Was this the voice from the seaward side of Meteor? True, the sea had yielded this wild being up, but did she speak with the sea's voice? She had at least the sea's inconstancy, the sea's abandonment.
Her words were hot and heavy in little Rackby's heart. Serene harbor master that he was, the unearthly quiet of his harbor was an affront upon him in his present mood. Now that she was lost to him, he could not, by any makeshift of reason, be rid of the impulse that had come upon him to jump fairly out of his own skin in an effort to recapture that tormenting woman—.
He drifted down upon Meteor Island, bowed and self-reproachful, like a spirit approaching the confines of the dead. He stepped ashore and passed the painter of his dory through its ring.
On the crest of the island, at the very spot where, scientists averred, a meteorite had fallen in some prehistoric age, there stood a thick grove, chiefly of hemlock trees. Here on this night he paused. A strange inertness filled all nature. Not a whisper from the branches overhead, not a rustle from the dark mold underfoot. Moonlight in one place flecked the motionless leaves of an alder. Trunk and twigs were quite dissolved in darkness—nothing but the silver pattern of the leaves was shown in random sprays. He felt for an instant disembodied, like these leaves—as if, taking one step too many, he had floated out of his own body and might not return.
"Bear and forbear," he thought. "You wouldn't have stirred, let her say what she would," his heart whispered to the silver leaves.
But he could not forget that wild glance, the wet hand clinging to his wrist, the laugh repeated like an echo from the symphony of that November hillside. He reproached himself withal. What was known of Cad Sills? Little known, and nothing cared to be known. A waif, pursuing him invisibly with a twinkle or flare from her passionate eyes. She was the daughter of a sea captain by his fifth wife. He had escaped the other four. They had died or been deserted in foreign ports, but this one he could not escape. Tradition had it that he lost the figurehead from his ship on the nuptial voyage, attributed this disaster to his bride, and so left her at Rosario, only to find her, after all sail was set, in the forechains, at the very stem of his ship, half drowned, her arms outstretched, a living figurehead. She had swum after him. She outlived him, too, and died in giving birth to Cad Sills, whose blood had thus a trace of sea water—.
He entered his house. In his domestic arrangements he was the very figure of a bachelor. His slimsy silver spoon, dented with toothmarks of an ancestor who had died in a delirium, was laid evenly by his plate. The hand lamps on the shelf wore speckled brown-paper bags inverted over their chimneys. A portrait of a man playing the violin hung out, in massive gilt, over the table, like a ship's figurehead projecting over a wharf's end. His red couch bore northeast and southwest, so that he might not lose good sleep by opposing his body to the flow of magnetic currents.
On this night he drew out from a hole in the upholstery of the couch a bag of stenciled canvas, which chinked. It was full of money, in gold and silver pieces. He counted it, and sat thoughtful. Later he went out of the house and stood looking at the sea as if for a sign. But the sea gave him no sign; and on that night at least had no voice.
It was three days before he came up with Cad Sills again. Then he spied her at nightfall, reclining under the crab-apple tree at Hannan's Landing.
The little man came close enough to tread on her shadow, cleared his throat, and almost shouted: