills entered it only long enough to carry in food and fetch out the pail of slops. Since no one was ever of a mind to question Shawn or Marsh, Ben and the others (even Tom Ball) relied on Joey Mills for news of Peter Jenks. Mills did not much enjoy talking on the subject.
It was ever the same, Mills said. Jenks was there, and alive; but what the Captain wanted of him was beyond the imagination of an old man who'd been brought up Godfearing in Gloucester. Jenks' ankles were close together in irons; Ledyard had stapled the chain of the irons to the floor and nailed a plank over the staple so that nothing less than a crowbar would ever tear it loose. The chain was long enough to allow Jenks to lie in his bunk or sit at the stationary bench by the built-in table. When the ketch was careened for cleaning, Mills said, the Old Man must be obliged to lie braced against the side boards of his bunk—never speaking a word. Nothing movable was allowed within Jenks' reach except a light wooden food tray that Mills pushed to him by a long stick, and the slop bucket, managed with the same stick, and a leather flask of rum. Under Shawn's strictest orders, Mills observed all the precautions one might with a chained bear. Jenks laughed at that sometimes, Mills said—but spoke not a word. He had not once touched the rum; Mills was certain of it. The flask lay in a corner, some motion of the vessel having dislodged it from the table where Shawn had tossed it. It still lay within Jenks' reach: Mills doubted if he even looked at it. And the leather had turned green on the outside with tropic mold.
Shawn actually slept in that cabin, the door locked. Beside the bunk across the cabin from the one Jenks used, Ledyard had built a heavy wooden screen, and after that Ledyard also had been forbidden the place. The screen, Mills supposed, would keep the chained bear from hurling his bucket at Shawn while Shawn slept—if Shawn ever slept....
The May moon sank into a grayness of horizon cloud behind the island, then sank altogether, lost out of the night, and with its passing the shadow of the Diana vanished into the black immensity of the sea. Under the blackness that spread above him like another sea bearing a foam of stars, Ben stood in a loneliness complete, feeling nothing for a time but the loyal secret motion of his own heart and the noise of ocean not concerned with him. He was waiting: waiting at least for the gradual fading of the dark that must soon begin in the lower sky, maybe for something more. That light would come in its time, over the open waters in the east, pouring upward, compelling the sea of blackness to a luminous change and then dissolving it away. But what is morning to a slave?
Why, nothing. Nothing unless in some way the light can grow within the slave as well as upon the world where he drags out his captivity.
I have been too passive, Ben thought, and that for much too long a time. Defiant, yes, and maybe brave enough, but in a child's way, to no real purpose. For that first month or so I may have had some excuse—I was dazed; I had never dreamed any such thing could happen, to me. But since then, no excuse for drifting, letting things happen. There must have been something I could have done.
Oh, and passive, too passive by far, a long time before that evening in the cabin of the sloop. Drifting, letting things happen instead of taking a hand in forcing them to happen. Maybe a child is compelled to that. But childhood ended—when? Did not Reuben at fifteen discover a purpose?
He will have turned sixteen a few days ago, and I not there; and doubtless he believes I am dead.
Faith surely imagines I am dead, she who said with her lips at my ear that she would wait for me a thousand years.
There must have been something I could do....
Dry logic of arithmetic asserted itself and Ben noted it. I don't know how one youth steals a ketch from seven grown men. But....
By the contemptuous assent of Daniel Shawn himself, I still possess the knife my father gave me. He gave me also a word: readiness....
The stars weakened; some of them were gone. The sky, no sea of blackness now, became a paleness and then a glory. Shadows acquired weight and relief, substance and sharpness in the transfiguration of daylight—the rail under Ben's hand no pallid blur but familiar with every spot and imperfection of the polished wood. The headland out yonder at the southern arm of the cove, a looming dullness not long ago, became the gray hand of a giant, then green, then manifest jungle, a fragment of solid earth, and the lonely red flare of the sun burst free in silence over the rim of the world. Clouds hung high in the west; none lingered over there on the morning side to obscure the birth, and at the moment of completion a light sweet wind tranquilly arrived, a northeasterly breeze, cooling Ben's face, roving across the island, waking in the bare cordage a music of morning and perhaps of spring.
There must be something I can do....
"Mr. Hibbs, was Reuben uncertain what time he would come home?"
"Yes—late, I think, Charity. There was something—a cutting for the stone to be precise, and the patient living somewhere near Cambridge. You know he goes with Mr. Welland on nearly all the visits now. On this occasion, I understand, he's to aid with the surgery, holding instruments I suppose, or whatever—the which maketh me ill only to contemplate it, but when I saw Ru this morning he was cool as you please, and quite unmoved, and cracked a joke or two that I'm sure Mr. Kenny was able to hear and enjoy. I dare say the doctor is right, that to visit the sick in all their trials will provide a learning not to be won from the best of books. Yet I wish it did not mean that he must neglect his other studies."
"Perhaps he'll come back to them one day."
"Ay—'tis absurd of me, but I feel in a manner cheated. There was so much more I had hoped to teach him—nay, I dare say any teacher is a fool, seeing only his small island of knowledge, forgetting how wide is the world beyond it. Can you stay the night, my dear?"
"Yes. Kate's most kind, allowing me to share her bed. I fear I'm a plague to her, I'm that restless, but she says not."
"I believe there's another bed in the attic that we could bring down, if she wishes."
"Ben's?"
"Oh, no! That hath remained in Reuben's room—their room, I'd rather say. I don't know that Reuben ever said anything of it, but—you can imagine no one of us would suggest taking it out."
"Of course. I spoke something foolish. I do so often."
"Not at all. It is—may I say this, Charity?—a blessing, that you do come to us here. In this house we are, all but Reuben—oh, how shall I say it?—old, dusty, something discouraged perhaps. There was so much of youth and gaiety, the which we took for granted when we had it, when Ben was here, the two of them alway in some harmless commotion or other—why, merely to hear them talk together was—was.... What are you sewing, Charity? Something for the—for what I believe fair young maids do call a bride chest?"
"I am no-way fair, Mr. Hibbs. And—honestly now, doth this appear to you like an item of female apparel?"
"Oh! Marry it don't, now you hold it up—you had it bunched under your hand so I couldn't see."
"A nightshirt of Mr. Kenny's, and I only trust I may mend this hole so it won't chafe him. He wears them out in the back, you see, lying on them constantly, and—oh, the fidgeting that's all he's able to do. I pray you, Mr. Hibbs, would you sit the other side of the lamp? You're in peril of my elbow, besides shutting off the light."
"Of course—clumsy of me.... How deftly your little hands do work at whatever they find, Charity!... Te spectem, suprema mihi cum venerit hora...."
"I sew very badly, Mr. Hibbs, and I have no Latin."
"Forgive me. I think, though, you sew excellent well."
"Ha!"
"'Twas only a line of Tibullus that cometh now and then to my mind. Et teneam moriens deficiente manu.... I never read Tibullus with the boys. Not altogether suited, I felt, to their time of life. And yet sometimes, as in those particular lines, my dear, he is quite innocent, indeed expressing sentiments appropriate to a man of honorable feeling. 'May I'—(saith Tibullus, my dear)—'may I look on thee when cometh my last hour, and may I hold thy hand as I sink dying!'"
"I must tell Kate this one is nearly past mending, but if she'll make a pattern for me I believe I could follow it in my blundering fashion. He ought to have a change of them for every day. I know a place on Sudbury Street where they have better material than this, and cheap."
"I recall some other lines from the same poem—me mea paupertas vita traducat inerti, dum meus adsiduo luceat igne focus.... 'Let the humble fortune that is proper to me lead me through a quiet way of life, if only my hearth may glow with an unfailing fire!' You'd suppose that the sentiment of an aging man, wouldn't you? And yet they tell that Tibullus, he died young.... Charity...."
"Yes, Mr. Hibbs?"
"Charity, having spent, I must admit, very nearly twenty years—beginning, let us say, with the year I commenced study at Harvard, the which was the thirteenth year of my life—having spent so much time, I say, in what would seem, to some, a most arid employment, namely the cultivation of the abstract, the exploration (tentative, limited by the frailty of mine own poor powers) of the borders of philosophy—having spent thus much time in—shall I call it, perhaps, a sanctuary of loneliness?—not altogether unrewarding, you understand; not without the consolation of the poets; not without an occasional satisfaction, like unto discovery, within the region of the inquiry: nevertheless, out of such loneliness—out of——"
"Sir——"
"Nay, forgive me, Charity, I'm most clumsy with words, and could never speak bold and plain what's in my mind, the which plain speaking I do much admire to discover in others, but let me essay it. Having spent, I say, almost twenty years, yes, almost a full score in the—I must call it the dust of scholarship, save the mark—one may then, suddenly as it were, look out as through the window of a study, let us say, and observe that outside this not altogether despicable refuge there is—oh, spring perhaps, as it is even now, my dear—and one may presume to hope that one hath not remained so long out of the world, nor grown so old, but that—but that——"
"Mr. Hibbs, I pray you——"
"Not so old but that perhaps one who is truly at the very brightest beginning of the springtime might find—might find in one's maturer years—oh, nothing like the call of youth to youth, my God! but—but.... You have not known how I—how since you began coming here in so much kindness—I think you have not known——"
"Mr. Hibbs, I must speak too, and I pray you say no more till I have done. The sentiments you express, the which—oh bother! There goes my thread again and I wasn't even pulling at it, they needn't to make it so miserable weak, do they? The sentiments—look, Mr. Hibbs: when we moved to Dorchester last autumn, I found there a place on the shore, just beyond reach of the high tides, a pretty place, a kind of—what was it you said?—a sanctuary of loneliness, at any rate I made it one. The rocks hide it from the house, from the land; 'tis like a room overlooking the open waters, where all the ships from the south must pass when they come in for the harbor, and I go there—oh, whenever I may. My mother thinks I'm looking for seashells or other such employment suited to children, and so I do bring in any pretty ones I find—and then throw them away secret-like, la, to make room for more—why, I'm a deceiving small beast, Mr. Hibbs, learned deception young, marry did I, I often wonder that anyone can put up with me. Well—even last winter, if it wasn't outright storming, I'd bundle up in my coat and go out there. The rocks break the wind. You can look a long way out.... I told Reuben about this. He understood—well, of course he did. One expects understanding from Reuben, I don't quite know why."
"I am not certain that I myself understand you, Charity."
"I must say more then?... But perhaps you will tell me, as my mother would, that at my years I can know nothing of love, and yet I do.... Sometimes I'll see a sail that looks from a distance like the Artemis. But I watch any sail that appears, because—because who can say what manner of ship it will be that brings him home?—and now you are weeping, but Mr. Hibbs, I never intended——"
"Nay, I—am not. The fireplace a'n't drawing properly—I'll push these logs further back."
"I am a beast."
"Hush!... I think he will come home, Charity—older, as you are, but what you saw in him will not be greatly changed.... But I may be your gray-headed counselor, and—friend?"
"Of course. You aren't gray."
"Soon enough."
"What is it, Mr. Hibbs—what is it that doth compel one to—eh, as they say, to give away the whole heart to another? I would be better, I would be happier, I suppose, if I...."
"I could wish for mine own sake that I knew the answer to that. Why, Charity, it seems we love where we must and no help for it."
"I remember I was not happy, very far from it, a year and more ago, when I was a silly child, had not even met him, indeed had none to love but—oh, poor Sultan. Clarissa of course, but it seems to me I never knew I loved her until I lost her, only took her for granted like sunlight until the day she was no longer there."
"Sultan?"
"Don't you remember Sultan, Mr. Hibbs? Why, the child I was would never forgive your forgetting Sultan. He died, very fat and ancient, soon after we moved to Dorchester. It was the sea air, my mother said. I wept like a fountain. But I think it was some while before then that I had ceased to feel like a child."
Chapter Three
The island fell away in the west. All day long, and for three days more, the ketch Diana held the northeast trade off her larboard bow, close-hauled. Ben supposed that presently Shawn would turn south and prepare for another chicken-thief raid somewhere in the Leeward Islands. On the fifth day he did shift course, but not much, the unchanging wind now on the larboard beam, the Diana's direction southeast.
A withdrawn, taciturn mood had come over Captain Shawn. The members of his ragamuffin crew, including Ben, felt it as schoolboys feel a teacher's cold in the head. For Ben there was the growing urgency of that secret whisper: Something I can do....
Ben was forced to admit that, whatever else might have happened to the year, he had learned a little seamanship. He had acquired sea-legs even before the capture of Artemis. He was never seasick—Shawn himself knew green moments from time to time. Ben had learned the ropes—no mystery after all but quite simple once you agreed to use your head and accept the buckle end of Marsh's belt as a parallel to the sarcasm of Gideon Hibbs. Marsh was acidly fair about that: as soon as Ben's hand had learned to jump for the right rope at the right instant, the belt was no longer used.
Shawn's instruction had followed a different idiom—articulate explanation, with continuing patience (not displayed toward anyone but Ben). Somehow the Irishman conveyed: Let's forget that we seem to be enemies; let's consider this logic of navigation, the sextant, the tiller, the handling of sail, powers of wind and current and the pattern of the clear stars; let's do this as though we were not afraid to turn our backs to each other, you with the knife I let you keep, and I with mine. Ben could respond to this; could not help responding.
The secret whisper continued in the dark.
Ben's body was learning too, his hands calloused and enlarged, his shoulders thickened. Already wiry and tough, he was aware of a burgeoning strength that never reached exhaustion even in the occasional days of bad weather when the mainsail could stiffen and fight back like a living beast. When Ben stripped for swimming, as he had done back there at the island to the amused horror of all aboard, he had noticed a whiplash hardness in leg and thigh, surely much greater than he had possessed a year ago. Ben had been startled to learn—last July, when the Diana put in for careening at another lonely island—that not one other man aboard could swim. So Ben, who had learned it fishlike in the waters of the Pocumtuck River with Reuben darting around him, a little demon of gold and ivory, frolicked alone in the surf and beyond it, amazed and delighted at the buoyancy of salt water and the untiring almightiness of the waves. Even to Shawn it was a mystery. Manuel giggled helplessly. Tom Ball appeared to regard it as a black art.
Once in November, during a lesson on the sextant, Shawn had happened to stretch and flex his shoulders, and Ben discovered that he was fully as tall as Captain Shawn. Another time, Ben spoke with careless sharpness to Joey Mills—the old man's garrulity could be a nuisance—and Joey had drawn back in manifest physical fright, astonishing to Ben until he understood: Well, I could break him in two, couldn't I?
Manuel? One fist, and Manuel would cringe and run.
Ledyard? Maybe, just maybe. That would be a near thing.
Ball? French Jack? Well, hardly. And still, either of them might think twice before starting anything unarmed, or alone.
Dummy? Never, if he got a grip.
Judah Marsh? Why, knives put aside, by God, I could flatten him like a bug, and wash my hands.
Shawn?...
The whisper continued in the dark.
Since leaving the island under the northeast trade, Captain Shawn had spent most of his time in the locked cabin, or on deck in a black and scowling silence. He ordered the log cast unreasonably often; it was plain the Diana was maintaining an even speed, better than nine knots. Ben was present whenever Shawn checked his bearings, and could make his own calculations. When his trick at the helm began at midnight on the seventh night out from the island, the Diana had crossed the 18th parallel and was surely far east of the Leewards, too far if Shawn intended any business with them, and was still running blandly southeast. Why?...
In these wartime years, with no pressure of maritime unemployment to drive hungry men into piracy, some furtive harbors throughout the Caribbean still nourished the old trade, and at some outwardly respectable ports a vessel of dubious virtue could still put in to dispose of this and that with few questions asked. So much had been common talk at Boston; Ben heard it again from the half-timid chatter of Joey Mills. Captain Shawn might have found men in those ports to make up his complement; he never went near one of them, all year long. Joey Mills dared to ask why, and shook his head and spat over the rail. "Tell you why," said Joey Mills, watching Ben with squirrely courage and making sure no one else could hear. "He'll get more men, he says, from the fine prize we a'n't seen yet—or if we seen it we been evermore tacking somewheres else, God almighty damn. But this here ketch, Ben Cory, let alone it seems she a'n't bound for nowhere, she a'n't got nothing. Salt cod, God almighty damn. Put in at one of them places, nothing to trade, he'd be laughed at. They'd give him salt cod, yah. I allow he can't bear no laughing at—now don't betray me, don't never let it out I said no such of a thing—you wouldn't, boy?" Before Ben could even promise, he chuckled in apology and fled, and avoided Ben for days....
Far away ahead this midnight, over the curve of the world, stood the shoulder of Africa. Somewhere in the south—Ben gazed off idly to his right in the murmurous dark—down there beyond the Line, the Spanish and Portuguese settlements of the southern continent. Down there too—so far that one's thought hardly dared trouble with it—the wild cold legendary region of the Horn, Magellan's gateway, the path to the western sea.
Here in the undemanding night Ben found it possible to command the earth to be not vast but small. Merely to point with the right arm toward the Horn—did not that reduce the world to a modest map that might be held in fancy, handled, contemplated?—never mind the thousands of leagues of open sea where that right arm was no greater than one splash of foam. The paradox was familiar. Mr. Gideon Hibbs had touched on it at the borders of philosophy: how, if the container be greater than the thing contained, that organ in the skull must be somehow wider than a galaxy....
The shadow coming slowly aft might be Manuel, ready to relieve Ben at the tiller. No—too soon, and Manuel was aloft. Moonrise had begun some while ago at Ben's left shoulder, magnificent and calm. The shadow was not Manuel but Daniel Shawn, prowling the dark as he often did when, as Ben supposed, he could not sleep. Ben suppressed a word of greeting. His arm over the tiller held firm with elastic readiness for all of the Diana's whims, as Shawn himself had patiently taught him it must do. Captain Shawn stood a long time at the after rail gazing northwestward.
It could happen some night, Ben knew, out of a silence like this. The unknowable driven brain could abruptly decide that Ben Cory must no longer live. What is madness?... After the decision, execution—but not immediate, perhaps. It did not seem to be Shawn's way to kill with his own hand.
He was capable of it. Joey Mills had told Ben how, in the battle with the Schouven, Shawn had boarded the sloop with the rest, two pistols in his belt. Disdaining a cutlass after the pistols were empty, Shawn went in howling with his short knife, and that on a tall Dutchman with long arms—as if, Mills muttered, death was a nothing to Captain Shawn, or welcome. But Shawn wasn't for dying that day.
Quite gently Shawn asked; "All quiet, Ben?"
"Yea, quiet." Not "Yea, sir." Not "Yea, Captain." The self clinging to integrity will snatch at trivia. But for Ben there was a kind of upside-down shame in reflecting that anyone else aboard who omitted the formula of humility would very quickly be instructed with a rope's end. And so, Ben Cory thought, it seems Ben Cory doth care about the opinion of others, be they only the rats aboard a pirate ketch, the which would be dem'd good and comical—could I be telling it to Ru before the fire in Uncle John's library, and sweet Kate maybe bringing us a plate of——
"Ben, who's aloft?"
"Manuel."
"Have you chanced to look aft, the last half-hour, boy?"
"No. Watching the bow, so to keep the bearing you ordered."
"Then give me the helm, and take this glass"—Shawn's voice was rising curiously—"and look well abaft, and tell me what you see at all."
"Where away?"
"God damn it," said Shawn, still rather softly, "find it yourself!" He thrust the spyglass into Ben's hand and snatched the tiller, humming in his teeth and not pleasantly.
Ben searched the northwestern arc, and found nothing but empty sea. Something to throw him off his guard?—he lowered the glass quickly, but Shawn was not even watching him. Shawn was staring forward, head high, the moon's whiteness displaying his face, cold and suffering and proud.
"I don't find anything."
"Look again."
"I see the stars, a quiet sea, and not another thing."
"Judah!" Marsh hurried aft. "Take the glass, Mr. Marsh. See what you can find to the northwest."
Ben stood away from them. He saw Marsh stiffen with uneasiness or bewilderment; fidget, and mutter, and rub the glass with an end of his shirt. "Mr. Shawn, sir, my one glim a'n't too sharp."
Shawn immensely filled his lungs and slowly let the breath go. "You too maybe?... Well—it may be gone." It might be easier, Ben thought, to endure the ache of waiting if Shawn himself would look aft again, but he would not.
"Was it a sail, Captain?"
"It wasn't the Lamb of God walking upon the waters, Mr. Marsh. I am changing course two points. Sou'-sou'east, d'you hear? Call that fool Manuel from aloft, who wouldn't be seeing the entire Royal Navy and it half a mile to wind'ard. He and Dummy will make ready to haul me the tack—will you move, man?" Marsh vanished forward; Ben heard his thin snarl crying Manuel down from the masthead. "Well, Cory?—get to the mizzen, damn you!" Ready in his place—what else?—Ben presently heard Marsh's advisory shout. "Cory, Mother of God, can't you speak up like a seaman?"
"Ready!"
"Lee-oh!" The Diana answered calmly, undismayed. "Trim her!" Ben had already done so, handily. "Will you sheet her in, you bloody farmer? Oh, dear Mother of God, for men to sail with me!..." Undismayed, the Diana settled to her new course under the friendly wind. A small maneuver—a crew of boys could have done it in this soft landsman's weather. Ben knew that Shawn had no cause to rave at his part in it; knew also in a moment that the crying voice climbing from the region of the helm was no longer concerned with him. "Speak plainer! I cannot hear you.... Oh, but I will go alone if I must. Have I not alway gone alone? Have I not alway made mine own law—as I am directed, as I am directed—but thou knowest I am compassed about.... Plainer! Speak plain!—or send me a wind and not this damned crawling breeze! Am I to meet them in a bloody calm?... Then, most soberly and quietly: "Ben—aft with you!"
Ben returned aft, being on duty and having perhaps no choice. "Am I to take the helm again?"
"First look, only once more. Man dear, don't you see?—it could be I'm growing old and foolish, but—but for all you hate me, you can't call me fool, Beneen, you can't do that."
"I never have."
"Then look once more—the way I might've been deceived—the way the Devil's minions are in the thing tonight, now that's no lie. I waited too long, so I did. I cast about, while time wasted, praying for the easier course—a fleet—men enough—seeing I could not have the support of those who should have understood me. I prayed for the easier course, so I did, but I tell you now, Beneen, a man must never do that."
And Ben looked again, and found nothing. "It was a sail?"
"I thought so. I thought so, Ben."
"If you'll call Manuel aft, whose eyes are good as mine——"
"Manuel is it? Have I time for the witless, when—but I may have been deceived. Not there, you say, and I'm believing you. Nothing?"
"Nothing. Sometimes, Mr. Shawn, I've been fooled at night by a whale's spouting. The spray of him seems to hang in the air a while, and I suppose moonlight may lend it the look of a sail." Shawn laughed a little, his breathing slower. He seemed not annoyed that an untamed pup should be instructing him concerning sea-born illusions. "Well, do you take the helm again, and this'll be your bearing, steady as she goes."
"May I ask, Mr. Shawn, is this course for Martinique?"
"It seems to be gone and that's the truth, and yet I could have sworn—what? Martinique? Why, if my reckoning is right, her present course maintained will bear her a very far way to the east of Martinique."
"Nothing before us then but the South Atlantic."
"The Line, the South Atlantic, and the Horn. No more waiting. No more of this petty cruising about. No more—piracy. Do you hear me?"
"Less than a year ago I might have jumped at the sound of that."
"Not now?"
"You're not speaking to a boy now, Mr. Shawn."
"'Deed so, friend? When did that happen?"
"Who can ever say? It happened.... Mr. Shawn, I've asked you a dozen times, and have been refused, and now I say again: I wish to go in that cabin and speak with Captain Jenks."
"And I'll be telling you for maybe the hundredth time, Ben, he is not captain of this or any other vessel.... Ben, with all the charity I've seen in you, can you not hear a man acknowledge his error? I said, no more piracy. I have done wrong, almost betraying my purpose. I say now—and this is like something you once said to me yourself—henceforth I will not lift my hand against any man except to defend my life and my purpose. Jenks?—why, I think he can be released, and you too if it must be so. I shall be forced to put in at some Brazilian port for water and provisions, and there, I think—well, we shall see. Can I say more?"
"Yes, you could, Mr. Shawn, because I'm asking you again: Why do you hold him at all? Mills says you question him continually, and he answers nothing."
"That's true." Shawn gazed steadily northward, at the open sea. "Answers nothing, and will any man hold such a silence with nothing to hide?"
"Hide, Mr. Shawn? Captain Jenks, hide?"
"Must I say again, he is not captain now?... Ben, did you know I spent more than a year in that sorry city of Boston?"
"No, how should I?"
"Oh, you might've.... More than a year, seeking support for the greatest venture a man's spirit ever conceived. I was ignored, laughed at, brushed aside. I sought out the merchants, for behind all the pious canting they've become the rulers of your Boston and I suppose you know it. Sought 'em out one after another, and spilled my heart, the while they looked at my poor clothes and shuffled their feet and remembered important business. I sought audience with your Governor Dudley himself—Mother of God, would he even admit me to the bloody presence? Queen Anne's man, body and soul.... Somehow, Ben—and mark this, I pray you—at some time that miserable year, the story was passed about that I had been with John Quelch. And—why, damn their souls, so I was, for a while. I did ship with him, being penniless and starving, and escaped him as soon as I might. He was evil, Ben, a common pirate, it was right he should hang. I served him briefly, I did that, having no choice, and the rumor of it was made a cause why I should be persecuted, ignored, laughed at, brushed aside. Compassed about.... And still, didn't I ask far less than was asked by Cabot, Drake, Magellan? A trifle of support, mind you, a tiny fleet, a sound crew, a charter to explore—don't you see any man of them might have compounded his fortune a hundred times and written his name in history beside my own? But would they? You know the answer, and they shall know the whole of it too, in time.... And somehow, Ben—while I went from one to another wearing my heart out—somehow a few of them did finally understand a little of what I so recklessly told concerning this venture. Certain of them began to think: Why not the venture without the man? You see? Have you ever heard of such a thing as stealing a man's dreams?"
"What has this to do with Captain Jenks?"
"Surely it's plain? The man you childishly call Captain was one of those who began to ask themselves: What if this wild, shabby, tedious Irishman hath glimpsed something of value after all? What if there are new lands for the taking in the western sea, and why should this miserable noisy Sligo man, this old Shawn, why should he have any part of it?... Why, I couldn't believe this of Peter Jenks myself for a long time—never came to me that he was one of 'em, till he hired that man Hanson in the room of me—and that in despite of your great-uncle."
"But——"
"Whisht, Ben! You'll be telling me your great-uncle gave me no promise hard and fast, but I know men's hearts. But for Jenks, I'd've had my way, and glory in it for Mr. Kenny as well as me, don't you doubt it. It wasn't to be. When he took on that agent Hanson, sure my voice was plain enough, I could see how they'd been planning it all the while. You see now, don't you? Had I not taken Artemis from him, Jenks would have her now the other side of the Horn, and Boston would never see her again. But I, Ben—why, I shall give her back the name of Artemis, and I'll send her home, when she's taken us to the new country...." In the silence Ben caught the glint of something—merely the copper farthing; at length Shawn spoke again, quietly: "True, Ben—nothing before you now but the Line, and the South Atlantic, and the Horn. Nothing below you but the Atlantic. And once on a time wasn't I a boy of your age who believed that God was over me?" He was moving away. Ben thought he might be weeping, but his voice often sounded so when his eyes were dry. "And over you, over all that breathe. Oh, but in those days I was that young and foolish you wouldn't know the misguided thoughts that would seize hold of me and deceive, for the voices I heard then were not God's voice, they were far other. Maybe even now I'm not certain of anything, except that I cannot die until I've looked again on the color of the western sea." He returned swift and silent out of the shadow and stood close to the helm, eyes level with Ben's; no taller than Ben. Not even as tall, perhaps. "What now? Why did I say that, Ben? Why did I say, the color of the western sea?"
Ben supposed his right hand could flash away from the tiller to his belt, if it must. "How could I know why you say any of the things you do?"
"Ah? But you must sail with me, all the way. Will you not say it? Will you be forcing me to destroy you? Then I'll be alone, Ben. These men with us—what are they but phantoms, all of 'em? Knife 'em, they'd bleed smoke—not blood, Ben—smoke, and drift away downwind. None aboard but you and me, now that's no lie...."
But Ben, for sheer pity and disgust, terror and bewilderment, self-blame and homesickness and again pity, could not speak at all, and Shawn moved away, himself like smoke, past another black shadow by the mizzen that must have heard all he said; at this Shawn snarled: "If the wind changes, Mr. Marsh, you needn't be calling me—I shall know it."
Under Ben's hand beautiful Diana ran southward, cutting away the miles with a timeless whisper at her bow; but during the night the wind fell off, the air growing dull, silent, and in the morning dead. The sun rose on sails become slack, bemused in idleness on a mirror sea.
"I wondered, in fact, that she had not long ago destroyed herself in one of those seizures."
"They seldom do, Reuben, though often they injure themselves. She is nearly forty, that woman we saw today—I've known her bite her tongue and bruise herself, but nothing worse. As a rule they die somewhat young. It's as well you saw her so—the condition is not too rare and you'll encounter it again."
"And the books?"
"Have nothing to offer but speculation and bad advice. Nothing I've tried ever had the slightest effect.... What's that?—I mean the one that called from back there in the pasture."
"Red-winged blackbird."
"I wish I knew 'em all, the way you do."
"Brought up with 'em in the wilderness, Amadeus. But nobody could know them all.... Do the books tell anything of the cause?"
"Nothing worth your notice. Speculation, most of it not based on clinical observation. And (as you suggest) without at least some knowledge of immediate causes, treatment's only a blind groping. We must try it of course, because sometimes a guess is correct. But somehow we must also push back along the chain of causes—widen the area of light—somehow.... As you may or may not know, there are many going about in the world far madder than that poor epileptic, who is not really mad at all but merely drops into her fit from time to time, and usually comes out of it unharmed. A fearful thing to watch, Ru—I dare say you still feel it in your stomach. But some of the forms of madness that don't so loudly announce themselves are much worse."
"The world may be a mad place, Amadeus, but there go the peeper frogs. I told you they might, on such an afternoon."
"So they do. You don't suppose——?"
"If we continue to the pond, they'll stop. However, should we then squat patient in our boots, the thing might be done—imitating boulders, you know. We might, as it were, rock ourselves into the semblance of a natural outgrowth."
"Who now hath plumbed the depths of a contumelious paronomasia?"
"Ha!"
"That log looks more comfortable."
"If the ants on it are black, yes. If red, no."
"They look black, the few I see. Is there a difference?"
"Oh, my friend! How did you survive till I came to you?"
"Don't know."
"Yes, they're black.... By the madder ones, you mean the raving kind? Those with wild delusions?"
"Those, and others. I was thinking of the quieter sort, who are seldom called mad. Men and women eaten up with suspicion. So that—I think you've never encountered this, but beware of it if you do—so that everything happening within their purview must be bent to the shape of that suspicion; and to hear them talk you'd suppose the whole world was allied in conspiracy against them. I'd guess that such a state of mind is begotten of a most fearful vanity. And what evil is commoner than vanity? Of course that particular sickness of the mind is only one of its fruits. How seldom do you find anyone who hath ever attempted to look on his own life with something like the eye of eternity! But without at least some detachment, vanity is bound to grow."
"As for example the seeming humility of proper Christians?"
"Oh, that, yes—but don't trouble thyself too much about that. It would seem they need it. Well, and there are those madder ones devoured by jealousy, spite, greed, and fears of a hundred kinds, mostly groundless. It's no-way true that all is vanity, but I think you may say that vanity is the source of nearly all the saddest things in human nature. Nay, I think our poor wench with the fits, by comparison with many respectable souls, is quite sane."
"And so what is madness?"
"Do thou tell me, thou who gavest me once a definition of health that serves me still."
"A—a gross exaggeration of some natural activity of the mind? 'Lilies that fester....'"
"I'm pleased I made thee discover the Sonnets. Yes, that might serve.... But the hunger for verifiable knowledge—now there's an activity of the mind, natural I think, but sluggish or nonexistent in most men, and in a few like thee and me, very intense: are we then mad?"
"If such hunger for knowledge became painful or annoying to others, Amadeus, I am sure we would be called mad."
"Mm-yas—thought I'd caught thee, but (as usual) I'm caught instead. So consider—would you say there are any activities of the mind that would not deserve the name of madness if sorely exaggerated?"
"Maybe none. That hunger for knowledge could become a thing I'd call madness, if the pursuit of it caused a man to neglect too many other matters—such as sunlight and peeper frogs and Charity's pictures and the brightness of a swallow flying."
"I'll agree. I dare say anything out of proportion may become a madness. Even generosity. Even love."
"But Amadeus, I do ever think that love is not a thing, but more like a region where we travel. Something of that I said once to Ben. I can't remember when it was, and he may not have understood it—I'm sure I said it badly. Like a region, where we travel with—oh, some vision, some of the time. As sleep is like a region, and waking. Do I still say it badly, Amadeus? I mean that no one can give his friend a handful of sunlight, but may walk in it with him, and so love him."
After scant and haunted sleep, Ben woke to stillness where motion should have been. Stumbling up on deck long before the beginning of the forenoon watch, he saw Shawn on the quarterdeck deep in a stillness of his own, ignoring Tom Ball who muttered at him, and Joey Mills who stood by the helm but had nothing to do there, for the Diana had lost all way, the sails were dead rags, and if some profound current still moved her there was nothing to tell of it in this deathlike air under a brazen sun.
Ben remained forward, to avoid Shawn. Matthew Ledyard was lounging near the bow with nothing to do. His stare was not unfriendly; he even wished Ben a laconic good morning. Maybe he wanted to break his custom and share a word or two out of his permanent gloom. Like Ben, in these tropic days Ledyard had discarded shirt and jacket, wearing nothing above his belt but a kerchief around his head to moderate the sun and hold sweat out of his eyes. His gaunt chest was darkly tanned; it had never seemed to Ben that the purple splash on Ledyard's face was particularly ugly—once you grew used to it, it was a nothing, no more than another man's scar or mole. Unnecessarily Ledyard said: "We're in for a calm."
For several days a carrion reek had corrupted the air of the forecastle, and the murky hell-hole of the galley where French Jack prepared his strange offerings. Likely more barrels of the salt cod had gone bad and ought to be hunted out. Mr. Ball claimed the whole dirty cargo was spoiled and should be heaved overside, but French Jack explained that cod smelt that way anyhow; in spite of the pride of a Boston man, Ben was inclined to agree. With no breeze to sweep the nastiness away, the stench overhung the deck also, as though the Diana herself were exhaling corruption in a mortal sickness. To come up into this from the fetid forecastle was for Ben like waking to a continuation of nightmare. He was in a mood to fume and curse at anyone—particularly at Shawn, and that not for the large and just reasons, but simply for a certain standing order that forbade any of the hands to sleep on deck. For Ledyard, however, Ben managed a smile and a grunt of agreement. "Hope I may spend some of my trick aloft."
"Ay—stinks, don't it?" And Ledyard startled Ben exceedingly by adding: "Like a dead man's dream it is. A fair hope gone rotten."
Ben grew alert. Ledyard had never said anything like that to him before. "Maybe it'll be as bad at the masthead. This morning I believe we could stink out Father Neptune himself. Is no one aloft?"
"I was. Captain called me down. Seems dem'd foolish even to him to keep a lookout now—if we're becalmed so's everything else that might be about." He glanced aft and continued, a murmur in his smallest voice: "Cory, him and Mr. Ball was just now speaking of breaking out the boat and towing her. Understand that? Take at least six men at the oars to move her. Six men in a boat, in this sun, nothing to their bellies but p'ison stew or salt cod.... Step further away from the hatch, will you?" He lounged away to the bow, and Ben followed him as casually as he might, noticing how, with no way on her at all, the Diana had at some time since the wind died turned completely about, her lifeless bow pointing homeward to the north. Ben stood with the blaze of the morning sun behind him and watched the fire of it on the battlefield of Ledyard's face. "You might say, Cory, if so be he wants to kill all us mis'able scrannel hands, us buggerly rascals, that's what he'll do. Just get us out there at the oars in the sun, to tow the old bitch, that's all it needs." His browned sturdy arms spread out along the rail, Matthew Ledyard looked much like a man crucified, his dark face unflinching in the sun. "And I wonder would you be out there too—Mister Cory? Pulling an oar? With your charmed young life, so even the tropic sun won't strike you down? Or back here on the deck belike, so to sail with Captain Shawn when the rest of us is maybe dried up and burnt too black to stink? Or will you now be trundling aft to tell the Captain what old Ledyard said to you?"
Ben dropped his hand on the man's iron wrist. It did not move away. Ledyard's intense stare did not seem to be one of wrath, for all his words. "I have never carried tales to Shawn and you know it."
"Ya-ah—maybe I do know it. Maybe I wished to learn if you could ever be angered any way at all."
"I can." Ledyard's heavy brows lifted; his brown eyes in the sun squeezed down to little fires. "I can, and since you're a-mind to speak to me at last, I'll say this: the hope was never fair, it was rotten in the beginning, and I told him so. He lets me live because he imagines he can change me into one like himself, no other reason. He cannot. As for me, I swallow the puky food and haul on the ropes and jump to Marsh's orders because I wish to live, no other reason. I'm not Shawn's man."
"Whose then?"
"My own."
"That'd be the hard thing to prove in the sight of God."
"And you shall be your own man, nothing less."
"Shall I so?" Ledyard winced heavily and turned his face away from the beating of the sun at last, but Ben tightened his grip. "How could that be, now? You don't know, boy, you don't know——"
"Why, I say it shall be."
"And who a devil's name are you? A boy—a——"
"Benjamin Cory, son of Joseph Cory of Deerfield, adopted son of Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury, who owns this ketch. Look back at me!"
Ledyard did so, plainly with great effort—changed; certainly without wrath, perhaps even without curiosity. It seemed to Ben that what he must say was only something that Ledyard would surely have been saying to himself, and for a long time. "You will believe it, Matthew Ledyard, so now listen to me. She is not the old bitch. She is the ketch Artemis out of Boston, and the man who's a second father to me, whom you served well for nearly the length of my life—he had a hand in designing her. My brother and I climbed about on her ribs when she was a-building up the Mystic River—you were there. Since those days I have loved her, as Kenny's vessel and mine, sir, mine—and you were her carpenter, and Peter Jenks is her captain." Ledyard groaned at the sound of that name and jerked his hand away and pounded it on the rail. Ben reached out quickly and tapped his purple cheek. "Look back at me, I say! Chips—what's the name of this ketch?"
"The ketch is the Artemis," he said, harshly and choking on it. "Step away from me, Cory, or they'll notice us from the quarterdeck."
Ben did so, instinct urging him to wait, to look away, to lounge at the bow in the semblance of idleness till Ledyard's whisper came: "What will you do?"
"Who would be with us?"
Dubiously the whisper said: "Joey Mills. But he's old and puny."
"Are you sure of him?"
"Sure enough. We—have spoke of it. But——"
"I've seen him wear a pistol sometimes. I suppose he could use it?" Ledyard grunted. "I suppose he might even bear a message from me to Captain Jenks?"
"Oh, my God!... You mean it, don't you?"
"I will ask you to cease doubting it. Now, how many men would it require, to get Artemis home to Boston?"
"God!... Three or four hands could do it somehow." He sounded calmer. Glancing at him again, Ben found his face no less a battlefield, even more perhaps, but it had grown sharp with intelligence. "On such a thing as that, Mr. Cory, you'd be obliged to play it timid, understand me? Reef in at the first hint of dirty weather, if you'll take an old seaman's word for it. Comes fast, do you see? You remember we rode out a bad one off Grenada last year, and it was all hands hop to it, and even then it near-about caught us. Now imagine two or three men trying to get her snug in the time we did it then! Remember you got to keep one at the helm. All the same—all the same, sir, three or four hands could do it. That—is your intention?"
"It's my intention to try. What about Dummy?"
"Shawn's dog. Jack's another dog, a mad one."
"That's mostly show, I think. It makes others let him alone."
"Maybe, but don't trust him, Mr. Cory. He's not—with us."
"Manuel?"
"Can neither fight nor hold his tongue.... If you—if we can take care of Shawn and the others, you would release the Captain?"
"Certainly."
"Then I ... Mr. Cory, I'll beg you for your word on a—on two things, if I may."
"What?"
"If we can do it, and if Captain Jenks is free, put in a word for me. Let him know that whatever else I did, I tried to change back to what I was. Let him know I went back. Those would be the words, Mr. Cory. Say to him, if so be I can't say it myself, say that Matthew Ledyard went back."
"I will."
"And one other thing. If we can do it, then when we raise the Cape or—my God, better if it might be Rhode Island, but I suppose there's no hope of that—aid me, if you can, to get away in the boat. It's a thing, Mr. Cory—I've got a fear I wouldn't hang decent. Sooner drown. Would it sit fair with your conscience to help me run for it? Would you do that much, if I can help you in this thing?"
Ben said: "It sticks in my conscience that hanging never mended anything, and I will do that if I can. It'll mean deceiving Captain Jenks, helping you steal the boat, but I will do it. Matthew Ledyard, I'm eighteen, with less than a year at sea against the many that you've served. Can you take orders from me?"
Wonderingly, Ledyard said: "Yes, sir, I can."
"Bide the time then. It will be soon. I must speak with Mills and do one or two other things."
Ben spoke quickly—already he heard the commotion of Dummy lurching up from the forecastle with his monkey, and he was dizzy with the first full understanding of what had taken place. Well, damn it, I was wishing to make things happen!... As he moved away from Ledyard the man's whisper followed him: "Don't forget, those are the words, Mr. Cory—Matthew Ledyard went back...."
The monkey had begun to ail when the fruit gave out, after the Diana left the Bahamas, although she had endured other periods of poor eating without harm. This morning she looked half dead in the great hairy cradle of Dummy's arms. Dummy squatted with her at the foot of the mainmast, crooning hopelessly. Sometimes in the last few days she had swallowed a bit of sea biscuit if Dummy chewed the miserable stuff first to soften it. This morning she would not, but only shivered in spite of the sullen heat and twisted her wise black head away from the repulsive mass. Ben on his way aft paused to consider them, aware that of the two sorrowful ape-faces, Dummy's held the greater pain. The little black beast was merely dying.
She had been lively and delighted with her new home after her capture from the Schouven, learning every corner of the ketch—including the galley, where she could engage in shrieking encounters with French Jack. Since she returned continually, and never got anything there except missiles and rhetoric unsuited to the tender sex, Ben deduced that because of her streak of hoyden she must relish war for its own sake. Jack never once scored a hit. Best of all she loved soaring in dizzy flights all over the rigging, and hanging by her tail from the crosstrees to contemplate the sky and the ocean and the ways of man. She would come quickly down out of that for Dummy if he smacked his lips, but not for anyone else—except, occasionally and with the air of granting a favor, for Ben.
Now it seemed likely that her airy journeys were ended. Dummy gazed up at Ben with the grieving eyes of an ape-mother, and Ben could find nothing worth saying, but touched his finger to the tiny black bullet head that paid him no heed. Dummy smiled in his loose bewildered way, and Ben moved on.
Joey Mills was scuttling down the short companion ladder. Ben wished to detain him, but Shawn had noticed Ben and called to him. Ben whispered hastily: "I've spoke with Ledyard—he'll inform you what passed between us. Tell him I said he was to do so—and wipe that surprise off your face, quick!" Ben climbed to the quarterdeck, not glancing back to see how much Joey had understood. Shawn in this reeking glare of morning light looked old. No wrinkle, no scar of smallpox was spared, and none of the white dust at his temples. His hand had a fine tremor and he needed shaving.
"Mr. Ball," he said in a voice of weariness, "go below and get your breakfast."
"Yea, sir—but it be'n't yet eight bells, and you'm not eat a bite since yesterday noontime."
Shawn spoke with ugly patience: "I said go, and will I be explaining? I wish to speak with Cory alone."
"Yea, sir." Ball made a vague motion at his forelock, and waddled past Ben with a glance of remote dislike, muttering under his breath.
Shawn watched Ball's back out of sight. "Even he would desert me, had he anywhere to go. He was not so fat and sullen when he sailed with John Quelch—and escaped Quelch when I did—and listened when I told him of the western sea, and seemed, like you, to be understanding it. I suppose time's gone over all of us, and I alone faithful to the vision. Did I not say they were all phantoms, all but you and me?"
"You wished to speak with me?"
"Cold, cold. It's the cold good morning I get from you."
"Did Judah Marsh have visions, Mr. Shawn?"
"Oh, Ben, Ben! Marsh is a tool to be used, a thing with a cutting edge in the shape of a man. And Manuel is a lump of muscle, a sort of poor engine for pulling ropes, in the shape of a man, and Dummy another, with hardly even the shape. They're all phantoms, all but you and me."
"At this moment, your thing with hardly the shape of a man is grieving like a mother over his pet that's like to die in a day or so."
"So? Well, what should that be to you?"
"Much, I find, Mr. Shawn. And I suppose no one ever found it comfortable to cease being a boy."
"Hm? Your mind's running in strange courses. Maybe it's true you've come to be something like a man. Wisha!" said Shawn, and tried to smile—"nearly as tall as me, now that's no lie." His hand came out in an abortive gesture of friendship, and fell to his side. "Dummy, Ben, is what I made him. I found him on your foul Boston water front, sweeping and carrying garbage in a warehouse. I sat down by him with a length of rope and showed him sailor's knots, and he grinned and took the rope and showed me he knew them too. Then, seeing he knows well what you say for all he can't speak, I told him of the new countries in the western sea, and the vision did strike fire in him—Mother of God, I saw it! Plainer, more honest than I've seen it in many a man who hath all his wits and the power of speech. And I said to him: 'Will you sail with me then?' And he knelt in the filth of the warehouse and patted my boots. Poor lump, have I not given him vision and purpose? Could I heal his dirty monkey for him I would do it, now that's no lie. But I am not God, Ben—only God's instrument. Now take this glass. It's there, Ben, but when I try to bring the glass on it I lose it—it must be my eyes or this damned blaze of light—yet without the glass I see it. Why, even Ball saw it, but would have it a floating tree. A floating tree!" said Shawn with thin bitterness, and smiled, and held out the spyglass.
Very far away it was, a dark smudged line at the angle of a rakish sail, miles away over a flat sea where nothing stirred—no, something did stir out there as Ben took the glass, a black triangle of fin cruising in calm perhaps a quarter-mile to starboard, but Shawn was not concerned with that, and Ben paid it no heed as he sought to bring the distant shape under the power of the lens.
Ball was right. In the glass it was quite plainly a floating tree-trunk, felled or uprooted by storm maybe a long time ago and swept here by the whims of wind and current from God knew where. A single branch stood upright at that deceiving angle; a heavier one submerged must have been overbalancing it.
Ben was remembering an April afternoon when Artemis came into Boston harbor, and Faith stood beside him, and Daniel Shawn also was someone new, both admirable and good. He was remembering certain acts of kindness, of almost incredible forbearance, chess games, lessons with the sextant, jests and tall stories told in moments of relaxation during the long armed truce, and told without any overtones of madness or evil. He was remembering above all the magic of a voice, and how the vision it generated had stirred his own spirit with all the rocketing enthusiasm of a boy and the more sober acceptance of a man—for surely, no matter what madness and evil there were in Shawn, it was still as true as sunrise that there must be new lands in the western sea, and some day those would be discovered, and one could fairly trust (as Shawn said) that all men's life on earth would be the richer for it. Remembering all this, it seemed wholly impossible to Ben that he could actually do what he now intended. He prayed for at least a little time of delay, and hesitantly said: "Mr. Shawn, it seems we've swung full about during the calm this morning. By the sun, I make it that our stem here is pointed near due south, and so——"
"And the sail is southwest by west, and when I saw it last night it was northwest, but Mother of God, Ben, I make nothing much of that. They could have made a better run in the night than we did before the wind fell away. Even if they be common men aboard her, that's possible. The great thing—ah, have you sometimes thought me mad, Ben, until now?—the great thing is, you see it too, and so you know I am not deluded. Now give me back the glass. I'll try once more if I can't find her in it."
Ben knew he must no longer delay, or he could not do the thing at all. He said: "The marks on her side will be the letters of her name—must be mighty large to show at such a distance, I cannot quite make them out, except there are three, and then a space, and then a D. The next after the D may be a Y."
"Give me the glass!" Shawn snatched it and held it to his eye, but with such wildly shaking hands that surely he would find nothing in it. The sight of such weakness sickened Ben, yet at the same time gave him a sense of his own power overwhelming as a wave, and of amazement that he could ever have feared this man Shawn, or believed Shawn to be stronger than himself.
Shawn's struggle with the spyglass was not prolonged. Something—possibly sweat on his hands—caused the glass to slip and fall to the deck with a sharp tinkle of breakage. Ben thought: Something broke in me then, and when he dies something in me will die and no help for it. He would have retrieved the glass for Shawn, but Shawn stooped quickly, blood suffusing his face, and leaned at the rail fumbling at it aimlessly, though he must have known when a shard of broken glass fell from his fingers that the thing was smashed beyond saving. "And didn't I know last night that I must meet them in a calm? And alone. I was not told I would be blind also."
"Mr. Shawn——"
"Blind!" Shawn said, and hurled the spyglass far out over the flat water, toward the black blade that calmly cruised in its wide circuit of the motionless Diana.
"Mr. Shawn, Peter Jenks would speak for me, if I may enter the cabin. Merely the sight of me would make him speak. Does he know I am aboard?"
"What? He knows it. I told him long ago you were one of us."
"Then you told him a lie, for I have never been one of your crew and well you know it."
"But you will be," said Shawn, not commandingly but in pleading, almost in pathos, and took hold of Ben's arm. "You will be."
Ben met the blue stare, knowing how in many ways it was truly blind, and shook his head. "I can make Jenks speak, Mr. Shawn. You wish him to speak, do you not?"
"What? Why, he must, if only to confess the sin. It's a very great sin to steal a man's dream. I'd compel no man to die in it."
"What if he never did so, Mr. Shawn?"
Shawn let go his arm. "You question the voice that guides me?"
"Did your voice tell you of the coming of that sloop?"
"I am not God. I am not told everything."
"A sloop bearing Jan Dyckman's name, a sloop that seems now to be moving, Mr. Shawn, in a flat calm where we find no breath of wind at all? But we might be moving presently. Will you look over there—sir?"
Shawn swung about to gaze where Ben pointed, to the northeast. There—no illusion—a faint blackish smudge was visible on the horizon, with a slight hazing in a small area of the burning sky. Shawn turned back to Ben a face transfigured. "Why, there's the answer! Let it come down on us, and we'll outrun them to the ends of the earth. Can you doubt me now? What's that you were asking? Oh, Jenks, Jenks. You may not go in the cabin, Ben, not yet. But sure he'll speak now, and I seeing to it. A word of that sloop and he'll speak, the Devil willing, if I must cut out his damned tongue and let it wag alone." Shawn strode down the quarterdeck laughing—not in music but with shrillness, high and thin, almost an old man's laugh. "Let it come down! D'you hear, Ben? D'you hear?—I say, if that squall comes down on us, Mother of God, we'll not reef one inch of sail, I'll hang the man that tries it. Let it come down, we'll go about and run south for Hell or Heaven, or the western sea, or the dark!"
When Ben reached the companion ladder Shawn had already entered the cabin. Ben heard the door crash, the rattle of the key.
Ben hurried forward, where a voice was crackling and spitting in the lifeless air. Ben had glimpsed Manuel climbing to the masthead; Marsh must have sent him up, not knowing the standing order had been revoked. Tom Ball would be still below, and French Jack serving him what passed for breakfast. Joey Mills and Ledyard had not gone below to eat but stood together near the bow, tightly watching the black scarecrow Judah Marsh, and Dummy with his sick monkey.
Dummy had backed away from Marsh to the rail, shaking his head and moaning. "So throw it over, d'you hear, or will I do it? You've had the dirty Jonah long enough. Wish us to stay beca'med forever? Don't make out you can't understand me, you pig's get, you know every word I say. Throw it over!" But Dummy, who could squeeze no further away from him, began a desperate sidling down the deck, his twisted back pressed against the rail, the monkey whimpering at his shaggy breast.
Coming up behind, Ben said: "Stop that, Marsh!"
The man swung fast, a glare of total amazement above his smile as though he did not know the voice, and doubtless he did not, since Ben had never before in his life spoken in such a tone. "You? I'll take care of you presently." A long arm snaked out, snatching the monkey from Dummy's embrace by a miniature wrist.
Marsh flung her over the side. She made no outcry; only the lightest splash. She surfaced in the mildly rippled water, feebly beating at it, her black button of head scarcely clear of it, already near to death, unable to swim, an atom of life useless and helpless. Dummy had turned automatically, stunned, to watch the arc of her falling. "Now then!" said Marsh, and grabbed at the mute's arm.
The arm surged upward at the touch, a motion like brushing at a fly—Dummy did not look at the man, only at the struggle in the water, too hypnotized by it even to moan or shake his bulging head. But the brushing motion was enough to send Marsh reeling across the deck. He fetched up squealing in the scuppers, his left leg bent under him. His knife was out. Ben saw his leg give way once; then he was upright, advancing slowly and with great care, the blade flat in his hand, swinging from side to side. The monkey sank out of sight. Dummy turned then, and saw Marsh. Head lowered, arms dangling to his ankles, he saw Marsh, and understood, and charged him in a shambling rush.
Joey Mills and Ledyard had not moved.
The monkey broke the surface once more in some last spurt of strength and stubborn hunger for life. Ben slipped out of his trousers and tossed them to Ledyard. "Chips, mind my knife!" He was free of his shoes and climbing naked over the rail.
He gave himself time for a glance out over the still water. The black fin was there, yes, but not too perilously near, he thought—maybe a hundred yards off, and moving away, cutting the water slowly astern of the Diana. The small commotion of the monkey's fall must have gone unnoticed, or the shark would have had her in an instant.
Ben gave himself time for one other glance, backward. Marsh had no knife. Dummy's chest was dripping blood, but the knife lay several feet away. Dummy was over Marsh, a knee on his chest, one fearsome hand closed around his throat, and Marsh was not struggling. His neck was probably broken already; the black eye-patch dangled over his ear; neither eye would see anything more, and the smile was gone.
Joey Mills inside the rail was chattering. "Don't dive, Ben, for God's sake don't! Leave me throw the brute a rope." He had one in his quick little hands, had made it fast to the rail.
"Don't heave it, Joey—let it down." Ben could make out the shoe-button dots of eye. They were fixed and possibly blind. "She could never find it," Ben said. The motion of her arms had almost ceased; she could make no progress through the water. Ben caught the rope and let himself down without a splash, gauged his distance from her, and struck out under water, eyes open.
He found the black shadow of her body and emerged beside her, about to reach for her, but she had life enough yet to grab at him. He turned his head to save his eyes. He felt the clutch of midget fingers in his hair, the scrabble of her legs at his shoulders, and he swam for his life.
Ledyard's wild yell aided him. Until he caught the noise of it he had been concerned only with his need to complete the act, having no time at all to be afraid. The yell brought him sharp knowledge of death, and the one more ounce of speed required to defeat it. He found and seized the rope, and swung with a final burst of violence into safety. Up here in his own element, clutching the rail with Dummy's monkey secure in his other arm, he could look down in time to see not only the black fin lancing toward him from astern but another shape of the same breed, a vast gray hunger shimmering upward from the abyss, shifting to dull silver, cutting water harmlessly at the Diana's side and surging unappeased away.
Dummy stumbled over the deck bleeding from the long gash across his ribs. He blinked in love and fear at the naked god and fell to his knees, then forward to clasp Ben's foot and roll his forehead over it.
"Don't! I pray you, don't!—here, take her! But I fear she'll die, Dummy—I could only bring her back." Dummy reached up for her. Ledyard at Ben's elbow was muttering something about his britches. "In a moment," said Ben. "Mind the hatch, you and Joey. I don't want Jack and Ball coming up yet if we can stop them." He knew somehow without a glance that they would do as he directed. He crossed the deck to the black heap of strangely inoffensive carrion. It seemed to him—outside and apart from this incredibly violent new self of Ben Cory—that his only impulse was to discover whether he could lift that gangling weight. He could, and with astonishing ease. A limp stick, nothing more, a stick with hanging legs and spiritless head and a bad smell. Needlessly he crossed with it back to the starboard side. "The fish will be hungry," he said, and heaved it over. He gripped the rail with both hands, and watched.
They were hungry. Ben watched, thinking not of Jan Dyckman nor of justice nor of the long year ending; thinking only that quiet must presently arrive when this was over, and that in his home country it would be spring. The young apple tree by the kitchen garden—might that be in bloom this morning, and Reuben there to see it? The water briefly boiled in muddy red, and sent its diminishing ripples to infinity, and was still.
Ledyard was tugging at his hand, which could now release its grip on the rail, and urgently shoving something into it—the handle of Ben's knife. "Look to yourself—he's coming!"
Daniel Shawn was framed in the cabin doorway, blankly staring. He could certainly see them all—Joey and Ledyard now by the open forward hatch, Dummy squatting in the shadow of the mainmast cherishing his dying companion, Ben naked at the rail, the knife his father gave him unsheathed and brilliant in the sun. Shawn closed the cabin door and came a step away from it. He remembered; drew out the key from under his shirt and turned his back on all of them, carefully locking the cabin. Then he was advancing, astonishment giving way to some partial understanding, savage and cold. He glanced aloft.
Ben did so too, having almost forgotten Manuel. Manuel was frozen at the masthead, gazing down. Manuel must have seen it all. Ben guessed that not even a roar from Shawn would bring him down at this moment, and Ben was aware of having laughed.
"Well?" Shawn came forward another step or two. "Well? What's this disorder, and thou naked and shameless?"
"Why," said Ben, "this is the garment and shield I wore when I came into the world, as they say, and one day I'll die wearing it, maybe not today. It's my intention to live a long while, after this ketch is returned to Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury."
"Mutiny," said Shawn quietly. His head canted to one side, a danger sign. He had stood so, without a word, when the body of Cornelius Barentsz was cut in quarters and tossed to the sharks. Then as now, the copper farthing had appeared in his left hand, twisting and sparkling. It caught the sun this morning, sending lances of sharp light at Ben's eyes, and Ben turned his knife until it shot the same small cruel messages to Shawn, who winced and briefly turned his face away. "Judah!"
"He can't run any more of your errands. He's sharks' meat, five minutes past. Don't be calling the others and disturbing their breakfast."
"This from you.... Ben, you shall have part of your wish. You shall go in the cabin, immediate. I order you to go there, and here is the key." He took it from under his shirt and tossed it across the deck.
Ben made no motion for it, watching its fall with the corner of his eye. "Joey," he said, "take that key and open the cabin. Tell Captain Jenks that if fortune favors me I'll come to him presently with the key to his leg irons. Tell him, Joey, I am hoping to redeem a year of my life that in folly and weakness I threw away. Tell him that, and return here at once to me."
The key had fallen near to Ben. Joey Mills did not need to pass close to Shawn in order to retrieve it. Small, old and terrified, he was sidling for it when Shawn bellowed: "Joey Mills, do you take orders from a bare-naked child and not from your captain?"
Mills leaped and fluttered like a hurt sparrow. But he had the key, and scuttled to larboard, intending a quick rush aft along by the larboard rail as far from Shawn as he could get. Shawn was wearing no pistols, only his short knife. Ben said: "He won't harm you, Joey. His business is with me, not with you. If he tries to stop you, Ledyard and I will both help you."
"Dummy!" Shawn called that name not in command but in pleading. But even as he spoke, Dummy sobbed once, wetly and loudly, and shambled away up to the bow. Ben glimpsed the monkey's head flopping limp, and the spidery arms. She must have died, and Dummy must have known the moment—yet up there at the bow Dummy was still trying to support her head and make it live.
"Shawn, you spoke of these men as phantoms. Only some of them are that. I think your Judah Marsh was a phantom, and so likely he made a thin meal for the fish. Mills there is a man, and Matthew Ledyard, and Dummy. Men are creatures you've never understood, never. I can see that now. Myself, I begin, just a little, to understand them.... Joey has opened the cabin. Needn't trouble to look behind you. Take my word for it, and now give me that other key."
Shawn did not look behind him. He drew his own knife, slowly, without threat, and leaned his back against the mainmast. "Compassed about.... Ben—why, why? Why must it be so?... And if I do not give you that other key?"
"Then I must take it."
"With that knife. You'll use that knife against the man who would have given you the key to a whole new world."
"Yes."
"Were we not to go there together, Ben?"
"Certainly I dreamed that once myself, before Jan Dyckman was found dying in a dirty alley. And afterwards too, until I learned why he had to lie there."
"Did I not give you the vision?"
"Yes."
"And see it strike fire in you?"
"Yes."
"As I never saw it in any other.... Have I not been kind?"
"Yes."
"Forbearing too? Forgiving a thousand things I'd never take from any other man?"
"Yes."
"But you will use the knife. Have we not spoke together a thousand times like friends? Haven't I made you laugh?"
"Yes."
"But you will use it.... Why?"
"Shawn, do you think I could walk into Heaven across the flesh of Jan Dyckman? Dyckman and others—how many? The men of the Schouven—how many, Shawn? And how many more, before we ever saw the new lands?"
"Does it matter? The vision is greater than the man."
"Nay, I think not, but even let that be so if you wish. But if you follow the vision through blood and deceit, in mad denial of what your senses tell you, then you lose it. Maybe the vision is there yet, but you're mired down in your own folly. You're lost.... Shawn, you're truly compassed about, as you say." Ben raised his voice, knowing that in this windless air it must reach into the open cabin, if Jenks was in any condition to hear it. "Mills and Ledyard and Dummy are with me. Manuel won't fight for you. If Jack or Tom Ball would come on deck, they must pass my friends there at the hatch. I don't wish to fight you, Shawn, nor to harm you. We were friends. I know what you gave me and I value it. But you're lost. You're mired, and I will not go down with you. Now hear the alternatives. If you——"
"I see," said Shawn, perhaps to himself. "I see you will not go with me, the way I should have known it all the while."
"Shawn"—Ben understood that he himself was pleading—"Shawn, there are those who love me, or there were. My life is more to them than ever it was to you. You never knew me. You never saw me. You saw the image of a follower, and that you may have loved, but me you never saw. Now then—my life is all I own. I'm naked in every way. And if you'd take that from me I'll fight you to the last breath, and I'll win. Now hear the alternatives. Throw your knife away and give me that other key. Then, sir, I will not release Captain Jenks until he gives me his word that he will take you unharmed to Boston."
"To man's justice!" said Shawn, and laughed. "No hearing. The short gasp on the tricing line and all vision dead!"
"Men know little enough about justice, that's true. And so I'll give you another alternative. If you will yield, I'll even set you free in a boat when we raise the Cape—as you could have done for me a year ago when I told you plain I'd have no part of your venture."
In dark astonishment, Shawn appeared to be considering that a while. His gaze wandered over the deck. Certainly he would be understanding the open cabin behind him, and whatever Mills and Ledyard were doing at the hatch—Ben could not turn his head to look—and Dummy up there at the bow, shut away in a private world of grief. "Your friend Peter Jenks would never be consenting to such a thing at all."
"He would. His first duty is to Mr. Kenny and to the Artemis. To carry out that duty he must be free of the leg irons. If I say he cannot be free until he gives me his word to let you go, he will give it, and he will keep his word."
"He will not. I know his kind."
"You know nothing of him. You see all men, including me, through your fog of ambition and vanity—and visions.... Well, a third alternative—nay, I can't put that in words."
"To turn this knife against myself?" Shawn's eyes were all black. The copper farthing had been put away. He was shifting lightly from one foot to the other. Ben caught some blurred noise from the forward companionway, but could not turn to look. "I might even do it, Beneen, now that's no lie—if so be the voyage is ended, and wouldn't it be the lightest demand your tender heart has made of me? But Mother of God, I wonder a little what you can do with the pretty ketch, and I not here. Will you look to the northeast?"
Ben did so, a glance not so long as a heartbeat, taking in all that part of the horizon. The faint smudge had grown to a rolling wall of black, far away, maybe not so far. No least breath stirred here aboard or over the near waters still ardent under the sun, but the pressure of storm ached in Ben's eardrums, and over yonder, where the advancing shadow fell, the water, no longer beaten gold, wavered in a troubled darkness. So much Ben discovered in less than a heartbeat, and Shawn chose that moment to leap for him.
The knife was up and aiming for Ben's heart—flashing, perilous enough, intending death, but not shrewdly held as Judah Marsh would have held it, in the flat of the hand, circling and slicing.
To Ben the man's action seemed almost slow; clumsy, weary. He was able with amazing ease to catch the wrist of Shawn's right hand and force it away. His own was seized in the same moment, the blade only inches from Shawn's corded throat. Then indeed a slowness settled over them, a long straining, a silent tension like that of the nearing squall—it must break sometime, maybe not for a long while. Ben became a fighting machine, the power in his left arm sufficient to hold destruction away, the power in his right sufficient to maintain the ultimate threat, but—because of the quivering effort in Shawn's bent arm and because of a tortured reluctance in himself—he was not quite able to fulfill the threat, not quite able to drive the point the two or three inches more down into the soft pulsing spot in Shawn's neck where the life could drain away.
Locked so and waiting, Ben heard commotion break loose behind him. A yell, a shot, a tramp of loud struggling feet, a shrill hollow squeal that could only be French Jack's war cry, and then a different kind of yell from him—higher and thinner, maybe a scream of pain. Ben thought he heard some strangled cursing in Ledyard's voice. No way to learn about it. Nothing to do but hold the fighting machine to its cold purpose until it should win through or take a knife in the back.
It seemed to Ben that he knew, before it happened, everything that Shawn would try to do. Shawn shifted his feet, seeking to bring his boot down on Ben's bare foot. The foot was not there, and Shawn nearly lost his balance, regaining it with a groan of stormy breath—but Ben could still breathe deeply, evenly. After that, he knew, Shawn would not dare to try raising a knee to foul him. I am a little taller after all....
In chill calculation, the fighting machine forced Shawn aft by gradual steps. Behind Ben the noise went on, a thrashing and a snarling. Two men must be rolling about all over the forward deck—which two? Not Joey Mills—surely Mills could do nothing with bare hands against Jack or Tom Ball. It ought to be possible to turn about in this hideous embrace, at least long enough to see——
Ben jerked his right arm backward, hoping to throw Shawn off balance or at least to turn him.
It turned him, but in the swirling and writhing readjustment Shawn's knife found Ben's forehead and drew a hot line downward. Ben heaved at it long enough to save his eye. It returned, for that instant inexorable, gouging Ben's cheek in a lingering kiss of fury to the edge of the jaw. Then Ben's left hand could drive it away, and Shawn was down on his knees and his face was turning brilliant red. But that's my blood on him. Shawn was staring upward. "The color," he said. He was staring directly into Ben's eyes. "The color of the western sea." And his knife clattered on the deck.
Yet he was up on his feet once more, still pressing Ben's knife away, even forcing it downward a little, and the motionless deadlock continued. Weaponless and gasping, knowing defeat, Shawn would not yield. "It's over," Ben said. "Can't you understand?" He would not yield.
Ben's left eye clouded with blood from his forehead. The right eye could discover all things in brilliant detail. A small gray heap by the open hatch—Joey Mills, shot in the forehead. Up near the bow, Ledyard and Tom Ball in a tangle of tom clothes and flailing arms; Ledyard had him by the ears, beating his round head against the planks, and Ledyard's marred face was a great gash of grin. Nearer, a redheaded thing crawled aft inch by inch, holding a pistol, trailing a leg broken between knee and ankle. This thing should have been creeping and suffering in sunlight, but in the sky beyond it a blackness had done away with the sun, while over Ben's head had begun a dubious mutter of troubled canvas.
And only three or four feet away—Dummy, his head swaying from side to side on the blunt neck, moaning, unable to advance, or understand, or take part. Ben could understand that somehow. Dummy had two gods now, and the gods were destroying one another, and the world had fallen to bits while he clutched dead love in his tremendous arms.
Ben could not understand how there should again be huge noise behind him, now that he was facing forward and could see them all with his one unclouded eye, the living and the dead. Manuel? Never. The noise was metallic, a crashing jangle, and the repeated thud of some heavy object striking on the deck. He yelled: "God damn you, Shawn, give over!" Shawn might not have heard that. Shawn was staring fixedly over Ben's shoulder. Except for the grip on Ben's right wrist he was certainly relaxing, weakening fast. It was possible to swing him around again, and look aft, and understand.
With shackled ankles the giant could move in a horrible and careful hopping, the chain jerking behind him. He carried in his hand the three-foot plank that he had torn loose from the floor nails and all. His broad face was one whitened granite calm. Clear of the cabin doorway, he swayed for a time without support, observing—the wrathful sky, the full spread of sail fitfully trembling and stammering under the first warning gusts, the human deeds completed and not completed. His little blue eyes brilliant with all the pure cold of northern ice, he raised the plank, and balanced it, and hurled it.
But French Jack rolled his crawling body just clear of it, and leveled his pistol with some care. It crashed in the same moment that Jenks flung himself forward, and Jenks struck the deck still a yard or two from his enemy, blood seeping from his leg above the iron band. Jenks could crawl too. They would meet in a moment. The thunder of the shot had galvanized Shawn into a last effort, and Ben could watch no more, but he knew that the other thunder following was not from any human source.
That was in the sails, a roar of stricken canvas above a deck gone mad. Out of the torn sky the northeast wind with a booming outrage of rain fell upon Artemis, slapping her over on her beam ends. The twisted knots of human warfare rolled tight against the larboard rail, inches away from a suddenly boiling sea.
Pressed down in that inferno, his face cold, and still, and streaming with the flood of rain, Shawn forced Ben upward away from him, until his right hand could join his left in grasping Ben's right hand. Shawn was trying to speak above the uproar; Ben could not hear him. Ben felt the agonized living shudder of Artemis as a thing within himself, and then he saw, not believing it, that his knife had gone down, its blade hidden in the green cloth, buried to the hilt. Ben could not know, then or in all his life, whether Shawn's own hands had drawn the blade in upon himself, or whether this had been done by the wrenching struggle of Artemis in her extremity, or whether Ben's own right hand had sent it down and so blotted out in one motion all the hope and the madness, the cruelty, the blindness and the radiant visions, and the pain.
Chapter Four
"In such a gale, and my father shot down, and no one at the helm?"
"Ay, but she did rise, Charity. I felt her bear up against it slow and brave, and I trusted her. Call it a fancy or a vain thought, but surely any vessel will carry under her ribs some part of the spirit of the men who made her, a spirit of her own. Yes, she answered that blow, and no one at the helm. It had caught her flat-aback, but some-way, rising against it, she brought herself clear into the eye of the wind. There she hung in irons a moment, only a moment, found herself, paid off, heeled over to starboard and scudded away to the southwest before it, steady as an arrow. No one at the helm."
"Do you notice, Charity?—he speaks louder, and plain, my little brother. That will be from answering back to the winds, and I think they will never be so big my little brother can't shout 'em down."
"They've shouted me down many a time and will again. Well, when she found her way like that, of course we were all flung to starboard too. I cannot remember taking that key from Shawn's body. I must have done it during that moment while she hung in the wind's eye, for I had it in my teeth when I reached your father, and he helped me drag him to the mainmast where he could brace himself. He knew me and spoke to me. He held my knife for me while I unlocked the irons—I remember seeing it in his hand, and the rain was washing it clean."
And will again. She thought: How else could it be, after all? Certainly he would go again, and many times again. And it might be that God would bring him safe through tempest and calm and war, but no daughter of Peter Jenks would dare to predict safe harbor, least of all perhaps for anyone so loved, since the Lord is a jealous God. There could be that final time when even Ben would not come home; his place would be empty, and so then—and so—as if one of those fleecy tranquil clouds over in the blue clean east were advancing on her for her dubious entertainment, Charity observed the beginning of a daydream. It was nothing in her mind, as yet; it could become the familiar indulgence, if she wished: herself receiving the news of her widowhood and bearing it as best she might, maybe accepting the Romish faith so to join a nunnery, or—much better!—going out among the Indians—(why not? Did not John Eliot do so?)—to heal their sick and bind up their wounds and teach them, becoming gray and old in this dispensation of decent mercies until such time as God was willing to—Hey! Misty dreams for silly maids. I don't want you—go away!... Well, it was partly Ben's fault for falling silent so long, when there was so much more to tell; Reuben's too—Reuben sitting there radiantly quiet, and skimming a pebble out beyond the line of foam whenever a wave spent itself whispering at the open side of their sanctuary. Why dream now, when the one dream (so unlike all the others!) had amazed and somewhat frightened her by coming true? It might have been well enough in the long year past to dream. Not now. Anyway not of widowhood—when he ha'n't even asked me!—but his eyes inquire of many things this afternoon—and other such matters far-off and cold and surely unwelcome. It might have been well enough, once, to dwell in that labyrinthine refuge of fantasy; and certain treasures brought back from the labyrinth might be saved—as for instance the created moment when his face would turn to her gravely astonished in discovery, and he would say: 'Why, Mistress Charity, you're no longer an awkward child at all'—or something like that—something.... But why flee from the present even for an instant? Was he not close in the here-and-now? A very tall stranger who was not a stranger; vastly older, a whole year older, the mobile miracle of his face transformed by the bitter dissonance of the great scar still livid and not quite healed, that angled across his high forehead and then ran from his cheekbone to the edge of his jaw. Mouth and eyes were spared. He could look far and curiously, as he always had, and deep. His smile was—almost the same. Surely it would be altogether the same when the scar was fully healed: probably now the torn muscles pained him when his mouth widened; and maybe he felt less often in a mood for smiling since his homecoming and the death of John Kenny. While a part of her irresolutely wondered whether that mouth had ever kissed a woman—it must have—her eyes searched and pondered the multiple planes and shadows of his quiet face, beholding it in many ways. It was the face of Ben Cory, with much in it of the Ben Cory who was, but even more for a while it was a challenge and a problem. What if I undertake what I could never do before? Why could I never draw his face when he was gone?... God knows I remembered it. Or did I truly? Did it not float before me in the dark and come between me and the sunlight of winter? The shadow in the hollow of his cheek was deeper than she remembered it—well, he was thinner; bad food and not much of it, she supposed; still he grew on it and found strength in it. The hairline above his ear was a simpler curve than she recalled. And why, why had she never noticed that the tops of his ears were slightly pointed?—very slightly, not like Reuben's, but still he did have that comical faunlike point. Her fingers itched for a pencil but lay still, and she looked away to the ever-moving green, and white, and unfathomable blue, the lashing hurry of spent water up along the sand, the unceasing rise and fall. I must have been blind. She closed her eyes, seeing much. Well, it ought to be three-quarter face, the chin up a little, intentness without a smile-like so....
"'O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days?...
"Reuben, you know too much. Won't you tell the rest, Ben? So many things—tell me more about my father, and—all the rest. Will you not?"
"I will try.... She was far over to starboard, running from the squall, until we got the tops'l furled. Dummy and Ledyard saw to that—or better say your father did, for it was his voice, not mine, that made them jump to it, and I to the helm, so to lash it and then go back to your father for what little I could do. So much happened, and all in a moment. All that I spent minutes in telling—why, I don't suppose more than one minute passed from the time the squall struck to the time I was unlocking the irons. Then much less than a minute, and I was lashing the helm, Dummy and Ledyard aloft—in that bit of time Manuel died. Ledyard had broken French Jack's leg with a capstan bar when Jack came up through the hatch. Tom Ball shot poor Joey Mills, and Ledyard grappled with Ball, beat the wind out of him I guess—a man's work. When the squall hit us, only an instant after Jack shot your father, Jack was washed overboard, and Ledyard—helped Ball to follow him, I believe. All that I didn't see; Ledyard told me later. I saw Manuel die. It was while I was at the helm, and she settling steady as you please on that starboard tack. Poor soul, he'd stayed at the masthead through it all, and clung to it through the first stroke of the storm, and now was trying to come down, and it wasn't wind or rain that made him fall, but his own sudden shaking—or maybe he thought Dummy was coming to get him, but I don't believe that. He fell clear of the side, sank and never rose, and Artemis swept on by the empty waters where I could see nothing of him.... Shawn was not washed over. His dead hand had gripped the rail. Later I had much trouble freeing it so to give him a decent sea-burial; and maybe that was when I truly said him a farewell, and his hand so unwilling to let her go."
"Don't alway be turning me the right side of your face. I tell you it does not trouble me."
"The scar would trouble most girls, Charity. Well, so I lashed the helm and went back to the Captain, who was losing blood at a fearful rate, and then I was a frantic time scrabbling in the locker for a cord to bind the leg and stop the flow. I was obliged to pull the cord with all my power before it would stop. The bullet had completely shattered the bone. I don't think a surgeon could have set it. He said so himself, and commanded me to cut the leg away below the break."
"The blood was not flowing but spurting?"
"Ay, Ru. Could anything have been done?"
"Not that I know of, under those conditions. Not with the anterior tibial artery spouting and the bone shattered. You were fortunate he lived beyond that day. You did as he ordered?"
"I did, and he lived twenty days. I asked him if I might not bring him rum from the cabin before I cut it, and he thundered at me, No, in God's name no, and thrust my knife back in my hand, and I cut as quickly and cleanly as I might. Then he thanked me, and bade me help him up the companion ladder to the quarterdeck. There he remained for all of our homeward voyage, by the helm to give me guidance—and the same a fair passage with no dirty weather except a little off the Bermudas, nothing bad. He took the tiller himself at times, to relieve me, during the first days. On the fourth day, I think it was, we could see the wound had begun to mortify, and later he was sometimes out of his wits and rambling, but he would alway come clear of that and tell me once more how he would live until we came into harbor—seeing that nothing except his word stood between me and Copp's Hill. He wrote an account of it all and signed it with a great flourish—that was a quiet and a sunny day—but he feared that would not be enough. Determined he was to speak that word for Dummy and me, and he did so. Charity, I had never thought your father a compassionate man, but—we learn, sometimes."
"He—I don't know. I don't know what to say."
"Perhaps he changed, as it seems we all do.... My clothes were washed overside, by the way. I came into Boston harbor and to Uncle John's house wearing a suit of Shawn's garments too small for me."
"Yes, little brother, they were too small for you, now that's no lie."
"Don't ever laugh at him!"
"I was never farther from laughing. You killed your wolf...."
"Ben, what of Ledyard? He did not come home with you."
"Nay, Charity, he did not. Ledyard, who felt so great a dread of hanging—oh, it happened in the night, Charity, and the quiet, when we'd come clear of that bad weather off the Bermudas and were sailing free under a fair southeasterly and hoping to raise the Cape in a day or two. Your father was sleeping in the fever of his sickness. Dummy came to me in the dark, whimpering and pointing. He took the helm while I went forward, half knowing what I was to find, but I was a long time finding it. Ledyard had climbed out on the bowsprit with a length of rope. The rope slipped backward after he fell, and so his face came close against the face of the white goddess. I have never seen her look so careless and so proud."
"For the deity of the moon that may be a way of kindness."
"Maybe, Reuben, maybe...."
Ben could remember how some such thought had stirred in his own mind there in the moonless shadow—not altogether moonless, since the white goddess had taken starlight to her face and was delicately shining, aloof, indifferent, as Ben leaned out and cut the rope and gave the spent body to the sea, and the sea accepted it with the careless whisper of an enfolding wave. He had gone back then to the quarterdeck, where the Captain had waked in a remission of the fever, and told him of it. "She's taken better men," said Captain Jenks, and shrugged and groaned. "All the same I never thought he had it in him." That was all Captain Jenks ever said of Matthew Ledyard. Ben in the undemanding hours of the days that followed could yet inquire: Where is the way where light dwelleth? And where does the self end and the universe begin? But it was plain—more than ever plain in this calm place where land and ocean met and the war between them was only the joyful-tragic music of breakers on firm sand—plain that he must ask those questions again and many times again: of Reuben, of Charity, of others not yet known, most often of himself, and would discover many answers, until the unimaginable time when all questions arrived at silence as they had for John Kenny. Answers bearing illumination seemed closer in this place than ever before—"My garden," said Charity when they first came here, and held up to him a pebble of many colors, flowerlike, worn smooth and round with the sea's many thousand years.
"Storm never continues, I notice. The sky itself can't maintain it, nor can we. Always the calm afterward—here, Ben, or in the Spice Islands."
"There are storms then in the Spice Islands?"
"Of course, Ben...."
"Did my father have—have aught to say of poor Ledyard?"
"Oh, he.... Why, he prayed God deal kindly with him. And he said not a word against him when we'd entered the harbor and the men who came aboard were questioning us. True, he had little time for words, Charity, since death was on him while he spoke, and it took him, his head on my arm, before the men were ready to lower him into the boat that should have brought him ashore.... Yesterday when I went into Boston I sought out Ledyard's widow, and told her how he aided us, and then I—a white lie, I said he was washed overboard. Your father would have approved this deception, I'm sure of it. I wish he could have lived to see you again, Charity—still it's a marvel he could even live out the homeward voyage, he was that wasted and worn out with the sickness from his wound. But he did, and his word stood like a shield for me, so that when I gave mine own account they believed me. Charity, when he'd done speaking I asked him if I might not bring him something to drink. He laughed at me a little, saying he had not the craving. He said: 'Do you drink to me as well as pray for me if you're a-mind.' That was the last he spoke.... Are you dreaming, Charity?"
"She's human too, you know."
"Oh, Ben, I was remembering how it was when they brought him home to us. Is it possible that was only three weeks ago now? And thinking of the burial, and how all the things we did—all the words spoken, ours, the minister's, our friends'—how all that was so far from—him. Am I a terrible bad heathen, that I should have felt—well, angry at it? But mark you, Ben, I did not show it, I did not have one of my—my Times. Did I? Did I show it, Ben?"
"Certainly not. You was a most quiet sweet mouse and opened your mouth for naught but Amen and Thine-is-the-power."
"Faith and Mama in tears all day, and the neighbors resenting my dry eyes, be sure of it, and good Mr. Hoskison so—marry, so important! As if motions of the hands and holy words spoken could make any difference to one who's died and gone away. But you don't think I'm a terrible bad heathen?"
"You are not, but if Ben and I labor with you long enough, love, perhaps we can make you one. I have hopes."
"Oh, you!"
"No, Charity, never mind the pup, you're no heathen, or if you are, then I too. I've no patience with—let's call it mummery. I saw your father die. He was a captain of men, and he died well. No words spoken over his body can add anything to that. Such words are for the living, if they wish them. No one spoke them for Daniel Shawn, and though it may be that I killed him, I loved him too."
And having said so much, and understood it while you said it, you will never lean on me again, the which I accept because it is right. Reuben shied another pebble beyond the running line of the water's edge, aiming for a circle of hurrying foam, hitting it with a neat plop in the center. Good exercise for a steady hand. What he had said to Ben concerning storm and calm was banal, he reflected, but truth has a way of hiding in the blur of the commonplace and must be hunted there from time to time: no good rushing upstairs or outdoors in search of a paper that lies on the table under your nose. We do pass continually from storm to calm—every one of us, even Madam Prudence Jenks. So meet them both, in the atmosphere of doubt where honesty is—whether in fog over quicksand, or on firm-appearing ground like this under a sunny sky of June. Reuben tossed another pebble, seeing Charity smile at him ruminatively, a gust of the sea breeze lifting a lock of soft hair from her broad forehead; then her homely, snub-nosed, square-jawed face turned back to Ben and was beautiful.
"I was thinking too, I wish I might have been with you both when Mr. Kenny died. You've told me little of that, indeed nothing much about your homecoming."
"He came on foot, Charity, and no word arrived ahead of him. We are not such important people now, you know. I was upstairs in Uncle John's room, and Mr. Welland with me. It was late, Mr. Hibbs gone to bed, and we had almost persuaded Kate to go and rest too, but Mr. Welland had told me he half expected Uncle John to go out that night, so we sat up with him. There had been another stroke, as you know, a light one, but he was failing rapidly and most of the time seemed hardly to know us. Kate went downstairs for something, a pitcher of water I think, and I heard the front door, and she cried out something, presently weeping and laughing and calling up gibberish to us. I knew it was Ben, but I—you know, Snotnose, you really should have sent a messenger to warn us you was an inch taller and fifteen pounds heavier, in fact you'll be obliged to work now to some purpose, or at thirty you'll have a gut, I swear it. Mind it, Charity—he was ever too fond of cracklin's." Quiet, Ru Cory! This is how it was, and you can't tell it: Ben Cory appeared in the candlelight, and Ru Cory stood like a cold image and could not move, and Amadeus Welland came to him—to Reuben because he was the one in need—and then Ben came to him also—but you can't tell it, seeing that for all your and-so-forth intellect you cannot bring love into the compass of a few well-chosen words, so be quiet and live a while. "Well, Charity, Uncle John knew him at once, even before he knelt by the bed and said, 'I've come back.' His right hand came up and touched the scar, and he said very plainly—we all heard it: Kate, and Mr. Hibbs who'd come in rubbing his eyes and doubting, it may be, that anything so good as Ben's return could actually happen at the borders of philosophy—Uncle John said very plainly: 'Thou art my son.'"
"And he died then?"
"No, love, somehow nature seldom accommodates our itch for the appropriate, I don't know why. That was later in the night. Ben was exhausted, and I made him go to bed and save the story of his life for the following morning. Uncle John didn't die then, but seemed to have fallen into a heavy sleep. We stayed with him of course. I was watching his hand, Charity"—and Amadeus' arm over my shoulder, and his voice speaking to me now and then—"and at some time toward morning there was a kind of disturbance in his sleep, his hand closing as if it would hold fast to certain things for a while yet. Then it opened and gave it all away."
He needs no help except what Mr. Welland can give, still I'll do what I may. Ben could see also the next voyage of the ketch Artemis. He would not be aboard—as Sam Tench had made clear, there was much to do, and Ben Cory the one to do it. A possible partnership with Riggs of Salem, for instance—it must be considered at least. Captain Heath would take Artemis to New York, and some good man must be found to take Heath's place on the sloop Hebe. But next year, Ben thought, maybe he could go again on Artemis—maybe to Norfolk—maybe.... Then at some time, much later, maybe three or four good vessels fit for the passage around the Horn, even a charter from the Queen—not at all impossible, some years from now, if done in the right way. In the meanwhile——
"Now you are dreaming, Ben. I used to know that look, in Deerfield. But now when your mind's under sail I suppose it goes into places you've seen with your true eyes. And when you'd hear the sea you needn't bury an ear in the pillow and cover the other with the flat of your paw—well, Charity, what a fool he used to look that way! And how often was I tempted to shove the paw aside and blow in his ear—give him a real storm—you know? Never did, and can't now because he's grown big enough to give me a hiding, or he thinks he has."
"It's true I was thinking a little of the seaways, but how a devil's name did you know it?"
"He's much too wise a fox, Ben—it's those little pointed ears."
"Charity, I meant to ask before now: Faith—is she—content?"
"I believe so. Mr. Hoskison is a worthy man, and has been most kind to us."
"What of that girl who—I mean—her name was Clarissa, was it not?"
"My mother was obliged—that is, she...."
"Without Charity's knowledge, Ben, Clarissa was sold to New York because there was no place for her at Dorchester."
"Oh, as for my knowledge—what difference—damn it—oh, forgive me! I meant——"
"Darling wench, in the presence of two scholars of the humanities you needn't alway be deferring to your Mama's judgment, and if you do, I will overlook your attainment of the years of decorum and paddle you. Clarissa should have been manumitted—you know it, would have done it had it been in your power, I know it, Ben knows it, and I dare say now and then your Mama knows it—this being a mad world, and it seems we live in it. Now I do prophesy: in a few years my little brother will be a man of affairs, and I myself intend to become filthy rich. As soon as we may, sweetheart, Ben or I will go to New York and Clarissa shall be bought free, so stop crying—Ben don't like it...."
"Better so in my arm, Charity? Are you comfortable?"
"Yes."
"And I must be going, seeing I promised Mr. Welland I'd be back in Roxbury by the end of the afternoon. Medicines to be compounded, a visit he's to make this evening and wishes me to go with him, and more of the study that endeth never."
"We can't keep you?"
"No, dear."
"If you must go, Ru, maybe I——"
"Oh no! Do you stay here in the sun. I pray you both, be happy, and love me sometimes. I must get on with my work."