John Amid.
EVEN SO
It all happened a century ago. “On this day,” the village minister of those other years wrote in his slow, regular hand—the pages of his journal are yellow as saffron now, and the ink is faded brown—“on this day did Captain Hastings sail in command of the Amaryllis, taking with him as hitherto, poor Christine Widmer, concerning whom there has been so much talk. For my own part I cannot be properly scandalized by their relation. Certainly the thought of marriage with one in her condition is not to be tolerated, and I believe her to be happier with him than elsewhere.” Christian charity, indeed!
There have always been men of the Hastings name in the village. They came in the days of its first settlement. There are a score of them living here at this very minute. And, like the most of them in the early years of the republic, Donald Hastings followed the sea. Holiest, impetuous, young, as were so many of those sea captains in that golden era of the early nineteenth century, he left but one shadow on his memory—perhaps not altogether a shadow. Therein lies the story.
Above the junk the masts and spars of a ship loomed in the moonlight.
Singsong voices swelled to a wild chatter, and the steering sweep was swung hard over. But the old junk, clumsy and slow to obey her helm, remained in the center of the channel. For a moment, collision was imminent. Then from the deck of that Chinese vessel on the Chu Kiang, one of thousands as like as their yellow masters, came the sharp call:
“Ahoy there! Bear off!”
“Who’s there below?” A deep voice from above roared the words in a tone of amazement.
A rattle of commands came down to the junk, hoarse and loud on the night air. The Chinese clamored in ducklike harshness of speech. Then the slowly turning junk and the veering ship passed by a margin of inches. And as they passed, seven men came scrambling over the bulwarks of the ship to a deck filled with shadowy figures that gathered in a silent circle. Then the circle opened and one man, standing out from the rest, confronted the seven in the near darkness.
“Well,” said he, in a low, deliberate voice, “who and what are you?”