The storm petrel hovered high, swooped close, her lips parted. Her teeth
shone with a native luster, as if she had lived on roots and tough
things all her life. Again little Rackby felt that glow of health and
hardness in her person, as if one of the cynical and beautiful immortals
of the Greeks confronted him. He was heartily afraid of her mystifying
power of enchantment, which seemed to betray him to greater lengths than
he had dreamed. Even now perhaps all was lost.
"I will meet you tonight, then--at the top of the hill. See? By the
Preaching Tree."
She nodded her head toward the church corner. "At eight sharp, by the
west face of the clock. And, mind you, Mr. Man, not one jot late or
early."
Although he heard the quick fall of her feet in the dust grow fainter,
it pleased him not to turn. There was a prickling above his heart and at
the cords of his throat. The harbor was as blue as a map suddenly
unrolled at his feet. Clouds with a purple warp were massing in the
east.
The harbor master stared hard at the low ridge of an outlying island
where a cow had been put to pasture. The hillocky back of that lone
ruminant grew black as ink in the glow of sunset. The creature exhibited
a strange fixity of outline, as if it had been a chance configuration of
rocks. Rackby in due time felt a flaming impatience shoot upward from
his heels. Water soughed and chuckled at the foot of the crab-apple
tree, but these eager little voices could no longer soothe or even
detain him with their familiar assurances.
He jumped up and stared hard at the west face of the clock, whose gilt
hands were still discernible in the fading light. It was five minutes of
eight.
When he slipped into the shadow of the Preaching Tree it had grown dark.
Fitful lightning flashed. In the meadow fireflies were thick. They made
him think of the eager beating of many fiery little hearts, exposed by
gloom, lost again in that opalescent glare on the horizon against which
the ragged leaves of elm and maple were hung like blobs of ink or swarms
of bees.
He breathed fast; he heard mysterious fluted calls. A victim of
torturing uncertainty, he strained his ear for that swift footfall.
Suddenly he felt her come upon him from behind, buoyant, like a warm
wave, and press firm hands over his eyelids. Her hair stung his cheek
like wire.
"Guess three times."
Rackby felt the strong beat of that adventurous heart like drums of
conquest. He crushed her in his arms until she all but cried out. There
was nothing he could say. Her breath carried the keen scent of crushed
checkerberry plums. She had been nibbling at tender pippins by the way,
like a wild thing.
The harbor master remembered later that he seemed to have twice the
number of senses appointed to mortals in that hour. A heavy fragrance
fell through the dusk out of the thick of the horse-chestnut tree. A
load of hay went by, the rack creaking, the driver sunk well out of
sight. He heard the dreaming note of the tree toad; frogs croaked in the
lush meadow, water babbled under the crazy wooden sidewalk.--The meadow
was one vast pulse of fireflies. He felt this industrious flame enter
his own wrists.
Then the birches over the way threshed about in a gust of wind. Almost
at once rain fell in heavy drops; blinds banged to and fro, a strong
smell of dust was in his nostrils, beat up from the road by driving
rain.
The girl first put the palm of her hand hard against his cheek, then
yielded, with a pliant and surprising motion of the whole body. Her eyes
were full of a strange, bright wickedness. Like torches they seemed to
cast a crimson light on the already glowing cheek.
Fascinated by this thought, Rackby bent closer. The tented leaves of the
horse-chestnut did not stir. Surely the dusky cheek had actually a touch
of crimson in the gloom.
This effect, far from being an illusion was produced by a lantern in the
fist of a man swinging toward them with vast strides. And now the clock,
obeying its north face, struck eight.
Before the last stroke had sounded the girl was made aware of the
betraying light. She whirled out of Rackby's arms and ran toward Sam
Dreed. The big viking stood with his feet planted well apart, and a
mistrustful finger in his beard.
"Touch and go!" cried Caddie Sills, falling on his neck. "Do we go at
the top of the tide, mister?"
"What hellion is that under the trees?" he boomed at her, striking the
arm down savagely.
"You will laugh when you see," said Cad Sills, wrung with pain, but
returning to him on the instant.
"On the wrong side of my face, maybe."
"Can't you see? It's the little harbor master."
"Ah! and standing in the same piece of dark with you, my girl."
Cad Sills laughed wildly. "Did ever I look for more thanks than this
from any mortal man? Then I'm not disappointed. But let me ask you, have
you taken your ship inside the island to catch the tide?"
"Yes."
"Oh, you have. And would you have done that with the harbor master
looking on? Hauled short across the harbor lines? Maybe you think I
have a whole chest of pearls at your beck and call, Sam Dreed. Oh, what
vexation! Here I hold the little man blindfolded by my wiles--and this
is my thanks!"
The voice was tearful with self-pity.
"Is that so, my puss?" roared the seaman, melted in a flash. He swung
the girl by the waist with his free arm. "You _have_ got just enough
natural impudence for the tall water and no mistake. Come along."
"Wait!" cried Jethro Rackby. He stepped forward. He felt the first of
many wild pangs in thus subjecting himself to last insult. "Where are
you going?"
The words had the pitiful vacuity of a detaining question. For what
should it matter to Jethro where she went, if she went in company with
Sam Dreed?
"How can I tell you that, little man?" Cad Sills flung over her shoulder
at him. "The sea is wide and uncertain."
Her full cheek, with its emphatic curve, was almost gaunt in the moment
when she fixed her eyes on the wolfish face of that tousle-headed giant
who encircled her. Her shoulder blades were pinched back; the line of
the marvelous full throat lengthened; she devoured the man with a
vehemence of love, brief and fierce as the summer lightning which played
below the dark horizon.
She was gone, planting that aerial foot willfully in the dust. Raindrops
ticked from one to another of the broad, green leaves over the harbor
master's head. Water might be heard frothing in a nearby cistern.
Suddenly the moon glittered on the parson's birch-wood pile, and slanted
a beam under the Preaching Tree. Sunk in the thick dust which the rain
had slightly stippled in slow droppings, he saw the tender prints of a
bare foot and the cruel tracks of the seaman's great, square-toed boots
pointing together toward the sea.
He raised his eyes only with a profound effort. They encountered a
blackboard affixed to the fat trunk of the Preaching Tree, on which from
day to day the parson wrote the text for its preachments in colored
chalk. The moon was full upon it, and Rackby saw in crimson lettering
the words, "Woman, hath no man damned thee?" The rest of the text he
had rubbed out with his own shoulders in turning to take the girl into
his arms.
"I damn ye!" he cried, raising his arms wildly. "Yes, by the Lord, I
damn ye up and down. May you burn as I burn, where the worm dieth not,
and the fires are not quenched."
So saying, he set his foot down deliberately on the first of the light
footprints she had made in springing from his side--as if he might as
easily as that blot out the memory of his enslavement.
Thereafter the Customs House twitted him, as if it knew the full extent
of his shame. Zinie Shadd called after him to know if he had heard that
voice from the sea yet, in his comings and goings.
"Peter Loud was not so easy hung by the heels," that aged loiterer
affirmed, "shipping as he did along with the lady herself, as bo's'n for
Cap'n Sam Dreed."
Jethro Rackby took to drink somewhat, to drown these utterances, or
perhaps to quench some stinging thirst within him which he knew not to
be of the soul.
When certain of the elders asked him why he did not cut the drink and
take a decent wife, he laughed like a demon, and cried out:
"What's that but to swap the devil for a witch?"
Others he met with a counter question:
"Do you think I will tie a knot with my tongue that I can't untie with
my teeth?"
So he sat by himself at the back windows of a water-front saloon, and
when he caught a glimpse of the water shining there low in its channels
he would shut his lips tight.--Who could have thought that it would be
the sea itself to throw in his path the woman who had set this
blistering agony in his soul? There it lay like rolled glass; the black
piles under the footbridge were prolonged to twice their length by their
own shadows, so that the bridge seemed lifted enormously high out of
water. Beyond the bridge the seine pockets of the mackerel men hung on
the shrouds like black cobwebs, and the ships had a blighting look of
funeral ships.--
He had mistrusted the sea. It was life; it was death; flow, slack, and
ebb--and his pulse followed it.
Officials of the Customs House could testify that for better than a
year, if he mentioned women at all, it was in a tone to convey that his
fingers had been sorely burned in that flame and smarted still.
The second autumn, from that moment under the Preaching Tree, found him
of the same opinion still. He trod the dust a very phantom, while little
leaves of cardinal red spun past his nose like the ebbing heart's blood
of full-bodied summer. The long leaves of the sumach, too, were like
guilty fingers dipped in blood. But the little man paid no heed to the
analogies which the seasons presented to his conscience in their dying.
Though he thought often of his curse, he had not lifted it. But when he
saw a cluster of checkerberry plums in spring gleam withered red against
gray moss, on some stony upland, he stood still and pondered.
Then, on a night when the fall wind was at its mightiest, and shook the
house on Meteor Island as if clods of turf had been hurled against it,
he took down his Bible from its stand. At the first page to which he
turned, his eye rested on the words, "Woman, hath no man damned thee?"
He bent close, his hand shook, and his blunt finger traced the remainder
of that text which he and Cad Sills together had unwittingly erased from
the Preaching Tree.
"No man, Lord."--"Neither do I damn thee: go, and sin no more."
He left the Bible standing open and ran out-of-doors.
The hemlock grove confronted him a mass of solid green. Night was coming
on, as if with an ague, in a succession of coppery cold squalls which
had not yet overtaken the dying west. In that quarter the sky was like a
vast porch of crimson woodbine.
When this had sunk, night gave a forlorn and indistinguishable look to
everything. A spark of ruddy light glowed deep in the valley. The
rocking outlines of the hills were lost in rushing darkness. At his back
sounded the pathetic clatter of a dead spruce against its living
neighbor, bespeaking the deviltry of woodland demons.--It was the hour
which makes all that man can do seem as nothing in the mournful
darkness, causing his works to vanish and be as if they had not been.
At this hour the heart of man may be powerfully stirred, by an anguish,
a prayer, or perhaps--a fragrance.
The harbor master, uttering a brief cry, dropped to his knees and
remained mute, his arms extended toward the sea in a gesture of
reconcilement.
On that night the _Sally Lunn_, Cap'n Sam Dreed, was wrecked on the
sands of Pull-an'-be-Damned.
Rackby, who had fallen into a deep sleep, lying northeast and southwest,
was awakened by a hand smiting his door in, and a wailing outside of the
Old Roke busy with his agonies. In a second his room was full of
crowding seamen, at their head Peter Loud, bearing in his arms the
dripping form of Caddie Sills. He laid her gently on the couch.
"Where did you break up?" whispered Rackby. He trembled like a leaf.
"Pull-an'-be-Damned," said Deep-water Peter. "The Cap'n's gone. He
didn't come away. Men can say what they like of Sam Dreed; he wouldn't
come into the boat. I'll tell all the world that."
The crew of the wrecked ship stood heaving and glittering in their oils,
plucking their beards with a sense of trespass, hearing the steeple
clock tick, and water drum on the worn floor.
"All you men clear out," said Caddie Sills, faintly. "Leave me here with
Jethro Rackby."
They set themselves in motion, pushing one against the other with a rasp
and shriek of oilskins--and Peter Loud last of all.
The harbor master, not knowing what to say, took a step away from her,
came back, and, looking into her pale face, cried out, horror-struck, "I
damned ye." He dropped on his knees. "Poor girl! I damned ye out and
out."
"Hold your horses, Mr. Happen-so," said Cad Sills. "There's no harm in
that. I was damned and basted good and brown before you ever took me
across your little checkered apron."
She looked at him almost wistfully, as if she had need of him. With her
wet hair uncoiling to the floor, she looked as if she had served,
herself, for a fateful living figurehead, like her mother before her.
The bit of coral was still slung round her throat. The harbor master
recalled with what a world of meaning she had caught it between her
teeth on the night of his rescue--the eyes with a half-wistful light as
now.
"Come," she said, "Harbor Master. I wasn't good to you, that's true; but
still you have done me a wrong in your turn, you say?"
"I hope God will forgive me," said the harbor master.
"No doubt of that, little man. But maybe you would feel none the worse
for doing me a favor, feeling as you do."
"Yes, yes."
Her hand sought his. "You see me--how I am. I shall not survive my
child, for my mother did not before me. Listen. You are town clerk. You
write the names of the new born on a sheet of ruled paper and that is
their name?"
Rackby nodded.
"So much I knew--Come. How would it be if you gave my child your
name--Rackby? Don't say no to me. Say you will. Just the scratching of a
pen, and what a deal of hardship she'll be saved not to be known as Cad
Sills over again."
Her hand tightened on his wrist. Recollecting how they had watched the
tide horse over Pull-an'-be-Damned thus, he said, eagerly, "Yes, yes, if
so be 'tis a she," thinking nothing of the consequences of his promise.
"Now I can go happy," murmured Cad Sills.
"Where will you go?" said the harbor master, timorously, feeling that
she was whirled out of his grasp a second time.
"How should I know?" lisped Caddie Sills, with a remembering smile. "The
sea is wide and uncertain, little man."
The door opened again. A woman appeared and little Rackby was thrust out
among the able seamen.
Three hours later he came and looked down on Cad Sills again. Rain still
beat on the black windows. Her lips were parted, as if she were only
weary and asleep. But in one glance he saw that she had no need to lie
northeast and southwest to make certain of unbroken sleep.
To the child born at the height of the storm the harbor master gave a
name, his own--Rackby. He was town clerk, and he gave her this name when
he came to register her birth on the broad paper furnished by the
government. And for a first name, Day, as coming after that long night
of his soul, perhaps.
When this was known, he was fined by the government two hundred dollars.
Such is the provision in the statutes, in order that there may be no
compromise with the effects of sin.
The harbor master did not regret. He reckoned his life anew from that
night when he sat in the dusk with the broad paper before him containing
the names of those newly born.
So the years passed, and Day Rackby lived ashore with her adoptive
father. When she got big enough they went by themselves and reopened the
house on Meteor Island.
The man was still master of the harbor, but he could not pretend that
his authority extended to the sea beyond. There he lost himself in
speculation, sometimes wondering if Deep-water Peter had found a thing
answering his quest. But Peter did not return to satisfy him on this
point.
The harbor master was content to believe that he had erred on the side
of the flesh, and that the sea, a jealous mistress, had swept him into
the hearing of the gods, who were laughing at him.
As for the child of Cad Sills, people who did not know her often said
that her eyes were speaking eyes. Well if it were so, since this voice
in the eyes was all the voice she had. She could neither speak nor hear
from birth. It was as if kind nature had sealed her ears against those
seductive whisperings which--so the gossips said--had been the ruination
of her mother.
As she grew older, they said behind their hands that blood would tell,
in spite of all. Then, when they saw the girl skipping along the shore
with kelp in her hands they said, mistrustfully, that she was "marked"
for the sea, beyond the shadow of a doubt.
"She hears well enough, when the sea speaks," Zinie Shadd averred. He
had caught her listening in a shell with an intent expression.
"She will turn out to be a chip of the old block," said Zinie Shadd's
wife, "or I shall never live to see the back of my neck."
Jethro Rackby heard nothing of such prophecy. He lived at home. Here in
his estimation was a being without guile, in whose innocence he might
rejoice. His forethought was great and pathetic. He took care that she
should learn to caress him with her finger tips alone. He remembered the
fatal touch of Cad Sills's kiss at Pull-an'-be-Damned, which had as good
as drawn the soul out of his body in a silver thread and tied it in a
knot.
Once, too, he had dreamed of waking cold in the middle of the night and
finding just a spark on the ashes of his hearth. This he nursed to
flame; the flame sprang up waist-high, hot and yellow. Fearful, he beat
it down to a spark again. But then again he was cold. He puffed at this
spark, shivering; the flame grew, and this time, with all he could do,
it shot up into the rafters of his house and devoured it.--
So it was that the passion of Cad Sills lived with him still.
He taught the child her letters with blue shells, and later to take the
motion of his lips for words. She waylaid him everywhere--on the rocks,
on the sands, in the depths of the hemlock grove, on tiny antlers of
gray caribou moss, with straggling little messages and admonishings of
love. Her apron pocket was never without its quota of these tiny shells
of brightest peacock blue. They trailed everywhere. He ground them under
heel at the threshold of his house. From long association they came to
stand for so many inquisitive little voices in themselves, beseeching,
questioning, defying.
But for his part, he grew to have a curious belief, even when her head
was well above his shoulder, that the strong arch of her bosom must ring
out with wild sweet song one day, like that which he had heard on the
November hillside, when Caddie Sills had run past him at the Preaching
Tree. This voice of Day's was like the voice sleeping in the great
bronze horn hanging in a rack, which his father had used to call the
hands to dinner. A little wind meant no sound, but a great effort,
summoning all the breath in the body, made the brazen throat ring out
like a viking's horn, wild and sweet.
So with Day, if an occasion might be great enough to call it forth.
"He always was a notional little man," the women said, on hearing this.
The old bachelor was losing his wits. Such doctrine as he held made him
out not one whit better off than Zinie Shadd, who averred that the heart
of man was but a pendulum swaying in his bosom--though how it still
moved when he stood on his head was more than even Zinie Shadd could
fathom, to be sure.
"It's the voice of conscience he's thinking of, to my judgment," said
one. "That girl is deafer than a haddock and dumb as the stone."
Untouched by gossip, the harbor master felt with pride that his jewel
among women was safe, and that here, within four humble walls, he
treasured up a being literally without guile, one who grew straight and
white as a birch sapling. "Pavilioned in splendor" were the words
descriptive of her which he had heard thunderously hymned in church. The
hair heavy on her brow was of the red gold of October.
If they might be said to be shipmates sailing the same waters, they yet
differed in the direction of their gaze. The harbor master fixed his
eyes upon the harbor; but little Day turned hers oftenest upon the blue
sea itself, whose mysterious inquietude he had turned from in dismay.
True, the harbor was not without its fascination for her. Leaning over
the side of his dory, the sea girl would shiver with delight to descry
those dismal forests over which they sailed, dark and dizzying masses
full of wavering black holes, through which sometimes a blunt-nosed
bronze fish sank like a bolt, and again where sting ray darted, and
jellyfish palpitated with that wavering of fringe which produced the
faintest of turmoil at the surface of the water.
This would be at the twilight hour when warm airs alternated with cold,
like hopes with despairs. Sparbuoys of silver gray were duplicated in
the water, wrinkled like a snout at the least ripple from the oars.
Boats at anchor seemed twice their real size by reason of their dark
shadows made one with them. One by one the yellow riding lights were
hung, far in. They shone like new-minted coins; the harbor was itself a
purse of black velvet, to which the harbor master held the strings. The
quiet--the immortal quiet--operated to restore his soul. But at such
times Day would put the tips of her fingers mysteriously to her
incarnadined dumb lips and appear to hearken on the seaward side. If a
willful light came sometimes in her eyes he did not see it.
But even on the seaward side there would not be heard, on such nights,
the slightest sound to break the quiet, unless that of little fish
jumping playfully in the violet light, and sending out great circles to
shimmer toward the horizon.
So it drew on toward Day Rackby's eighteenth birthday.
One morning in October they set out from Meteor for the village. A cool
wind surged through the sparkling brown oak leaves of the oaks at
Hannan's Landing.
"They die as the old die," reflected Jethro Rackby, "gnarled, withered,
still hanging on when they are all but sapless."
Despite the melancholy thought, his vision was gladdened by a magic
clarity extending over all the heavens, and even to the source of the
reviving winds. The sea was blown clear of ships. In the harbor a few
still sat like seabirds drying plumage. Against the explosive whiteness
of wind clouds, their sails looked like wrinkled parchment, or yellowing
Egyptian cloth; the patches were mysterious hieroglyphs.
Day sat sleepily in the stern of the dory, her shoulders pinched back,
her heavy braid overside and just failing the water, her eyes on the
sway of cockles in the bottom of the boat.
Rackby puckered his face, when the square bell tower of the church,
white as chalk, came into view, dazzling against the somber green
upland. The red crown of a maple showed as if a great spoke of the
rising sun had passed across that field and touched the tree to fire
with its brilliant heat.
So he had stood--so he had been touched. His heart beat fast, and now he
stood under the Preaching Tree again, and drew a whiff of warm hay,
clover-spiced, as it went creaking past, a square-topped load, swishing
and dropping fragrant tufts.--This odor haunted him, as if delights
forgotten, only dreamed, or enjoyed in other lives, had drifted past
him.--Then the vivid touch of Cad Sills's lips.
He glanced up, and at once his oars stumbled, and he nearly dropped them
in his fright. For the fraction of a second he had, it seemed, surprised
Cad Sills herself looking at him steadily out of those blue, half-shut
lazy eyes of his scrupulously guarded foster child. The flesh cringed on
his body. Was she lurking there still? Certainly he had felt again, in
that flash, the kiss, the warm tumult of her body, the fingers
dove-tailed across his eyes; and even seen the scented hay draw past
him, toppling and quivering.
He stared more closely at the girl. She looked nothing like the wild
mother. There was no hint of Cad Sills in that golden beauty unless,
perhaps, in a certain charming bluntness of sculpturing at the very tip
of her nose, a deft touch. Nevertheless, some invisible fury had beat
him about the head with her wings there in the bright sunshine.
Disquieted, he resumed the oars. They had drifted close to the bank, and
a shower of maple leaves, waxen red, all but fell into the boat.
"These die as the young die," thought the harbor master, sadly. "They
delight to go, these adventurers, swooping down at a breath. They are
not afraid of the mystery of mold."
His glance returned to the wandlike form of his daughter, whose eyes now
opened upon his archly.
"So she would adventure death," he reflected. "Almost at as light a
whisper from the powers of darkness, too."
They were no sooner ashore than the girl tugged at his hand to stay him.
The jeweler's glass front had intrigued her eye, for there, displayed
against canary plush, was a string of pearls, like winter moons for
size and luster. Her speaking eye flashed on them and her slim fingers
twisted and untwisted at her back. She lifted her head and with her
forefinger traced a pleading circle round her throat.
A dark cloud came over Rackby's features. These were the pearls, he knew
at once, which Caddie Sills had sold in the interest of Cap'n Dreed so
long ago. They were a luckless purchase on the part of the jeweler. All
the women were agreed that such pearls had bad luck somewhere on the
string, and no one had been found to buy.
"Why does he display them at this time of all times, in the face and
eyes of everybody?" thought the harbor master.
A laugh sounded behind him. It was Deep-water Peter, holding a gun in
one hand, and a dead sheldrake in the other. The red wall of the Customs
House bulged over him.
"Ah, there, Jethro!" he said. "Have you married the sea at last and
taken a mermaid home to live?"
"This is my daughter, if you please," said Jethro Rackby. An ugly glint
was in his usually gentle eye, but he did not refuse the outstretched
hand. "You have prospered seemingly."
"Oh, I have enough to carry me through," said Peter. "I picked up a
trifle here, and a trifle there, and a leetle pinch from nowhere, just
to salt it down. And so all this time you've been harbor master here?"
His tone was between contempt and tolerance, as befitted the character
formed in a harder school, and the harbor master was bitterly silent.
Day had turned from the jewels and was coming toward her father. When
she saw the strange man beside him she stopped short and averted her
face, not before observing that Rackby might have passed for Peter's
father.
"Not so shy--not so shy," murmured Deep-water Peter, as if she had been
a wild filly coming up to his hand.
"She cannot hear you," Rackby interposed. The gleam of triumph in his
eye was plain.
"Can't hear?"
"Neither speak nor hear."
Peter Loud turned toward the girl again--and this time her blue eye met
his, and a spark was struck, not dying out instantly, such a spark as
might linger on the surface of a flint struck by steel.
Was it a certain trick of movement, or only the quickened current of his
blood that made Deep-water Peter know the truth?
"This is strange," he said.
That wind-blown voice of his, with its deepwater melodiousness, had
dropped to a whisper.
"Even providential," the harbor master returned, and his eye glittered.
Peter would have said something to that, but Rackby, with a stern hand
at his daughter's elbow, passed out of hearing.
Peter Loud was promptly taken in the coils of that voiceless beauty
whose speaking eye had met his so squarely. The mother had played him
false, as she had Jethro--but with Peter these affairs were easier
forgotten.
Within the week, as he was striding over the bare flats of
Pull-an'-be-Damned, he saw the flash of something white inside a weir.
The sun was low and dazzled him. He came close and saw that this was
Rackby's daughter. She had slipped into the weir to tantalize a crab
with the sight of her wriggling toes and so had stepped on a sharp shell
and cut her foot to the bone.
Peter cried amazedly. The shadow of the weir net on her face and body
trembled, but she uttered no slightest sound. It was as if some wild
swan had fallen from the azure.
In falling she had hurt her leg and could not walk. Peter tore the
sleeves from her arms and bound the foot, then bent eagerly and lifted
her out of the weir.
Immediately she hid her cheek in his coat, shivered, set her damp lips
with their flavor of sweet salt, full against his.
Deep-water Peter held her tighter yet. How could he know that here, on
Pull-an'-be-Damned, within a biscuit's toss of the weirs, Cad Sills had
served the same fare to Rackby. He turned and ran, holding her close,
and the tide hissed at his heels like a serpent.
The harbor master, lately returned from evening inspection of the
harbor, heard the rattle of oars under his wharf, and in no great while
he saw Peter advancing with Day limp in his arms.
The sailor brushed past him into the kitchen, and laid the girl down, as
he had laid her mother, northeast and southwest. Rackby at his side
muttered:
"How come you here like this? How come you?"
A fearful misgiving caused him to drop to his knees. The girl opened her
eyes; a new brilliance danced there. With a shiver, the harbor master
perceived those signs of a fire got beyond control which had consumed
the mother.
"She has cut her foot, friend Rackby," said Peter. "I took the liberty
to bring her here--so."
Wrath seized the little man. "Thank you for nothing, Peter Loud!" he
cried, and these again were the very words Cad Sills had hurled at him
when he had saved her life at Pull-an'-be-Damned.
"That's as you say," said Deep-water Peter.
"You have done your worst now," said Jethro. "If I find you here again I
will shoot you down like a dog."
Peter laughed very bitterly. "You have got what is yours, Harbor
Master," he said, "and it takes two to make a quarrel."
But as he was going through the door he looked back. The girl unclosed
her eyes, and a light played out of them that followed him into the dark
and streamed across the heavens like the meteorite that had once fallen
on Meteor Island.
Peter had taken a wreath of fire to his heart. The girl attended him
like something in the corner of his eye. Times past count, he plied his
oars among the cross currents to the westward of that island, hoping to
catch a glimpse of his siren on the crags.
Sometimes for long moments he lay on his oars, hearing the blue tide
with a ceaseless motion heave and swirl and gutter all round its rocky
border, and the serpents' hiss come from some Medusa's head of trailing
weed uttered in venomous warning. Under flying moons the shaggy hemlock
grove was like a bearskin thrown over the white and leprous nakedness of
stony flanks. At the approach of storm the shadows stealing forth from
that sullen, bowbacked ridge were blue-filmed, like the languid veil
which may be seen to hang before blue, tear-dimmed eyes.
Deep-water Peter felt from the first that he could not dwell for long on
the mysteries of that island without meeting little Rackby's mad
challenge. Insensibly he drew near--and at last set foot on its shores
again. Late on a clear afternoon he landed in the very lee of the
island, at a point where the stone rampart was fifty feet in height,
white as a bone, and pitted like a mass of grout. This cliff was split
from top to bottom, perhaps by frosts, perhaps by the fall of the buried
meteor. A little cove lay at the base of this crevasse, and here a bed
of whitest sand had sifted in, rimmed by a great heap of well-sanded,
bright-blue shells of every size and shape. This was the storehouse from
which Day Rackby drew her speaking shells.
He looped the painter of his dory under a stone and ascended the rock.
His heart was in his throat. All the world hitherto had not proffered
him such choice adventure, if he had read the signs aright. As if
directed by the intuition of his heart, he slipped into the shadows of
the grove. Fragrance was broadcast there, the clean fragrance of nature
at her most alone. Crows whirred overhead; their hoarse plaint, with its
hint of desolation, made a kind of emptiness in the wood, and he went
on, step by step, as in a dream, wrapt, expectant. Was she here? Could
Rackby's will detain her here, a presence so swift, mischievous, and
aerial? Such a spirit could not be held in the hollow of a man's hand.
He remembered how in his youth a man had tried to keep wild foxes on
this same island, for breeding purposes, but they had whisked their
brushes in his face and swum ashore.
The green dusk was multiplied many times now by tiny spruces, no thicker
than a man's thumb, which grew up in racks and created a dense
blackness, its edges pierced by quivering shafts of the sun, some of
which, as if by special providence, fell between all the outer
saplings, and struck far in. A certain dream sallowness was manifested
in that sunlit glimpse. The air was quiet. Minutest things seemed to
marshal themselves as if alone and unobserved, so that it was strange to
spy them out.
"She is not here," he thought. His footfall was nothing on the soft
mold. Portly trunks of the hemlocks began to bar his way. The thick
shade entreated secrecy; he stood still, and saw his dryad, a green
apparition, kneeling at the foot of a beech tree, and looking down. In
the stillness, which absorbed all but the beating of his heart, he heard
the dry tick, tick of a beech leaf falling. Those that still clung to
the sleek upper boughs were no more than a delicate yellow cloud or
glowing autumnal atmosphere suffusing the black bole of the tree with a
light of pure enchantment. He was surprised that anything so vaporous
and colorful should come from the same sap that circulated through the
bark and body of the thick tree itself. But then he reflected that,
after all, the crown and flame of Sam Dreed's life was Day Rackby.
Had she, perhaps, descended from that yellow cloud above her? Deep-water
Peter had a moment of that speechless joy which comes when all the doors
in the house of vision are flung open at one time.
His feet sank unheeded in a patch of mold. He saw now that her eye was
on the silent welling of a spring into a sunken barrel. She had one hand
curled about the rim. The arm was of touching whiteness against that
cold, black round, which faithfully reflected the silver sheen of the
flesh on its under parts. Red and yellow leaves, crimped and curled, sat
or drifted to her breath in the pool, as if they had been gaudy little
swans.
Suddenly the sun sent a pale shaft, tinctured with lustrous green,
through the hemlock shades. This shaft of light moved over the forest
floor, grew ruddy, spied out a secret sparkle hidden in a fallen leaf,
shone on twisting threads of gossamer-like lines of running silver on
which the gloom was threaded, and, last of all, blazing in the face of
that fascinating dryad, caused her to draw back.
Peter, as mute as she, stretched out his arms. She darted past him in a
flash, putting her finger to her lips and looking back. The light
through the tiny spruces dappled her body; she stopped as if shot; he
came forward, humble and adoring, thinking to crush into this moment,
within these arms, all that mortal beauty, the _ignis fatuus_ of
romance.
His lips were parted. He seemed now to have her with her back against a
solid wall of rock outcropping, green-starred; but next instant she had
slipped into a cleft where his big shoulders would not go. Her eyes
shone like crystals in that inviting darkness.
"What can I do for you?" said Peter, voicelessly.
Day Rackby pinched her shoulders back, leaned forward, and drew a
mischievous finger round her throat.
* * * * *
On that night Jethro stole more than one look at the girl while she was
getting supper. Of late, when she came near him, she adopted a
beloved-old-fool style of treatment which was new to him.
She was more a woman than formerly, perhaps. He did not understand her
whimsies. But still they had talked kindly to each other with their
eyes. They communed in mysterious ways--by looks, by slight pressures,
by the innumerable intuitions which had grown up, coral-wise, from the
depths of silence.
But this intercourse was founded upon sympathy. That once gone, she
became unfathomable and lost to him, as much so as if visible bonds had
been severed.--
A certain terror possessed him at the waywardness she manifested.
Evidently some concession must be made.
"Come," he said, turning her face toward him with a tremulous hand. "I
will make you a little gift for your birthday. What shall it be?"
She stood still--then made the very gesture to her bosom and around her
neck, which had already sent Peter scurrying landward.
The movement evoked a deadly chill in Rackby's heart. Was the past,
then, to rise against him, and stretch out its bloodless hands to link
with living ones? That sinister co-tenant he had seen peering at him
through the blue eyes would get the better of him yet.
Conscious of his mood, she leaped away from him like a fawn. A guilty
light was in her eye, and she ran out of the house.
Rackby followed her in terror, not knowing which way to go in the lonely
darkness to come up with her. In his turn he remembered the man who had
tried to keep wild foxes on Meteor.
The harbor was calm, wondrous calm, with that blackness in the water
which always precedes the _rigor mortis_ of winter itself. All calm, all
in order--not a ship of all those ships displaying riding lights to
transgress the harbor lines he had decreed. How, then, should his own
house not be in order?
But this was just what he had thought when Caddie Sills first darted the
affliction of love into his bosom. Somewhere beyond the harbor mouth
were the whispers of the tide's unrest, never to be quite shut out. Let
him turn his back on that prospect as he would, the Old Roke would
scandalize him still.
A man overtaken by deadly sickness, he resolved upon any sacrifice to
effect a cure. On the morrow he presented himself at the jeweler's and
asked to be shown the necklace.
"It is sold at last," said the jeweler, going through the motions of
washing his hands.
"Sold? Who to?"
"To Peter Loud," said the jeweler.
Jethro Rackby pressed the glass case hard with his finger ends. What
should Deep-water Peter be doing with a string of pearls? He must go at
once. Yet he must not return empty-handed. He bought a small pendant,
saw it folded into its case, and dropped the case into his pocket.
When he came to the harbor's edge he found a fleecy fog had stolen in.
The horn at the harbor's mouth groaned like a sick horse. As he pulled
toward Meteor the fog by degrees stole into his very brain until he
could not rightly distinguish the present from the past, and Caddie
Sills, lean-hipped and dripping, seemed to hover in the stern.
At one stroke he pulled out of the fog. Then he saw a strong, thick
rainbow burning at the edge of the fog, a jewel laid in cotton wool.
Its arch just reached the top of the bank, and one brilliant foot was
planted on Meteor Island.
"That signifies that I shall soon be out of my trouble," he thought,
joyfully.
The fog lifted; the green shore stood out again mistily, then more
vividly, like a creation of the brain. He saw the black piles of the
herring wharf, and next the west face of the church clock, the hands and
numerals glittering like gold.
The harbor was now as calm as a pond, except for the pink and dove color
running vaporously on the back of a long swell from the south. A white
light played on the threshold of the sea, and the dark bank of
seaward-rolling fog presently revealed that trembling silver line in all
its length, broken only where the sullen dome of Meteor rose into it.
High above, two wondrous knotty silver clouds floated, whose image
perfectly appeared in the water.
"Glory be!" said Jethro Rackby, aloud. He hastened his stroke.
Rackby, returning to the gray house with his purchase, peered past its
stone rampart before going in. His eye softened in anticipation of
welcome. Surely no angel half so lovely was ever hidden at the heart of
night.
The kitchen was empty. So were all the rooms of the house, he soon
enough found out. Not a sound but that of the steeple clock on the
kitchen shelf, waddling on at its imperfect gait, loud for a few
seconds, and then low.
Jethro went outside. The stillness rising through the blue dusk was
marvelous, perfect. But an icy misgiving raced through his frame. He
began to walk faster, scanning the ground. At first in his search he did
not call aloud, perhaps because all his intercourse with her had been
silent, as if she were indeed only the voice of conscience in a radiant
guise. And when at length he did cry out, it was only as agony may wring
from the lips a cry to God.
He called on her in broken phrases to come back. Let her only come, she
might be sure of forgiveness. He was an old man now, and asked for
nothing but a corner in her house. Then again, he had here a little
surprise for her. Ah! Had she thought of that? Come; he would not open
the package without a kiss from her finger ends.
He hurried forward, hoarse breathing. A note of terrible joy cracked his
voice when the thought came to him that she was hiding mischievously.
That was it--she was hiding--just fooling her old father. Come; it
wouldn't do to be far from his side on these dark nights. The sea was
wide and uncertain--wide and uncertain.
But he remembered that ominous purchase of the pearls by Deep-water
Peter, and shivered. His voice passed into a wail. Little by little he
stumbled through the hemlock grove, beseeching each tree to yield up out
of obdurate shadow that beloved form, to vouchsafe him the lisp of
flying feet over dead beech leaves. But the trees stood mournfully
apart, unanswering, and rooted deep.
Now he was out upon the pitted crags, calling madly. She should have all
his possessions, and the man into the bargain. Yes, his books, his
silver spoons, that portrait of a man playing on the violin which she
had loved.
With a new hope, he pleaded with her to speak to him, if only once, to
cry out. Had he not said she would, one day? Yes, yes, one little cry of
love, to show that she was not so voiceless as people said.--
He stood with awful expectation, a thick hand bending the lobe of his
ear forward. Then through silver silences a muttering was borne to him,
a great lingering roar made and augmented by a million little
whispers.--The Old Roke himself, taking toll at the edge of his
dominions.
Nothing could approach the lonely terror of that utterance. He ran
forward and threw himself on his knees at the very brink of that cracked
and mauled sea cliff.
It was true that Peter, in his absence, had disembarked a second time on
Meteor--a fit habitation for such a woman as Day Rackby. But did that
old madman think that he could coop her up here forever? How far must he
be taken seriously in his threat?
Peter advanced gingerly. Blue water heaved eternally all round that
craggy island, clucked and jabbered in long corridors of faulted stone,
while in its lacy edge winked and sparkled new shells of peacock blue,
coming from the infinite treasury of the sea to join those already on
deposit here.
What, then, was he about? He loved her. What was love? What, in this
case, but an early and late sweetness, a wordless gift, a silent form
floating soft by his side--something seeking and not saying, hoping and
not proving, burning and as yet scarce daring--and so, perhaps, dying.
Then he saw her.
She lay in an angle of the cover, habited in that swimming suit she had
plagued Jethro into buying, for she could swim like a dog. There, for
minutes or hours, she had lain prone upon the sands, nostrils wide, legs
and arms covered with grains of sand in black and gold glints. Staring
at the transfigured flesh, she delighted in this conversion of herself
into a beautiful monster.--
Suddenly the sea spoke in her blood, as the gossips had long prophesied,
or something very like it. Lying with her golden head in her arms, the
splendid shoulders lax, she felt a strong impulse toward the water shoot
through her form from head to heel at this wet contact with the naked
earth. She felt that she could vanish in the tide and swim forever.
At that moment she heard Peter's step, and sprang to her feet. She could
not be mistaken. Marvelous man, in whose arms she had lain; fatal
trespasser, whom her father had sworn to kill for some vileness in his
nature. What could that be? Surely, there was no other man like Peter.
She interpreted his motions no less eagerly than his lips.
The sun sank while they stared at each other. Flakes of purple darkness
seemed to scale away from the side of the crag whose crest still glowed
faintly red. It would be night here shortly. Deep-water Peter gave a
great sigh, fumbled with his package, and next the string of pearls
swayed from his finger.
"Yours," he uttered, holding them toward her.
Silence intervened. A slaty cloud raised its head in the east, and
against that her siren's face was pale. Her blue eyes burned on the gems
with a strange and haunted light. There was wickedness here, she
mistrusted, but how could it touch her?
Peter came toward her, bent over her softly as that shadow in whose
violet folds they were wrapped deeper moment by moment. His fingers
trembled at the back of her neck and could not find the clasp. Her damp
body held motionless as stone under his attempt.
"It is done," he cried, hoarsely.
She sprang free of him on the instant.
"Is this all my thanks?" Peter muttered.
She stooped mischievously and dropped a handful of shells deftly on the
sand, one by one. Peter, stooping, read what was written there; he cried
for joy, and crushed her in his arms, as little Rackby had crushed her
mother, once, under the Preaching Tree.
A strong shudder went through her. The yellow hair whipped about her
neck. Then for one instant he saw her eyes go past him and fix
themselves high up at the top of that crag. Peter loosened his hold with
a cry almost of terror at the light in those eyes. He thought he had
seen Cad Sills staring at him.
There was no time to verify such notions. Day Rackby had seen Jethro on
his knees, imploring her, voicelessly, with his mysterious right reason,
which said, plainer than words, that the touch of Peter's lips was
poison to her soul. It seemed to Jethro in that moment that a ringing
cry burst from those dumb lips, but perhaps it was one of the voices of
the surf. The girl's arms were lifted toward him; she whirled, thrust
Peter back, and fled over soft and treacherous hassocks of the purple
weed. In another instant she flashed into the dying light on the sea
beyond the headland, poised.
The weed lifted and fell, seething, but the cry, even if the old man had
heard it once, was not repeated.