“Sir?” I asked.
“Judy,” says he, “haves disappeared.”
He held me until he perceived that I had commanded myself....
XXV
TO SEA
Judith had vanished! Our maid-servant, astir in the child’s behalf before dawn, in her anxious way, was returned breathless from Whisper Cove with the report. There was no Judith with the wife of Moses Shoos: nor had there been that night. ’Twas still but gray abroad––a drear dawn: promising a belated, sullen day. We awoke the harbor to search the hills, the ledges of the cliffs, the surf-washed shore. ’Twas my uncle hither, the maid-servant thither, myself beyond. Clamorous knocking, sudden lights in the cottages, lights pale in the murky daylight, and a subdued gathering of our kind men-folk: I remember it all––the winged haste, the fright of them that were aroused, the shadows and the stumbling of the farther roads, the sickly, sleepy lights in the windows, the troubled dawn. We dispersed: day broadened, broke gray and glum upon Twin Islands––but discovered no lost maid to us.
’Twas whispered about, soon, that the women had spoken evil of Judith in our harbor; and pursuing this ill-omened rumor, in a rage I could not command, I came at last upon the shameful truth: the women had 306 spoken scandal of the maid, the which she had learned from Aunt Esther All, the Whisper Cove gossip. The misfortune of gentle Parson Stump, poor man! who had in the ear of Eli Flack’s wife uttered a sweetly jocular word concerning Judith and the honorable intention of John Cather, who walked with her alone on the roads, about his love-making. But, unhappily, the parson being absent-minded, ’twas into the dame’s deaf ear he spoke, and his humor became, in transmission, by pure misfortune, an evil charge.
There was then no help for it, old wives being what they are: authorized by the gentle parson, depending upon the report of a dame of character, the tittle-tattle spread and settled like a mist, defiling Judith to the remotest coves of Twin Islands. And Judith was vanished! I knew then, in the gray noon of that day, why the child had cried in that leafy nook of the Whisper Cove road that she could go nowhere.