"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?"