There was a mystery about Captain Knox’s wife. Of course, everyone in Gull Harbor knew there had been a Mrs. Knox, but according to the best accounts no one had ever seen her. There were a few facts, however, upon which one could rely. Some thirty or forty years before, the captain, returning after a long voyage to the East, had announced himself a widower of recent bereavement. The existence of the captain’s spouse in Gull Harbor had begun, therefore, simultaneously with the knowledge of her decease.
A short time after the captain’s return, a neat gravestone was erected on the Knox farm, in the old burial lot, in which had already been laid to rest the bodies of the captain’s parents, two brothers, and an uncle. Upon the stone, by the captain’s order, was carved in plain lettering, “In memory of Selima, my beloved wife.”
The captain himself would often refer to her. “She was a pretty cretur, she was.” Beyond this, however, discussion of her was not tolerated in his presence.
By the time I came to know Gull Harbor, the captain’s seafaring career was over. The people of the village had long since recovered from the first excitement caused by the mystery of the captain and his wife, and conversation had drifted back into familiar channels of interest as to why Mel Hibbard’s sister had given up her flock of Plymouth Rocks, or speculations as to the color Mrs. Lovell, wife of the minister of the Adventist Church, would choose for her new front room carpet.
I had always felt a prejudice for the Maine coast and from the moment the Portland boat rounded the big rocky cove, I knew I should like Gull Harbor. There was a restful peace about the place peculiar to the seaboard of New England. The smell of low tide and drying codfish hung about the wharf. Almost immediately one felt at home.
I had not been two weeks in the town before I knew all that Gull Harbor had to tell about their distinguished captain. Didn’t I know Captain ’Thiel Knox, the man who commanded the first seven-masted schooner to sail the sea? Why, he had been to “Chiny” half a dozen times, and the Lord knows how many he has crossed the ocean. As a further mark of distinction he was the proud possessor of two long-haired cats which he had brought with him from Persia.
One day I happened to ask my landlady, Mrs. Simmons, an old resident and a noted gossip, if the captain was a widower, and then I learned of the mystery. “For it’s my opinion,” she added, after telling me the story, “that she was a Chiny woman, or mebbe a princess from Persy, though nobody’ll ever know. The captain he would never say a word; quiet’s a mouse on the subject. You oughter see him, Mr. Fitch. He’s real nice, and a great hand for company; all kinds, it don’t matter to him,” she finished in a tone which meant to include even the summer people.
A “fortnit” later (one can see how easily I slipped into the vernacular of the place), I was out sailing in a borrowed dory. It was a clear August morning; the sky, a healthy blue and cloudless; the tall spruce trees, interspersed here and there by a monumental pine, guarded the water’s edge.
By the time I had rounded the long point that lay between the harbor and the back bay beyond, a stiff breeze had sprung up. The churning blue stretched oceanward for miles, blotched by myriads of foamy white caps. The little dory rocked and twisted in the choppy waves. The sail, which was home-made, proved an easy victim of the wind, and I soon found to my dismay that I was drifting helplessly down the bay toward a stretch of shore that I had not yet visited. The boat moved rapidly. The trees along the shore were soon followed by a broad green field, which stretched up from a tiny harbor almost surrounded by a protecting arm of the sea toward which I was being driven. Gradually the water became shallower, and the wind reluctantly let me slip from its grasp. I was able to look about me. It was a very beautiful harbor.