_Chapter One_
Ben Cory searched the bay, his eyes ardent for greater distances. Here
at the wharf the ships relinquished wakefulness and power, becoming
boxes of cargo for the calculations of landsmen: the harbor is not the
sea.
"Watch, Ben--he'll take in sail presently." John Kenny was holding his
dwarfish body erect to make the most of it, ancient head slanted so that
he might look down his nose even at Boston Bay. He thrust his
gold-headed cane against a crack in the wharf--his wharf, and smiled at
the boy--his boy. "Luck of the Artemis, this breeze. When she nears the
wharf Jenks will haul his tops'l to set her aback. You'll see her reach
the piling a-tiptoe, a lady, all whisper and dignity. Didn't I say she'd
be the lucky thing, when I took thee and Reuben up the Mystic to watch
her a-building on the ways?"
"Yes, Uncle John." The mild westerly breeze fluttered Mr. Kenny's gray
coat and the gray owl-tufts above his ears. It woke the dance of
whitecaps under April sky, and seventeen is a kind of April. "She's a
fair ship, sir."
"Hoy, mind your terms! A ship is all square-rigged, commonly a
three-master. Two-masted, a ketch, is _Artemis_--well, a loose name,
seeing we use it also to mean small harbor craft. But with her
fore-and-aft mizzen you mustn't be calling her a ship. I wish Reuben had
come. He's missing a pretty sight, and all to go strolling in the
woods." Ben winced inwardly, knowing that the old man, for all his
understanding, had been hurt by that. He ought to know by this time, Ben
thought, how when the black mood came over Reuben there was nothing to
do but let the boy alone, let him go walk in the woods or whatever else
he wished. Ben himself did not know whether it was the flame of
Deerfield that attacked Reuben at such times; had not been able to
learn, in all the three years since they came to Roxbury and Uncle John
had opened heart and home to them. "_Artemis_ is near three hundred ton,
Ben. That's not big, but she could sail anywhere in the world."
The lonely man, blue-eyed and gaunt, who stood at the outermost end of
Kenny's wharf, swung about to gaze at the old merchant. Ben had not
until now observed the stranger's face, motionless as a boulder in a
patch of grass against the raised collar of a shabby green coat. Grave,
Irish maybe, handsome in spite of a signature of smallpox from jutting
cheekbones to the edge of an angular jaw. Under a battered tricorne hat
Ben saw coal-black hair and a forehead high and pale. The mouth was
thin, the upper lip compressed. Hands projected immensely from frayed
sleeves, a sailor's hands broadened at the knuckles. Others on the wharf
had been watching _Artemis_; discouraged by the chill of the breeze,
they had abandoned the airy region to Ben and Mr. Kenny and the
blue-eyed man.
Anchored in the near waters or drawn up to the many docks, an orderly
jungle stirred to the bay's mild motion--stem masts, steep bowsprits,
nervous bodies of the drowsing wind-wanderers. To Ben's eyes, Clarke's
Wharf over yonder hardly dwarfed Mr. Kenny's single squat warehouse and
three hundred feet of pier. All around Ben spread an apparent confusion
of ropes, tackle, mooring-posts, more meaningful than when he had first
stumbled through it three years ago, but still a confusion to one whose
hand had never yet felt the lurching sting and thrust of a working rope
across the palm.
Woolgathering, Ben had missed some remark about _Artemis_' rigging. "She
owes much to that fore-and-aft mizzen. Fore-and-aft or square, either'll
bring you the service of all the winds, but the way of the fore-and-aft
is a woman's way, Ben, seeming to yield, winning by yielding. Your
squares'l is male, standing up to wrestle the sky breast to breast--nay,
but he can drive almost as near the wind's eye--point or two less,
what's a point or two in a long journey? _Artemis_ don't roll too much.
I've been aboard her under sail only the once, when we tried her out.
She didn't roll much, for all Mr. Jenks tempted her to it so to learn
her paces. Fast she is, Ben. You can feel it even now when she's picking
her way slow as a dream."
"Sir, if I--supposing I might ship aboard----"
"You?" Mr. Kenny jabbed his cane at the planking, his crinkled face gone
blank. "Ben, boy, you must stick to your studies. You'll have sea enough
when Mr. Hibbs brings your Greek far enough on to read the Odyssey.
Better to drown in poetry than salt water."
"Still, Uncle John, the sea----"
"Now let me tell you a thing: never admit to a sailor that you love the
sea, if love is the word. He'd despise you for a landsman. A sailor may
love a ship, if she be fair and not vicious. Not the sea, not the old
blind murdering bitch-mother."
"No, I think love is not the word, but--nay, I don't know."
"You think I don't feel it? Didn't I take ship as a common seaman when I
was twenty? I ran away, Ben. My father's blood was partly cold
vinegar--something of that you felt in your day with my good sister. My
brother George's and mine was red, and hot. Well, I had but a few years
of it, he too. Not for me with my piddling strength. We went into trade,
we prospered, and I'm a landsman--but I know her. Sometimes if my bad
toe's a-troubling or I go to bed with too much drink in me, I dream I'm
fathoms down in the cold, the green dark. I see their faces, I mean
those of the dead, men I knew who own no grave except the sea. They
float by me orderly, no crowding--hoy, you learn not to crowd a man in
the neighborhood of live ropes! They go by me one by one--Amyas Holt
maybe, that was first officer of the ship _Marigold_ and would never
sing except he was stone cold sober, but I _have_ heard him sing, marry
have I. Went down with the _Marigold_ off the Bermudas--all hands....
Isn't the land fair, Ben? Full of good things? Good work, women,
children, warmth of an earned fireside? And the time of year that's
coming now?--but maybe you suppose an old man don't notice the spring.
Is not the land fair?"
"Yes, Uncle John," said Ben, and turned his face away.
"Sometimes I see Danny Roeder too, laughing boy, ready for anything,
dead of the scurvy when we stood thirty-four days becalmed south of the
Line, a run to Recife in the ship _Providence_--most of his teeth fallen
from puffed purple gums, not laughing then.... I've but now remembered,
Ben, this is the first time you've seen _Artemis_ afloat. When she left
the ways last August you and Reuben were a trifle indisposed."
Ben grinned weakly in acknowledgement. Last August he and Reuben had had
the measles. After a day or so of misery they had grown busily critical
of each other's spots, the despair of Mr. Kenny's housekeeper Kate
Dobson, who tried to make them mind the orders of Mr. Welland the doctor
and stay covered up in bed. Plump Kate did not frown on pillow fights in
principle. She suppressed a few nobly, knowing her massive rear to be
prime target, because she believed the boys were in a rarely tender
condition. Kate had heard that measles could become the lapsing
fever--whatever that was, and never mind that Mr. Welland rumbled and
chuckled and took snuff and said it wa'n't so. Kate had sniffed
pointedly and severely about Mr. Welland of Roxbury, asking after his
gentle departure how a head under such a Lord-help-a-sinner wig as he
wore could hold knowledge of the healing art or in fact anything else.
More than a year in building and the pride of Mr. Kenny's ancient years,
_Artemis_ took to the water--tide and wind and season won't wait on the
measles--with no help from Ben and his brother. By the time Mr. Welland
decreed they could leave the house, she was gone, with half a cargo,
mostly hardware and woolens from England. She slipped down to Newport to
fill her hungry hull with flour and cheese; on to Virginia for a quick
turnover; then with tobacco and what remained of the Yankee
hardware--anything you like from frying pans to thimbles--she was for
Jamaica in the warm seas. At Kingston she ran into a bit of trouble;
Captain Jenks sent word of it by a homeward-bound. Tropic fever and
smallpox had played hell with his crew, and he was delayed seeking
replacements. He would not put out in late winter even on the
Kingston-Boston run with nothing better than a passel of louse-gnawed
Jamaican monkeys who'd die like Caribbee butterflies at the first breath
of a northerly and anyway couldn't tell the head from the hawse-holes.
Jenks ripped out other comments, cramped by the need of setting quill to
paper, concerning Jamaican speed in loading his logwood and molasses
while the remnants of his good crew were too sick or drunk to lend a
hand. "They doe labour a Moment," he wrote, "and falle into a most
sweete bloudie Slummber." Snorting over that letter in the company of
Ben and Reuben, John Kenny remarked that he couldn't picture man, monkey
or butterfly winning much sweet slumber when Mr. Jenks spoke in his
natural voice--the which, said Mr. Kenny, was the secret of Mr. Jenks'
virtue, for by raising that voice to strong conversational pitch he
could lift you the father and mother of a typhoon out of a flat calm.
A clop of hoofs, a grind of halting wheels--Ben heard that above the
mutter of small waves fumbling the piles of the wharf, and turned to see
the coach drawing up near Mr. Kenny's warehouse. A dark woman stepped
out, doll-size with distance, helping two others alight. The breeze
snatched at full skirts; an arm flew up restraining a blue bonnet; Ben
heard a ripple of remote laughter, and the women consulted, bonnets
grouped like the heads of little lively fowl. Plainly not working-women
nor dockside sluts, they must have some errand at the warehouse, and
would not be coming out here into the raw smell of tar, fish,
sewage-corrupted water and salt air. Mr. Kenny, with slightly dulled
hearing, was unaware of them. Ben looked again to _Artemis_.
"Watch, Ben! Wouldn't you think he was bearing down smack onto the bow
of that three-master? She's a New Yorker, by the way. Hoy!" Mr. Kenny
danced a stiff caper. "Like an old woman threading a needle! But if the
watchman on that Mannahatta tub pissed his britches, no shame to him at
all. Watch!"
The lonely blue-eyed man was watching too, in the curve of his long back
something hawk-like.
Mr. Kenny relaxed, chuckling. "Ben, I recall you've never met Mr. Jenks.
When he's ashore he never visits around, damn the dear man, not even to
Roxbury. There's a reason--never mind. Had he a contrary wind this
afternoon he'd likely bring her in anyhow. Once I watched him fetch my
wallowing old _Hera_ to this wharf. Filthy little northeast blow, and
she about as comfortable to handle as a bull on ice. I thought he'd
drop anchor alee of Bird Island and wait. Not Jenks--brought her in like
a homing dove. Knows every inch and instant of the tides as they'll
never be known by your landside chart-makers, noticed it a thousand
times. I don't mean he'll take foolish risks. With _Hera_ that time--to
him it was a nothing, did it easy as a milkmaid strips a cow. _Hera_
went down off the Cape--'d I ever tell you?--seven years ago in a fog.
Floating hulk stove in her la'board side. Filled in twenty minutes, no
fault of Jenks, and didn't he bring off every man alive in one boat and
one damned little dory? Not a soul lost."
He had told of it before. Ben never found it difficult to hear Uncle
John's repeated tales as if new. In a way they were, since Ben knew he
had probably missed something in the earlier telling.
Wharf hands slouched from the warehouse, taking command of the space
where soon the figurehead under the low-slung bowsprit of _Artemis_
would gaze inward toward her homeland, if that grave white face,
something less than a woman's and something more, knew any homeland now
but the one she shared with Mother Carey's chickens. The men busied
themselves over ropes and fenders, with raucous horseplay. The blue-eyed
man certainly noticed them, but never turned from observing _Artemis_
with the intentness of a schoolmaster or a lover.
The roustabouts brought a stench of cheap taverns, rum, tobacco, sweat.
Bulky short-worded men, some tattooed and wonderfully scarred, their
noise slightly restrained by the presence of an important merchant and a
well-dressed boy. The boy envied their carelessness. To watch them you'd
think the homecoming of _Artemis_ from her maiden voyage was a trifle,
worth no more than a shot of spit off the jetty. Ben saw a leather-hided
giant twiddle free a length of rope and try it on the legs of a
companion who yelped and grappled with him harmlessly.
Behind Ben a crystalline voice abruptly asked: "Will she anchor, Mr.
Kenny, or come in to moor direct?"
"Direct, my dear." Mr. Kenny was beaming, a hand on the girl's arm. "Did
your father ever make me pay lighterage if he could help it?"
"What a pert breeze! I vow I'm brave to be out in it."
"This little air? Why, Faith, it would scarce raise a kite for a running
boy. Anyway 'twas no breeze put the brier roses in your cheeks, you was
born with those, well I remember."
Mr. Kenny's back was turned to Ben. Ben was standing quite alone,
hearing yet the long murmuring of the water, as he fought away the dead
weight of shyness and discovered the April grace of her, dressed in
shining blue, wind-clasped; looked again, and encountered a wounding
sweetness of blue eyes.
* * * * *
John Kenny's woodland had never been surveyed; somewhere it blended into
crown-grant timberland or unclaimed wilderness. His house stood beyond
the natural limits of Roxbury--he liked that--on a rolling rise of
ground south of the road to Cambridge. From his back pasture, Reuben
Cory had heard him say, you could keep under forest cover all the way to
Providence, and maybe he'd do it some time, the old man said, if ever
the Saints came a-snapping too close at his heels. John Kenny might have
started saying that twenty or thirty years ago when it wasn't entirely a
jest.
From the window of the room upstairs that he shared with Ben, Reuben
stared eastward beyond the Dorchester road, across open land and marsh
and water, to the low hills of Dorchester Neck two miles away, gray and
brown yet alive with a subdued radiance under the afternoon sun of
April. Beyond those harmless hills moved the sunrises, and the stern
Atlantic that seemed to be tugging at his brother's heart and giving him
no rest.
Driven by his own dark unease of spring, by some dread of human voices
and the wrong questions they ask, by shame at the ungracious whim that
had prompted him to stay home--after all, if he was not going in to
watch the return of _Artemis_, sighted yesterday playing games off the
Cape with a contrary wind, then he had no proper excuse for this
half-holiday from study--driven above all by a need for the April day as
it might come to him lonely in a golden calm at the edge of wilderness,
Reuben slipped downstairs light as a cat, out past the black wet ground
of the kitchen garden and down a long slope into the south pasture, then
on toward soft-spoken hemlocks.
Reuben had discovered a bodily sureness in these solitary journeys, a
trust in his own senses, and a puzzled, reaching love for the life of
the unhuman world. Sometimes he stole out of the house at night, with
owl and fox and whippoorwill, if the moon was shining to help him; Ben
slept sweetly never knowing that. Ben often came with him into the
daytime woodland, but to stroll out here with Ben belonged to another
category of experience. The world of I-am-alone cannot share an orbit
with other planets, as the world and Reuben-self that existed in Ben's
presence could exist nowhere else.
He would never be tall like Ben, nor quite as strong. At fifteen that no
longer troubled him. His own hard wiry thinness was sufficient; it would
carry him, he supposed, wherever he cared to go.
At the lower end of the pasture he climbed a stile into the
spicy-smelling hush. A wood road continued on the other side; Reuben
soon abandoned it, following landmarks that brought him to one of his
better-loved havens, where Ben had often loafed with him.
Over a huge flat-topped boulder a spruce towered to sixty feet, the
droop of branches enclosing the rock; one could imagine the hide of a
gray monster lurking in the green. The boughs slanted steeply, creating
a room with a granite floor and walls of gold-flecked shadow, a gentle
and a secret place--old; the spruce must have been already old in the
time of King Philip's War. A midget brook passed here. It had gouged a
pool at the outer end of the granite block, not deep even in the time of
spring rains, but reflections of the spruce gave it an ocean infinity of
green.
Wander a few yards down the brook and you owned another world, where the
water widened to larger ponds, supporting patches of feather-topped
marsh grass here and there. Maples on firmer ground bordered this damp
clearing, which by itself became many worlds in the flow of the
seasons--the world of deep summer, for example, when you could watch
mating dances of the small green dragonflies that never come near
houses.
Reuben climbed silently into the sanctuary under the spruce and lay out
on the rock to stare into the pool refreshed by the rains of April. He
invited to his ears all least disturbances of the enclosing silence--a
weak murmur upstream where the trifling water hurried over pebbles, a
breath of motion in the needles of the spruce, a bluejay's complaint
softened by distance, a cow lowing more than a mile away; a greater
mystery, the beat of his own heart in the rib-cage pressed against rock,
not quite pain. He saw the face of himself the stranger in the water
below, and shut his eyes. When the flesh is quiet, he thought, the mind
is also. Why? I alway knew that. The quiet is brief.
Why?...
Because (I think) everything is part of a journey. I am never, I was
never still. Perhaps there is no stillness except in death.
Human sounds reached him, a brushing of last year's grass in that
clearing downstream, a vague cough. Reuben sat up, annoyed and puzzled.
It could not be anyone with the privilege of bidding him to cease
idling. Uncle John was in Boston with Ben. The tutor was sulking in his
room--it hurt Mr. Hibbs that a boy granted a half-holiday should elect
to spend it as he pleased, and anyway Mr. Gideon Hibbs was not at home
in any forest outside the _Eclogues_ of Virgil. Uncle John's gardener
and handy man Rob Grimes was accounted for too--Reuben had heard his axe
in the woodshed.
If some poacher or Indian were fooling about the back land, Uncle John
would wish to know. Reuben slipped from the rock with no sound, and
wormed a gradual way through the brush. Someone sneezed. Poachers try
not to sneeze; prowling Indians just don't; still Reuben maintained his
caution because of a wild-animal pleasure in it. Having stolen by
degrees to the edge of the clearing, he observed the stout bowed back
and lightly fringed bald head of a man kneeling by a shallow pond,
parting the dead grass to stare down into the water. Surely not a
poacher examining a trap; the man was familiar somehow.
Reuben identified him, but doubtfully. Acting on an impulse of gentle
wickedness, he slid out from the bushes and sat cross-legged with his
chin in his hands, all as quietly as a mouse crossing a heap of flour.
Rising at last from his peculiar inspection of the pond water, the man
sneezed again. He turned unknowing, and jumped delightfully. He said
"God bless me!" and closed his large mouth two or three times while a
slow chuckle shook him from fringed head to dingy shoes--a memorably
ugly man pitted with smallpox scars from a button chin to a bulging
forehead. His clothes were snuff-stained; respectable once, now a second
best suited to the woods. His little dark eyes gleamed mirthful and sad,
intent. A ribbony nose ended in a flared tip with a double knob. Reuben
marveled that having known this face at his bedside, and that not long
ago, he could have been confused in remembering it.
"I'm sorry, sir--didn't go for to startle you, Mr. Welland." "Oh, didn't
you!"
"It was the wig."
"The wig, sir? Oh, you mean the absence of my wig. I'm in a manner
disguised. I understand your synecdoche, or do I mean hypallage?"
"Metonymy," said Reuben.
"Brrr!" said Amadeus Welland. "Mm-yas, of course, 'tis the spotted
child, the younger one. How's your brother, Mr. Cory?" "Well," said
Reuben, and laughed happily for no plain reason.
Sighing and grunting as the elderly do, the little man sat on the
ground, not too ungracefully in spite of stooped plumpness and a modest
melon of potbelly. His darkened snuff-stained hands were firm, not very
wrinkled; he might be less ancient than he seemed. "Ah, the wig! The
structure! I employ it, you understand, for medical purposes. Wondrous
therapeutic--I dare venture you and your brother were so frightened by
it that you were forced to recover in spite of the worst my simples
could do. Yet plainly no one in his right mind could dwell in such a
thing, let alone go for a walk in the woods."
"I can see that, sir."
"You can, ha? I bought it in Newport," said Mr. Welland dreamily. "Ten
years ago. The moths have been at it a little since then; at that time
there were more ribbons in it, and I was younger myself. It doth own one
other function beside the medical. Not exactly duplicity nor
artifice--let us say, concealment. As a scholar, Mr. Cory, you'll
discover how a man of learning must often hide in the bushes, not only
from the ignorant, sir, but even more from the almost-wise. Now a man of
medicine, if he hath also some pretension to scholarship, is much
exposed, sir, much exposed to the winds of mischance, and so must even
carry his own dem'd shrubbery about with him, and that's what I do.
Honestly, Reuben, a'n't it a _hell_ of a wig?"
* * * * *
"Oh, Mr. Kenny!" said Faith Jenks. "Brier roses? I'll rest content with
that till you say a prettier." She studied Ben with silent laughter.
Laughing of course at the pimples. For a year Ben's face had been
lightly tormented. Huge wrists jutted; his nose was too small, his mouth
too big, the devil with all of it. Since she chose to laugh, Ben hated
her; thus occupied, he discovered as one caught in the embrace of ocean
that he was in love.
Maybe she had not been laughing. Her own small dainty mouth showed no
obvious quirk. Not brier roses. Damask roses, remembered--remembered----
In a dooryard garden at Deerfield.
Why, they would be blooming still! The village burned, and many died,
but not the secret life under the snow. _She planted them...._ At the
first urgency of summer sun they would have waked, spreading over
scorched fallen timbers in the desolate ground to spill the sweetness
from their clear June faces. For the first time Ben thought: I must go
back--some day. I must learn whether that is true.
The blue of Faith's coat and dress conspired with the bay and the blue
of heaven to make her eyes deeper than any sky of April. She stood
taller than Mr. Kenny, a woman grown, full-breasted, poised, maybe no
older than Ben in years but in command of all she said and did. His
quick glance told him she was in the habit of biting her right
thumbnail, and he rebuked himself for noticing it--merely such a flaw as
a goddess needs if she's to wear the semblance of common clay.
"Your mother's well, my dear?"
"Ay, Mr. Kenny, but not well enough to be out in this changeable
weather. She wished to come but I prevailed on her. Poor Mother is so
readily distracted!"
"I know. Ah, forgive me!--Mistress Faith Jenks, Mr. Benjamin Cory, my
grand-nephew, more a son. Hoy, and Charity--how's my lady Charity?" This
to a brief, blunt block of child who made some breathy noise. Faith was
holding out her hand. Ben knew he could not kiss it (as Ru could have
done) nor speak at all without sounding like a crow.
She had pity, letting his fingers know the electric softness and taking
her hand away. Ben confronted the glare of my lady Charity. About
thirteen, grim with crippling shyness, Charity tilted her square face
back in a blue bonnet that reflected her sister's in everything but
grace. A freckled paw jerked out and dropped before Ben could grasp it,
clenching its tiny companion. "'D do," she said, and examined her
shoe-tips in a cold quiet of despair.
A third strange face watched Ben--still, brown, impersonal; a Negro
girl, therefore a servant, probably a slave, but with no beaten,
cringing air such as Ben had noticed in the slaves of Pastor Williams at
Deerfield or in the few he had glimpsed in Boston and Roxbury. Her
slenderness was clad Puritan-fashion in white and gray, somehow not
subdued by the radiance of Faith. She stood apart, unconcerned as the
lady _Artemis_. Charity had taken a few awkward backward steps until the
brown girl's long-fingered hand dropped on her shoulder and there
remained. Dark eyes moved on to contemplate the open daylight and blue
water, disturbing Ben with the sense of a quiet alien and strong.
"Indeed," Faith was saying, "I've heard of you, Mr. Cory, and hoped we
might meet sooner. We don't go about much, with my father so much away
at sea. You was of Deerfield, I think?"
"Yes." Why, that was no croak! "I feel it to be long ago."
She smiled compassionately; everyone knew the story of Deerfield. "'Deed
you and your brother are men of mystery. I fear your noses are buried in
big old long books from a day's end to the next."
Mr. Kenny sighed and intervened. "True, Faith, their tutor and I, we
make 'em toil like galley slaves. Harvard in the autumn--the both of
'em, I'm proud to say. Might have entered last year, but I wished 'em
better prepared, Mr. Leverett of Harvard concurring, seeing they had no
classics in childhood." Ben squirmed; it sounded as though having no
classics in childhood was rather like being born with one leg.
"Your brother isn't in Boston today to see the _Artemis_?"
"No, Mistress Faith, he--well...."
"Mr. Reuben," said Uncle John too lightly, "was of a mind to go walking
in the woods."
"Ah, the _pretty_ thing!" Faith exclaimed, and Ben gave her credit for
divine tactfulness. "Mr. Kenny, why is the bowsprit slanted so low to
the water? I never saw the like on another vessel, no never."
"A whim of mine, my dear. I meddled with the builders. But your father
hath told me the thought's good--larger spread of jib, and a stronger
angle against the tension of the stays. Yet when I wanted it so I merely
thought 'twould make a handsomer line to the eye. Mph!--so peradventure
art is good for something?"
"Sir...." The lonely blue-eyed man had come lightly from the end of the
wharf, his hat held to his breast with no attempt to hide its
shabbiness. His shoes were cracked and stained. A rip in the green coat
was mended with large seaman's stitches, evidence that no woman tended
him, that his feline neatness was his own achievement. He bowed, as Mr.
Kenny's wizened mask watched courteously down the nose. "I fear I
intrude--is it I'm addressing the owner of the ketch?"
"I am her owner, sir."
"I've not seen a fairer craft in my seafaring years, and they some
twenty or more in all manner of vessels, all manner of places too
betwixt here and the Indies, that'll be the eastern Indies--Molucca,
Ceylon...."
His voice was baritone, resonant and sweet, a power stirring in it like
a drumbeat felt in the marrow. A plangent overtone rang in every word. A
lifting inflection suggested the speaker loved his words, reluctant to
put a period to them. Ben had never heard that in New England
speech--once, maybe, in that lost time when Uncle Zebina Pownal came out
of nowhere to sing for them.
"Ay, she's fair," said Mr. Kenny, admitting the obvious.
"And if it's you that oversaw the designing, as (forgive my rudeness) I
thought I overheard you say, then may I be shaking your hand?"
Mr. Kenny held it out impulsively, defenses down. Ben saw in his
great-uncle what he thought of as the "_Artemis_ look"--love me, love my
ketch. Pushing aside a transient alarm, Ben himself gave way to one of
his gusty moments of allegiance. This blue-eyed man must be admirable
and wise. His pale quiet, the odd way his face took little share in the
ardor of his voice--why, merely the reasonable caution of a man who must
have voyaged everywhere and seen everything on the everlasting seas. One
would do well to listen when he spoke, and remember.
"I am John Kenny of Roxbury, sir. The ketch is the _Artemis_, Peter
Jenks captain, her maiden voyage now ending."
"_Artemis!_ O the fair true name for such a lady! Daniel Shawn, sir,
your humble servant." No man's servant, and Ben knew it. Presented to
the elder daughter of Peter Jenks, captain, Mr. Shawn kissed her
fingers, and Ben writhed, not in jealousy but at his own incompetence:
that was how it ought to be done, and Faith was clearly pleased.
"_Artemis!_--what other name would be possible?" said Mr. Shawn, and
grew intent on brushing his coat lapel, asking casually in the same
breath: "Doth she carry letters of marque, Mr. Kenny?"
"That she don't," said John Kenny rather blankly. "Armed she is--you can
see the la'board falconet from here--but no letters of marque, sir. I've
not a word to say against the privateersmen, in these years of war when
the French do beset us so, but for my ships I'll have no part of it,
having made mine own small fortune in the hard way, Mr.
Shawn--refraining, let us say, from the thought of easy prizes because I
know mine own share of human frailty, and proposing so to continue."
"For which I honor you, sir," said Mr. Shawn, and having brushed the
lapel to his satisfaction and smiled with wonderful sweetness, he
changed the subject. "I've heard of your father, Mistress Jenks, the way
I suppose most seaman have in this part of the world, and he noble as
any captain under sail, now that's no lie."
Faith blushed, overwhelmed; her right hand wandered to her mouth. Mr.
Kenny was visibly wondering whether to steer Charity into another social
ordeal. Charity leaned against the brown girl, observing _Artemis_ to
the exclusion of all else on earth, particularly Benjamin Cory. Faith
turned to Ben, astoundingly, swaying so near that her face under the
ribboned calash must tilt up to look at him. She clutched the bonnet,
though it was well tied. "Pray allow me to tack into the lee of you, Mr.
Cory, to shelter my silly bonnet--your shoulders are broad enough."