| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I | The House of the Five Pines | [ 3] |
| II | Mattie “Charles T. Smith” | [ 24] |
| III | The Winkle-man and the Will | [ 41] |
| IV | The Boycott | [ 51] |
| V | “The Shoals of Yesterday” | [ 65] |
| VI | Lobster-Pots | [ 76] |
| VII | The First Night at Five Pines | [ 89] |
| VIII | A Message from Mattie | [ 103] |
| IX | The Second Night | [ 118] |
| X | The Cat or the Captain | [ 134] |
| XI | The Third Night | [ 149] |
| XII | The Little Coffin | [ 162] |
| XIII | The Séance of Horns | [ 178] |
| XIV | The Fourth Night | [ 191] |
| XV | Beach-Plums | [ 207] |
| XVI | The Fifth Night | [ 225] |
| XVII | Dawn | [ 231] |
| XVIII | The Disappearance of Mrs. Dove | [ 247] |
| XIX | I Hide the Ghost | [ 260] |
| XX | Jezebel | [ 273] |
FIVE NIGHTS AT THE
FIVE PINES
FIVE NIGHTS AT THE
FIVE PINES
CHAPTER I
THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE PINES
A SEA of yellow sand rose, wave on wave, around us. High hills, carved by the bitter salt winds into tawny breakers, reared towering heads, peak upon peak. Like combers that never burst into spray, their static curves remained suspended above us, their tops bent back upon the leeward side, menacing, but never engulfing, the deep pools of purple shadows that lay beneath them. The sand was mauve in the hollows, and black upon white were the cupped dunes hung over their own heights. They were like water that did not move, or mountains with no vegetation. They did not support as much life upon their surface as that which crawls upon the floor of the ocean. They were naked and unashamed as the day when they were tossed up out of the bed of the sea. Only tufts of sharp green grass clung to some of the slopes, their silhouettes flattened out before them like the pin-feathers of a young bird, inadequate and scant, accentuating the barrenness of the saffron sand.
Centuries ago some gigantic upheaval of Neptune had forced this long ridge out of the shielding water, to lie prone in the sight of the sun, like a prehistoric sea-monster forever drying its hide. More isolated than an island, the head of the cape, with the town in its jaws, fought the encroaching sea, which thundered upon it in constant endeavor to separate it from the tail, extending a hundred miles to the mainland. From the height on which we stood, the line of ocean far away was dark blue, following in a frothy scallop the indentations of the coast. The sound of the surf came to us like a repeated threat. It could bend the cape, but never break it, twist and turn it, change the currents and the sand-bars, and toss back upon its shore the wreckage of such vessels as men essayed to sail in, but the sand-dunes continued to bask blandly. Sometimes they shifted, but so silently and gradually that they seemed not so much to move as to vanish. To-day there would be a dune in the way of our path to the sea, so steep as to make a barrier, impossible to scale. To-morrow the force of the wind upon its surface, and the strength of the far-away tide which continually seeped its roots, would have leveled it. The very footsteps one followed, trying to trace a track across the waste, would have melted away.
On this desert each traveler must be his own guide and climb to some eminence which topped all others, to get his bearings from the strip of deep blue that marked the ocean’s rim. Nor could he say to himself, securely, “Here is east,” although he looked out on the Atlantic. Land played a trick upon the wayfarer who trusted it, and turned its back upon the sea, and curled up like a snail, so that the inside of the cape, where the town lay behind us in its green verdure, faced south, and the outside sea, where the sun set, curved west and north. The glory of light in the afternoon struck first upon the hills and was reflected back from the sheltered bay to the little fishing-village.
The path from the woods, by which you entered the dunes, lost itself to sight under the foliage of the scrub-oak trees, and unless you had tied a white rag to the last branch, marking the point where you climbed up out of the forest, you would never find it again. There were many foot-paths through the thicket which separated the hamlet on the inside of the horn from the immense dry sea-bed, but none of them were visible, once you had left them. By day you must mark the entrance to the desert of your own footsteps, by night it was useless to look for them.
This must have been the place, I thought, where Dorothy Bradford was lost. Brave as the Pilgrim Fathers were, they had not loitered here after dark to look for William’s young wife! They had conscientiously attended to their laundry work, on that first November day when the Mayflower landed, and, having finished their domestic duties, waited no longer for any scatterbrain of the party who had been foolish enough to venture from the fold, but weighed anchor without finding her and put off for Plymouth Rock!
As I looked about me at the profound grandeur of space, it seemed to me that I understood why Dorothy had not hurried back to the boat. She had embarked upon the Mayflower, a bride, strange to the ways of men and of marriage, and for sixty-three days the stern-faced Puritans had been her only companions and the rolling sea her entire horizon. Her quarters must have become a prison to her before the voyage was over. When at last this finger of land, reaching into the Atlantic, had beckoned to the mariners, her heart must have sung like a caged canary, even as mine responded when first I saw the cape. Did she linger with the other virtuous housewives at the first spring, to wash her husband’s dirty linen? Not she! I liked to think that in glad escape she ran from all those stuff gowns and starched kerchiefs, through the woods, chasing the scarlet-winged blackbirds on and on, picking the wintergreen berries and ravenously eating them, gathering her arms full of bright autumn leaves, feeding her hungry eyes on the vivid color of growing things and her starved soul, at last, upon the dunes. It was not the Indians who prevented Dorothy Bradford from returning to the ship; it was her own heart. If Indians saw her, they must have fallen on their red knees in the sand and worshiped her for a sprite of limitless space, running past them with gay branches clasped to her gray dress and a wreath of waxy bayberries on her fair young head. It was her wayward feet that forbade her from following further the fortunes of the Pilgrims. No doubt, from some high point on the dunes she watched them sail away, and laughed, taking off her shoes upon the sand and dancing, fleeing further. That is what I would have done. That is what I wanted to do now. Something starving in my heart found food here; a hardness that had been growing within me for two years dissolved, as my mind relaxed, and the troubles that had driven me here appeared insignificant. The tired spirit of hope that had been driven deeper and deeper down beneath the weight of disillusion began to bubble up. There might be a way of regaining the nice balance of life, after all, if one could weigh it every afternoon upon the sand-dunes!