The man swung fast, a glare of total amazement above his smile as though
he did not know the voice, and doubtless he did not, since Ben had never
before in his life spoken in such a tone. "_You?_ I'll take care of you
presently." A long arm snaked out, snatching the monkey from Dummy's
embrace by a miniature wrist.
Marsh flung her over the side. She made no outcry; only the lightest
splash. She surfaced in the mildly rippled water, feebly beating at it,
her black button of head scarcely clear of it, already near to death,
unable to swim, an atom of life useless and helpless. Dummy had turned
automatically, stunned, to watch the arc of her falling. "Now then!"
said Marsh, and grabbed at the mute's arm.
The arm surged upward at the touch, a motion like brushing at a
fly--Dummy did not look at the man, only at the struggle in the water,
too hypnotized by it even to moan or shake his bulging head. But the
brushing motion was enough to send Marsh reeling across the deck. He
fetched up squealing in the scuppers, his left leg bent under him. His
knife was out. Ben saw his leg give way once; then he was upright,
advancing slowly and with great care, the blade flat in his hand,
swinging from side to side. The monkey sank out of sight. Dummy turned
then, and saw Marsh. Head lowered, arms dangling to his ankles, he saw
Marsh, and understood, and charged him in a shambling rush.
Joey Mills and Ledyard had not moved.
The monkey broke the surface once more in some last spurt of strength
and stubborn hunger for life. Ben slipped out of his trousers and
tossed them to Ledyard. "Chips, mind my knife!" He was free of his shoes
and climbing naked over the rail.
He gave himself time for a glance out over the still water. The black
fin was there, yes, but not too perilously near, he thought--maybe a
hundred yards off, and moving away, cutting the water slowly astern of
the _Diana_. The small commotion of the monkey's fall must have gone
unnoticed, or the shark would have had her in an instant.
Ben gave himself time for one other glance, backward. Marsh had no
knife. Dummy's chest was dripping blood, but the knife lay several feet
away. Dummy was over Marsh, a knee on his chest, one fearsome hand
closed around his throat, and Marsh was not struggling. His neck was
probably broken already; the black eye-patch dangled over his ear;
neither eye would see anything more, and the smile was gone.
Joey Mills inside the rail was chattering. "Don't dive, Ben, for God's
sake don't! Leave me throw the brute a rope." He had one in his quick
little hands, had made it fast to the rail.
"Don't heave it, Joey--let it down." Ben could make out the shoe-button
dots of eye. They were fixed and possibly blind. "She could never find
it," Ben said. The motion of her arms had almost ceased; she could make
no progress through the water. Ben caught the rope and let himself down
without a splash, gauged his distance from her, and struck out under
water, eyes open.
He found the black shadow of her body and emerged beside her, about to
reach for her, but she had life enough yet to grab at him. He turned his
head to save his eyes. He felt the clutch of midget fingers in his hair,
the scrabble of her legs at his shoulders, and he swam for his life.
Ledyard's wild yell aided him. Until he caught the noise of it he had
been concerned only with his need to complete the act, having no time at
all to be afraid. The yell brought him sharp knowledge of death, and the
one more ounce of speed required to defeat it. He found and seized the
rope, and swung with a final burst of violence into safety. Up here in
his own element, clutching the rail with Dummy's monkey secure in his
other arm, he could look down in time to see not only the black fin
lancing toward him from astern but another shape of the same breed, a
vast gray hunger shimmering upward from the abyss, shifting to dull
silver, cutting water harmlessly at the _Diana's_ side and surging
unappeased away.
Dummy stumbled over the deck bleeding from the long gash across his
ribs. He blinked in love and fear at the naked god and fell to his
knees, then forward to clasp Ben's foot and roll his forehead over it.
"Don't! I pray you, don't!--here, take her! But I fear she'll die,
Dummy--I could only bring her back." Dummy reached up for her. Ledyard
at Ben's elbow was muttering something about his britches. "In a
moment," said Ben. "Mind the hatch, you and Joey. I don't want Jack and
Ball coming up yet if we can stop them." He knew somehow without a
glance that they would do as he directed. He crossed the deck to the
black heap of strangely inoffensive carrion. It seemed to him--outside
and apart from this incredibly violent new self of Ben Cory--that his
only impulse was to discover whether he could lift that gangling weight.
He could, and with astonishing ease. A limp stick, nothing more, a stick
with hanging legs and spiritless head and a bad smell. Needlessly he
crossed with it back to the starboard side. "The fish will be hungry,"
he said, and heaved it over. He gripped the rail with both hands, and
watched.
They were hungry. Ben watched, thinking not of Jan Dyckman nor of
justice nor of the long year ending; thinking only that quiet must
presently arrive when this was over, and that in his home country it
would be spring. The young apple tree by the kitchen garden--might that
be in bloom this morning, and Reuben there to see it? The water briefly
boiled in muddy red, and sent its diminishing ripples to infinity, and
was still.
Ledyard was tugging at his hand, which could now release its grip on the
rail, and urgently shoving something into it--the handle of Ben's knife.
"Look to yourself--he's coming!"
Daniel Shawn was framed in the cabin doorway, blankly staring. He could
certainly see them all--Joey and Ledyard now by the open forward hatch,
Dummy squatting in the shadow of the mainmast cherishing his dying
companion, Ben naked at the rail, the knife his father gave him
unsheathed and brilliant in the sun. Shawn closed the cabin door and
came a step away from it. He remembered; drew out the key from under his
shirt and turned his back on all of them, carefully locking the cabin.
Then he was advancing, astonishment giving way to some partial
understanding, savage and cold. He glanced aloft.
Ben did so too, having almost forgotten Manuel. Manuel was frozen at the
masthead, gazing down. Manuel must have seen it all. Ben guessed that
not even a roar from Shawn would bring him down at this moment, and Ben
was aware of having laughed.
"Well?" Shawn came forward another step or two. "Well? What's this
disorder, and thou naked and shameless?"
"Why," said Ben, "this is the garment and shield I wore when I came into
the world, as they say, and one day I'll die wearing it, maybe not
today. It's my intention to live a long while, after this ketch is
returned to Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury."
"Mutiny," said Shawn quietly. His head canted to one side, a danger
sign. He had stood so, without a word, when the body of Cornelius
Barentsz was cut in quarters and tossed to the sharks. Then as now, the
copper farthing had appeared in his left hand, twisting and sparkling.
It caught the sun this morning, sending lances of sharp light at Ben's
eyes, and Ben turned his knife until it shot the same small cruel
messages to Shawn, who winced and briefly turned his face away.
"_Judah!_"
"He can't run any more of your errands. He's sharks' meat, five minutes
past. Don't be calling the others and disturbing their breakfast."
"This from you.... Ben, you shall have part of your wish. You shall go
in the cabin, immediate. I order you to go there, and here is the key."
He took it from under his shirt and tossed it across the deck.
Ben made no motion for it, watching its fall with the corner of his eye.
"Joey," he said, "take that key and open the cabin. Tell Captain Jenks
that if fortune favors me I'll come to him presently with the key to his
leg irons. Tell him, Joey, I am hoping to redeem a year of my life that
in folly and weakness I threw away. Tell him that, and return here at
once to me."
The key had fallen near to Ben. Joey Mills did not need to pass close to
Shawn in order to retrieve it. Small, old and terrified, he was sidling
for it when Shawn bellowed: "Joey Mills, do you take orders from a
bare-naked child and not from your captain?"
Mills leaped and fluttered like a hurt sparrow. But he had the key, and
scuttled to larboard, intending a quick rush aft along by the larboard
rail as far from Shawn as he could get. Shawn was wearing no pistols,
only his short knife. Ben said: "He won't harm you, Joey. His business
is with me, not with you. If he tries to stop you, Ledyard and I will
both help you."
"Dummy!" Shawn called that name not in command but in pleading. But even
as he spoke, Dummy sobbed once, wetly and loudly, and shambled away up
to the bow. Ben glimpsed the monkey's head flopping limp, and the
spidery arms. She must have died, and Dummy must have known the
moment--yet up there at the bow Dummy was still trying to support her
head and make it live.
"Shawn, you spoke of these men as phantoms. Only some of them are that.
I think your Judah Marsh was a phantom, and so likely he made a thin
meal for the fish. Mills there is a man, and Matthew Ledyard, and Dummy.
Men are creatures you've never understood, never. I can see that now.
Myself, I begin, just a little, to understand them.... Joey has opened
the cabin. Needn't trouble to look behind you. Take my word for it, and
now give me that other key."
Shawn did not look behind him. He drew his own knife, slowly, without
threat, and leaned his back against the mainmast. "Compassed about....
Ben--why, why? Why must it be so?... And if I do not give you that other
key?"
"Then I must take it."
"With that knife. You'll use that knife against the man who would have
given you the key to a whole new world."
"Yes."
"Were we not to go there together, Ben?"
"Certainly I dreamed that once myself, before Jan Dyckman was found
dying in a dirty alley. And afterwards too, until I learned why he had
to lie there."
"Did I not give you the vision?"
"Yes."
"And see it strike fire in you?"
"Yes."
"As I never saw it in any other.... Have I not been kind?"
"Yes."
"Forbearing too? Forgiving a thousand things I'd never take from any
other man?"
"Yes."
"But you will use the knife. Have we not spoke together a thousand times
like friends? Haven't I made you laugh?"
"Yes."
"But you will use it.... Why?"
"Shawn, do you think I could walk into Heaven across the flesh of Jan
Dyckman? Dyckman and others--how many? The men of the _Schouven_--how
many, Shawn? And how many more, before we ever saw the new lands?"
"Does it matter? The vision is greater than the man."
"Nay, I think not, but even let that be so if you wish. But if you
follow the vision through blood and deceit, in mad denial of what your
senses tell you, then you lose it. Maybe the vision is there yet, but
you're mired down in your own folly. You're lost.... Shawn, you're truly
compassed about, as you say." Ben raised his voice, knowing that in this
windless air it must reach into the open cabin, if Jenks was in any
condition to hear it. "Mills and Ledyard and Dummy are with me. Manuel
won't fight for you. If Jack or Tom Ball would come on deck, they must
pass my friends there at the hatch. I don't wish to fight you, Shawn,
nor to harm you. We were friends. I know what you gave me and I value
it. But you're lost. You're mired, and I will not go down with you. Now
hear the alternatives. If you----"
"I see," said Shawn, perhaps to himself. "I see you will not go with me,
the way I should have known it all the while."
"Shawn"--Ben understood that he himself was pleading--"Shawn, there are
those who love me, or there were. My life is more to them than ever it
was to you. You never knew me. You never saw me. You saw the image of a
follower, and that you may have loved, but me you never saw. Now
then--my life is all I own. I'm naked in every way. And if you'd take
that from me I'll fight you to the last breath, and I'll win. Now hear
the alternatives. Throw your knife away and give me that other key.
Then, sir, I will not release Captain Jenks until he gives me his word
that he will take you unharmed to Boston."
"To man's justice!" said Shawn, and laughed. "No hearing. The short gasp
on the tricing line and all vision dead!"
"Men know little enough about justice, that's true. And so I'll give you
another alternative. If you will yield, I'll even set you free in a boat
when we raise the Cape--as you could have done for me a year ago when I
told you plain I'd have no part of your venture."
In dark astonishment, Shawn appeared to be considering that a while. His
gaze wandered over the deck. Certainly he would be understanding the
open cabin behind him, and whatever Mills and Ledyard were doing at the
hatch--Ben could not turn his head to look--and Dummy up there at the
bow, shut away in a private world of grief. "Your friend Peter Jenks
would never be consenting to such a thing at all."
"He would. His first duty is to Mr. Kenny and to the _Artemis_. To carry
out that duty he must be free of the leg irons. If I say he cannot be
free until he gives me his word to let you go, he will give it, and he
will keep his word."
"He will not. I know his kind."
"You know nothing of him. You see all men, including me, through your
fog of ambition and vanity--and visions.... Well, a third
alternative--nay, I can't put that in words."
"To turn this knife against myself?" Shawn's eyes were all black. The
copper farthing had been put away. He was shifting lightly from one foot
to the other. Ben caught some blurred noise from the forward
companionway, but could not turn to look. "I might even do it, Beneen,
now that's no lie--if so be the voyage is ended, and wouldn't it be the
lightest demand your tender heart has made of me? But Mother of God, I
wonder a little what you can do with the pretty ketch, and I not here.
Will you look to the northeast?"
Ben did so, a glance not so long as a heartbeat, taking in all that
part of the horizon. The faint smudge had grown to a rolling wall of
black, far away, maybe not so far. No least breath stirred here aboard
or over the near waters still ardent under the sun, but the pressure of
storm ached in Ben's eardrums, and over yonder, where the advancing
shadow fell, the water, no longer beaten gold, wavered in a troubled
darkness. So much Ben discovered in less than a heartbeat, and Shawn
chose that moment to leap for him.
The knife was up and aiming for Ben's heart--flashing, perilous enough,
intending death, but not shrewdly held as Judah Marsh would have held
it, in the flat of the hand, circling and slicing.
To Ben the man's action seemed almost slow; clumsy, weary. He was able
with amazing ease to catch the wrist of Shawn's right hand and force it
away. His own was seized in the same moment, the blade only inches from
Shawn's corded throat. Then indeed a slowness settled over them, a long
straining, a silent tension like that of the nearing squall--it must
break sometime, maybe not for a long while. Ben became a fighting
machine, the power in his left arm sufficient to hold destruction away,
the power in his right sufficient to maintain the ultimate threat,
but--because of the quivering effort in Shawn's bent arm and because of
a tortured reluctance in himself--he was not quite able to fulfill the
threat, not quite able to drive the point the two or three inches more
down into the soft pulsing spot in Shawn's neck where the life could
drain away.
Locked so and waiting, Ben heard commotion break loose behind him. A
yell, a shot, a tramp of loud struggling feet, a shrill hollow squeal
that could only be French Jack's war cry, and then a different kind of
yell from him--higher and thinner, maybe a scream of pain. Ben thought
he heard some strangled cursing in Ledyard's voice. No way to learn
about it. Nothing to do but hold the fighting machine to its cold
purpose until it should win through or take a knife in the back.
It seemed to Ben that he knew, before it happened, everything that Shawn
would try to do. Shawn shifted his feet, seeking to bring his boot down
on Ben's bare foot. The foot was not there, and Shawn nearly lost his
balance, regaining it with a groan of stormy breath--but Ben could still
breathe deeply, evenly. After that, he knew, Shawn would not dare to try
raising a knee to foul him. _I am a little taller after all...._
In chill calculation, the fighting machine forced Shawn aft by gradual
steps. Behind Ben the noise went on, a thrashing and a snarling. Two men
must be rolling about all over the forward deck--which two? Not Joey
Mills--surely Mills could do nothing with bare hands against Jack or Tom
Ball. It ought to be possible to turn about in this hideous embrace, at
least long enough to see----
Ben jerked his right arm backward, hoping to throw Shawn off balance or
at least to turn him.
It turned him, but in the swirling and writhing readjustment Shawn's
knife found Ben's forehead and drew a hot line downward. Ben heaved at
it long enough to save his eye. It returned, for that instant
inexorable, gouging Ben's cheek in a lingering kiss of fury to the edge
of the jaw. Then Ben's left hand could drive it away, and Shawn was down
on his knees and his face was turning brilliant red. _But that's my
blood on him._ Shawn was staring upward. "The color," he said. He was
staring directly into Ben's eyes. "The color of the western sea." And
his knife clattered on the deck.
Yet he was up on his feet once more, still pressing Ben's knife away,
even forcing it downward a little, and the motionless deadlock
continued. Weaponless and gasping, knowing defeat, Shawn would not
yield. "It's over," Ben said. "Can't you understand?" He would not
yield.
Ben's left eye clouded with blood from his forehead. The right eye could
discover all things in brilliant detail. A small gray heap by the open
hatch--Joey Mills, shot in the forehead. Up near the bow, Ledyard and
Tom Ball in a tangle of tom clothes and flailing arms; Ledyard had him
by the ears, beating his round head against the planks, and Ledyard's
marred face was a great gash of grin. Nearer, a redheaded thing crawled
aft inch by inch, holding a pistol, trailing a leg broken between knee
and ankle. This thing should have been creeping and suffering in
sunlight, but in the sky beyond it a blackness had done away with the
sun, while over Ben's head had begun a dubious mutter of troubled
canvas.
And only three or four feet away--Dummy, his head swaying from side to
side on the blunt neck, moaning, unable to advance, or understand, or
take part. Ben could understand that somehow. Dummy had two gods now,
and the gods were destroying one another, and the world had fallen to
bits while he clutched dead love in his tremendous arms.
Ben could not understand how there should again be huge noise behind
him, now that he was facing forward and could see them all with his one
unclouded eye, the living and the dead. Manuel? Never. The noise was
metallic, a crashing jangle, and the repeated thud of some heavy object
striking on the deck. He yelled: "God damn you, Shawn, give over!" Shawn
might not have heard that. Shawn was staring fixedly over Ben's
shoulder. Except for the grip on Ben's right wrist he was certainly
relaxing, weakening fast. It was possible to swing him around again, and
look aft, and understand.
With shackled ankles the giant could move in a horrible and careful
hopping, the chain jerking behind him. He carried in his hand the
three-foot plank that he had torn loose from the floor nails and all.
His broad face was one whitened granite calm. Clear of the cabin
doorway, he swayed for a time without support, observing--the wrathful
sky, the full spread of sail fitfully trembling and stammering under the
first warning gusts, the human deeds completed and not completed. His
little blue eyes brilliant with all the pure cold of northern ice, he
raised the plank, and balanced it, and hurled it.
But French Jack rolled his crawling body just clear of it, and leveled
his pistol with some care. It crashed in the same moment that Jenks
flung himself forward, and Jenks struck the deck still a yard or two
from his enemy, blood seeping from his leg above the iron band. Jenks
could crawl too. They would meet in a moment. The thunder of the shot
had galvanized Shawn into a last effort, and Ben could watch no more,
but he knew that the other thunder following was not from any human
source.
That was in the sails, a roar of stricken canvas above a deck gone mad.
Out of the torn sky the northeast wind with a booming outrage of rain
fell upon _Artemis_, slapping her over on her beam ends. The twisted
knots of human warfare rolled tight against the larboard rail, inches
away from a suddenly boiling sea.
Pressed down in that inferno, his face cold, and still, and streaming
with the flood of rain, Shawn forced Ben upward away from him, until his
right hand could join his left in grasping Ben's right hand. Shawn was
trying to speak above the uproar; Ben could not hear him. Ben felt the
agonized living shudder of _Artemis_ as a thing within himself, and then
he saw, not believing it, that his knife had gone down, its blade hidden
in the green cloth, buried to the hilt. Ben could not know, then or in
all his life, whether Shawn's own hands had drawn the blade in upon
himself, or whether this had been done by the wrenching struggle of
_Artemis_ in her extremity, or whether Ben's own right hand had sent it
down and so blotted out in one motion all the hope and the madness, the
cruelty, the blindness and the radiant visions, and the pain.
_Chapter Four_
"In such a gale, and my father shot down, and no one at the helm?"
"Ay, but she did rise, Charity. I felt her bear up against it slow and
brave, and I trusted her. Call it a fancy or a vain thought, but surely
any vessel will carry under her ribs some part of the spirit of the men
who made her, a spirit of her own. Yes, she answered that blow, and no
one at the helm. It had caught her flat-aback, but some-way, rising
against it, she brought herself clear into the eye of the wind. There
she hung in irons a moment, only a moment, found herself, paid off,
heeled over to starboard and scudded away to the southwest before it,
steady as an arrow. No one at the helm."
"Do you notice, Charity?--he speaks louder, and plain, my little
brother. That will be from answering back to the winds, and I think they
will never be so big my little brother can't shout 'em down."
"They've shouted me down many a time and will again. Well, when she
found her way like that, of course we were all flung to starboard too. I
cannot remember taking that key from Shawn's body. I must have done it
during that moment while she hung in the wind's eye, for I had it in my
teeth when I reached your father, and he helped me drag him to the
mainmast where he could brace himself. He knew me and spoke to me. He
held my knife for me while I unlocked the irons--I remember seeing it in
his hand, and the rain was washing it clean."
_And will again._ She thought: How else could it be, after all?
Certainly he would go again, and many times again. And it might be that
God would bring him safe through tempest and calm and war, but no
daughter of Peter Jenks would dare to predict safe harbor, least of all
perhaps for anyone so loved, since the Lord is a jealous God. There
could be that final time when even Ben would not come home; his place
would be empty, and so then--and so--as if one of those fleecy tranquil
clouds over in the blue clean east were advancing on her for her dubious
entertainment, Charity observed the beginning of a daydream. It was
nothing in her mind, as yet; it could become the familiar indulgence, if
she wished: herself receiving the news of her widowhood and bearing it
as best she might, maybe accepting the Romish faith so to join a
nunnery, or--much better!--going out among the Indians--(why not? Did
not John Eliot do so?)--to heal their sick and bind up their wounds and
teach them, becoming gray and old in this dispensation of decent mercies
until such time as God was willing to--_Hey! Misty dreams for silly
maids. I don't want you--go away!..._ Well, it was partly Ben's fault
for falling silent so long, when there was so much more to tell;
Reuben's too--Reuben sitting there radiantly quiet, and skimming a
pebble out beyond the line of foam whenever a wave spent itself
whispering at the open side of their sanctuary. Why dream now, when the
one dream (so unlike all the others!) had amazed and somewhat frightened
her by coming true? It might have been well enough in the long year past
to dream. Not now. Anyway not of widowhood--_when he ha'n't even asked
me!--but his eyes inquire of many things this afternoon_--and other such
matters far-off and cold and surely unwelcome. It might have been well
enough, once, to dwell in that labyrinthine refuge of fantasy; and
certain treasures brought back from the labyrinth might be saved--as for
instance the created moment when his face would turn to her gravely
astonished in discovery, and he would say: 'Why, Mistress Charity,
you're no longer an awkward child at all'--or something like
that--something.... But why flee from the present even for an instant?
Was he not close in the here-and-now? A very tall stranger who was not a
stranger; vastly older, a whole year older, the mobile miracle of his
face transformed by the bitter dissonance of the great scar still livid
and not quite healed, that angled across his high forehead and then ran
from his cheekbone to the edge of his jaw. Mouth and eyes were spared.
He could look far and curiously, as he always had, and deep. His smile
was--almost the same. Surely it would be altogether the same when the
scar was fully healed: probably now the torn muscles pained him when his
mouth widened; and maybe he felt less often in a mood for smiling since
his homecoming and the death of John Kenny. While a part of her
irresolutely wondered whether that mouth had ever kissed a woman--it
must have--her eyes searched and pondered the multiple planes and
shadows of his quiet face, beholding it in many ways. It was the face of
Ben Cory, with much in it of the Ben Cory who was, but even more for a
while it was a challenge and a problem. _What if I undertake what I
could never do before? Why could I never draw his face when he was
gone?... God knows I remembered it. Or did I truly? Did it not float
before me in the dark and come between me and the sunlight of winter?_
The shadow in the hollow of his cheek was deeper than she remembered
it--well, he was thinner; bad food and not much of it, she supposed;
still he grew on it and found strength in it. The hairline above his ear
was a simpler curve than she recalled. And why, why had she never
noticed that the tops of his ears were slightly pointed?--very slightly,
not like Reuben's, but still he did have that comical faunlike point.
Her fingers itched for a pencil but lay still, and she looked away to
the ever-moving green, and white, and unfathomable blue, the lashing
hurry of spent water up along the sand, the unceasing rise and fall. _I
must have been blind._ She closed her eyes, seeing much. _Well, it ought
to be three-quarter face, the chin up a little, intentness without a
smile-like so...._
"'O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days?...
"Reuben, you know too much. Won't you tell the rest, Ben? So many
things--tell me more about my father, and--all the rest. Will you not?"
"I will try.... She was far over to starboard, running from the squall,
until we got the tops'l furled. Dummy and Ledyard saw to that--or better
say your father did, for it was his voice, not mine, that made them
jump to it, and I to the helm, so to lash it and then go back to your
father for what little I could do. So much happened, and all in a
moment. All that I spent minutes in telling--why, I don't suppose more
than one minute passed from the time the squall struck to the time I was
unlocking the irons. Then much less than a minute, and I was lashing the
helm, Dummy and Ledyard aloft--in that bit of time Manuel died. Ledyard
had broken French Jack's leg with a capstan bar when Jack came up
through the hatch. Tom Ball shot poor Joey Mills, and Ledyard grappled
with Ball, beat the wind out of him I guess--a man's work. When the
squall hit us, only an instant after Jack shot your father, Jack was
washed overboard, and Ledyard--helped Ball to follow him, I believe. All
that I didn't see; Ledyard told me later. I saw Manuel die. It was while
I was at the helm, and she settling steady as you please on that
starboard tack. Poor soul, he'd stayed at the masthead through it all,
and clung to it through the first stroke of the storm, and now was
trying to come down, and it wasn't wind or rain that made him fall, but
his own sudden shaking--or maybe he thought Dummy was coming to get him,
but I don't believe that. He fell clear of the side, sank and never
rose, and _Artemis_ swept on by the empty waters where I could see
nothing of him.... Shawn was not washed over. His dead hand had gripped
the rail. Later I had much trouble freeing it so to give him a decent
sea-burial; and maybe that was when I truly said him a farewell, and his
hand so unwilling to let her go."
"Don't alway be turning me the right side of your face. I tell you it
does not trouble me."
"The scar would trouble most girls, Charity. Well, so I lashed the helm
and went back to the Captain, who was losing blood at a fearful rate,
and then I was a frantic time scrabbling in the locker for a cord to
bind the leg and stop the flow. I was obliged to pull the cord with all
my power before it would stop. The bullet had completely shattered the
bone. I don't think a surgeon could have set it. He said so himself, and
commanded me to cut the leg away below the break."
"The blood was not flowing but spurting?"
"Ay, Ru. Could anything have been done?"
"Not that I know of, under those conditions. Not with the anterior
tibial artery spouting and the bone shattered. You were fortunate he
lived beyond that day. You did as he ordered?"
"I did, and he lived twenty days. I asked him if I might not bring him
rum from the cabin before I cut it, and he thundered at me, No, in God's
name no, and thrust my knife back in my hand, and I cut as quickly and
cleanly as I might. Then he thanked me, and bade me help him up the
companion ladder to the quarterdeck. There he remained for all of our
homeward voyage, by the helm to give me guidance--and the same a fair
passage with no dirty weather except a little off the Bermudas, nothing
bad. He took the tiller himself at times, to relieve me, during the
first days. On the fourth day, I think it was, we could see the wound
had begun to mortify, and later he was sometimes out of his wits and
rambling, but he would alway come clear of that and tell me once more
how he would live until we came into harbor--seeing that nothing except
his word stood between me and Copp's Hill. He wrote an account of it all
and signed it with a great flourish--that was a quiet and a sunny
day--but he feared that would not be enough. Determined he was to speak
that word for Dummy and me, and he did so. Charity, I had never thought
your father a compassionate man, but--we learn, sometimes."
"He--I don't know. I don't know what to say."
"Perhaps he changed, as it seems we all do.... My clothes were washed
overside, by the way. I came into Boston harbor and to Uncle John's
house wearing a suit of Shawn's garments too small for me."
"Yes, little brother, they were too small for you, now that's no lie."
"Don't ever laugh at him!"
"I was never farther from laughing. You killed your wolf...."
"Ben, what of Ledyard? He did not come home with you."
"Nay, Charity, he did not. Ledyard, who felt so great a dread of
hanging--oh, it happened in the night, Charity, and the quiet, when we'd
come clear of that bad weather off the Bermudas and were sailing free
under a fair southeasterly and hoping to raise the Cape in a day or
two. Your father was sleeping in the fever of his sickness. Dummy came
to me in the dark, whimpering and pointing. He took the helm while I
went forward, half knowing what I was to find, but I was a long time
finding it. Ledyard had climbed out on the bowsprit with a length of
rope. The rope slipped backward after he fell, and so his face came
close against the face of the white goddess. I have never seen her look
so careless and so proud."
"For the deity of the moon that may be a way of kindness."
"Maybe, Reuben, maybe...."
Ben could remember how some such thought had stirred in his own mind
there in the moonless shadow--not altogether moonless, since the white
goddess had taken starlight to her face and was delicately shining,
aloof, indifferent, as Ben leaned out and cut the rope and gave the
spent body to the sea, and the sea accepted it with the careless whisper
of an enfolding wave. He had gone back then to the quarterdeck, where
the Captain had waked in a remission of the fever, and told him of it.
"She's taken better men," said Captain Jenks, and shrugged and groaned.
"All the same I never thought he had it in him." That was all Captain
Jenks ever said of Matthew Ledyard. Ben in the undemanding hours of the
days that followed could yet inquire: Where is the way where light
dwelleth? And where does the self end and the universe begin? But it was
plain--more than ever plain in this calm place where land and ocean met
and the war between them was only the joyful-tragic music of breakers on
firm sand--plain that he must ask those questions again and many times
again: of Reuben, of Charity, of others not yet known, most often of
himself, and would discover many answers, until the unimaginable time
when all questions arrived at silence as they had for John Kenny.
Answers bearing illumination seemed closer in this place than ever
before--"My garden," said Charity when they first came here, and held up
to him a pebble of many colors, flowerlike, worn smooth and round with
the sea's many thousand years.
"Storm never continues, I notice. The sky itself can't maintain it, nor
can we. Always the calm afterward--here, Ben, or in the Spice Islands."
"There are storms then in the Spice Islands?"
"Of course, Ben...."
"Did my father have--have aught to say of poor Ledyard?"
"Oh, he.... Why, he prayed God deal kindly with him. And he said not a
word against him when we'd entered the harbor and the men who came
aboard were questioning us. True, he had little time for words, Charity,
since death was on him while he spoke, and it took him, his head on my
arm, before the men were ready to lower him into the boat that should
have brought him ashore.... Yesterday when I went into Boston I sought
out Ledyard's widow, and told her how he aided us, and then I--a white
lie, I said he was washed overboard. Your father would have approved
this deception, I'm sure of it. I wish he could have lived to see you
again, Charity--still it's a marvel he could even live out the homeward
voyage, he was that wasted and worn out with the sickness from his
wound. But he did, and his word stood like a shield for me, so that when
I gave mine own account they believed me. Charity, when he'd done
speaking I asked him if I might not bring him something to drink. He
laughed at me a little, saying he had not the craving. He said: 'Do you
drink to me as well as pray for me if you're a-mind.' That was the last
he spoke.... Are you dreaming, Charity?"
"She's human too, you know."
"Oh, Ben, I was remembering how it was when they brought him home to us.
Is it possible that was only three weeks ago now? And thinking of the
burial, and how all the things we did--all the words spoken, ours, the
minister's, our friends'--how all that was so far from--him. Am I a
terrible bad heathen, that I should have felt--well, angry at it? But
mark you, Ben, I did _not_ show it, I did _not_ have one of my--my
Times. Did I? Did I show it, Ben?"
"Certainly not. You was a most quiet sweet mouse and opened your mouth
for naught but Amen and Thine-is-the-power."
"Faith and Mama in tears all day, and the neighbors resenting my dry
eyes, be sure of it, and good Mr. Hoskison so--marry, so important! As
if motions of the hands and holy words spoken could make any difference
to one who's died and gone away. But you don't think I'm a terrible bad
heathen?"
"You are not, but if Ben and I labor with you long enough, love, perhaps
we can make you one. I have hopes."
"Oh, you!"
"No, Charity, never mind the pup, you're no heathen, or if you are, then
I too. I've no patience with--let's call it mummery. I saw your father
die. He was a captain of men, and he died well. No words spoken over his
body can add anything to that. Such words are for the living, if they
wish them. No one spoke them for Daniel Shawn, and though it may be that
I killed him, I loved him too."
_And having said so much, and understood it while you said it, you will
never lean on me again, the which I accept because it is right._ Reuben
shied another pebble beyond the running line of the water's edge, aiming
for a circle of hurrying foam, hitting it with a neat plop in the
center. Good exercise for a steady hand. What he had said to Ben
concerning storm and calm was banal, he reflected, but truth has a way
of hiding in the blur of the commonplace and must be hunted there from
time to time: no good rushing upstairs or outdoors in search of a paper
that lies on the table under your nose. We do pass continually from
storm to calm--every one of us, even Madam Prudence Jenks. So meet them
both, in the atmosphere of doubt where honesty is--whether in fog over
quicksand, or on firm-appearing ground like this under a sunny sky of
June. Reuben tossed another pebble, seeing Charity smile at him
ruminatively, a gust of the sea breeze lifting a lock of soft hair from
her broad forehead; then her homely, snub-nosed, square-jawed face
turned back to Ben and was beautiful.
"I was thinking too, I wish I might have been with you both when Mr.
Kenny died. You've told me little of that, indeed nothing much about
your homecoming."
"He came on foot, Charity, and no word arrived ahead of him. We are not
such important people now, you know. I was upstairs in Uncle John's
room, and Mr. Welland with me. It was late, Mr. Hibbs gone to bed, and
we had almost persuaded Kate to go and rest too, but Mr. Welland had
told me he half expected Uncle John to go out that night, so we sat up
with him. There had been another stroke, as you know, a light one, but
he was failing rapidly and most of the time seemed hardly to know us.
Kate went downstairs for something, a pitcher of water I think, and I
heard the front door, and she cried out something, presently weeping and
laughing and calling up gibberish to us. I knew it was Ben, but I--you
know, Snotnose, you really should have sent a messenger to warn us you
was an inch taller and fifteen pounds heavier, in fact you'll be obliged
to work now to some purpose, or at thirty you'll have a gut, I swear it.
Mind it, Charity--he was ever too fond of cracklin's." _Quiet, Ru Cory!
This is how it was, and you can't tell it_: Ben Cory appeared in the
candlelight, and Ru Cory stood like a cold image and could not move, and
Amadeus Welland came to him--to Reuben because he was the one in
need--and then Ben came to him also--_but you can't tell it, seeing that
for all your and-so-forth intellect you cannot bring love into the
compass of a few well-chosen words, so be quiet and live a while_.
"Well, Charity, Uncle John knew him at once, even before he knelt by the
bed and said, 'I've come back.' His right hand came up and touched the
scar, and he said very plainly--we all heard it: Kate, and Mr. Hibbs
who'd come in rubbing his eyes and doubting, it may be, that anything so
good as Ben's return could actually happen at the borders of
philosophy--Uncle John said very plainly: 'Thou art my son.'"
"And he died then?"
"No, love, somehow nature seldom accommodates our itch for the
appropriate, I don't know why. That was later in the night. Ben was
exhausted, and I made him go to bed and save the story of his life for
the following morning. Uncle John didn't die then, but seemed to have
fallen into a heavy sleep. We stayed with him of course. I was watching
his hand, Charity"--_and Amadeus' arm over my shoulder, and his voice
speaking to me now and then_--"and at some time toward morning there was
a kind of disturbance in his sleep, his hand closing as if it would hold
fast to certain things for a while yet. Then it opened and gave it all
away."
_He needs no help except what Mr. Welland can give, still I'll do what
I may._ Ben could see also the next voyage of the ketch _Artemis_. He
would not be aboard--as Sam Tench had made clear, there was much to do,
and Ben Cory the one to do it. A possible partnership with Riggs of
Salem, for instance--it must be considered at least. Captain Heath would
take _Artemis_ to New York, and some good man must be found to take
Heath's place on the sloop _Hebe_. But next year, Ben thought, maybe he
could go again on _Artemis_--maybe to Norfolk--maybe.... Then at some
time, much later, maybe three or four good vessels fit for the passage
around the Horn, even a charter from the Queen--not at all impossible,
some years from now, if done in the right way. In the meanwhile----
"Now you are dreaming, Ben. I used to know that look, in Deerfield. But
now when your mind's under sail I suppose it goes into places you've
seen with your true eyes. And when you'd hear the sea you needn't bury
an ear in the pillow and cover the other with the flat of your
paw--well, Charity, what a fool he used to look that way! And how often
was I tempted to shove the paw aside and blow in his ear--give him a
real storm--you know? Never did, and can't now because he's grown big
enough to give me a hiding, or he thinks he has."
"It's true I was thinking a little of the seaways, but how a devil's
name did you know it?"
"He's much too wise a fox, Ben--it's those little pointed ears."
"Charity, I meant to ask before now: Faith--is she--content?"
"I believe so. Mr. Hoskison is a worthy man, and has been most kind to
us."
"What of that girl who--I mean--her name was Clarissa, was it not?"
"My mother was obliged--that is, she...."
"Without Charity's knowledge, Ben, Clarissa was sold to New York because
there was no place for her at Dorchester."
"Oh, as for _my_ knowledge--what difference--_damn_ it--oh, forgive me!
I meant----"
"Darling wench, in the presence of two scholars of the humanities you
needn't alway be deferring to your Mama's judgment, and if you do, I
will overlook your attainment of the years of decorum and paddle you.
Clarissa should have been manumitted--you know it, would have done it
had it been in your power, I know it, Ben knows it, and I dare say now
and then your Mama knows it--this being a mad world, and it seems we
live in it. Now I do prophesy: in a few years my little brother will be
a man of affairs, and I myself intend to become filthy rich. As soon as
we may, sweetheart, Ben or I will go to New York and Clarissa shall be
bought free, so stop crying--Ben don't like it...."
"Better so in my arm, Charity? Are you comfortable?"
"Yes."
"And I must be going, seeing I promised Mr. Welland I'd be back in
Roxbury by the end of the afternoon. Medicines to be compounded, a visit
he's to make this evening and wishes me to go with him, and more of the
study that endeth never."
"We can't keep you?"
"No, dear."
"If you must go, Ru, maybe I----"
"Oh no! Do you stay here in the sun. I pray you both, be happy, and love
me sometimes. I must get on with my work."