"And if you're constable, and a man owns a bill he won't pay, why then
you've something to say in it, ain't I right? Well, here's a bill to
pay, fair and square. All this wool she'd pull over our eyes about
Andrew and the India ship--as if _that_ made a mite of difference one
way or the other! No, siree, Dunc, she give her word to take the man
that fetched the ring--that man's Joshua--the bargain's filled on his
side--and there you are. Now, you're constable. I take it right, Duncan,
you should give that girl a piece of your mind; give her to understand
that, India ship yes, India ship no, she's got a bill to pay and a
man's soul to save from damnation everlasting."
All Duncan could do with him that night was to smile and shake his head,
as much as to say, "You're a wild one, Miah, sure enough."
About Mary's sullen, stubborn belief in the "India ship," pretended or
real as it may have been with her, but already growing legendary, I know
only in the largest and mistiest way.
It is true there had been a ship that looked like an east-going clipper
in our waters on that fateful night. Every one had seen it before dark
came on, standing down from the north and laying a course to weather the
Head if possible before the weather broke. It was Mary's claim that
Andrew had pointed it out to her and spoken of it--in a strange way, a
kind of a wistful way, she said. And later that night, what better for a
man on the way to exile than a heaven-sent, outbound India ship, hove to
under the lee of the Head.
Yes, yes, it was so--it _must_ be so. And when they laughed at her in
Urkey Village and winked sagely at her assumption of faith, then she
asked them to tell her one thing: had any one's eyes seen Andrew's boat
go down--actually.
"If Joshua will answer me, and say that he _knows_ Andrew went down! Or
if any of you will tell me that Andrew's body ever came ashore on any of
the islands or the main!"
It was quite absurd, of course, but none of them could answer that, none
but Miah White, and he only when he had had a drop out of the bottle and
perceived that it weighed not an ounce in either scale.
Picked out so and written down, you would think this drama overshadowed
all my little world. Naturally it didn't. You must remember I was a boy,
with a thousand other things to do and a million other things to think
of, meals to eat, lessons to hate, stones to throw, apples to steal,
fights to fight. I take my word that by the time I was nine or ten the
whole tragic episode had gone out of my head. Meeting Mary Matheson on
the street, where she came but rarely, she was precisely as mysterious
and precisely as uninteresting as any other grown-up. And if I saw
Joshua Blake (who, pulling himself by the bootstraps out of drink and
despair, had gone into Mr. Dow's law-office and grown as hard as
nails)--if I saw him, I say, my only romantic thought of him was the
fact that I had broken his wood-shed window, and that, with an air of
sinister sagacity, he had told several boys he knew who the culprit was.
(A statement, by the way, which I believed horribly for upward of
eighteen months.)
I believe that we knew, in a dim sort of way, that the two were
"engaged," just as we knew, vaguely, that they never got married. And
that was the end of speculation. Having always been so, the phenomenon
needed no more to be dwelt on than the fact that when the wind was in
the east John Dyer thought he was Oliver Cromwell, or that Minister
Malden did not live with his family.
John Dyer had been taken beyond the power of any planetary wind;
Minister Malden (as I have told in another place) had gone back to live
with his family: and I had been away to Highmarket Academy for two
years, before I had sudden and moving reason to take stock of that
long-buried drama.
It was three days after I had come home for the long vacation, and,
being pretty well tired out with sniffing about the island like a cat
returned to the old house, I sprawled at rest on the "Wreck of the
Lillian" stone in the graveyard on Rigg's Dome.
It was then, as the dusk crept up from the shadow under the bluff, that
I became aware of another presence among the gravestones and turned my
head to peer through the barberries that hedged the stone, thinking it
might be one of the girls. It was only Mary Matheson. Vaguely
disappointed, I should have returned my gaze to the sea and forgotten
her had it not been for two things.
One of them was her attitude. That made me keep on looking at her, and
so looking at her, and having come unwittingly to a most obscurely
unsettled age, I made a discovery. This was that Mary Matheson, at the
remote age of thirty, had a deeper and fuller beauty than had any of
the girls for whose glances I brushed my hair wet and went to midweek
prayer-meeting.
I find it hard to convey the profound, revolutionary violence of this
discovery. It is enough to say that, along with a sensation of pinkness,
there came a feeling of obscure and unreasoning bitterness against the
world.
My eyes had her there, a figure faintly rose-colored against the
deepening background of the sea. She stood erect and curiously still
beside a grave, her hands clenched, her eyes narrowed. In Urkey they
always put up a stone for a man lost at sea; very often they went
further for the comfort of their souls and mounded the outward likeness
of an inward grave. Well, that was Andrew's stone and Andrew's grave.
Some one in the Memorial Day procession last week had laid a wreath of
lilacs under the stone. And now, wandering alone, Mary Matheson had come
upon it.
I saw her bend and with a fierce gesture catch up the symbol of death
and fling it behind her on the grass. Afterward, as she stood there with
her breast heaving and her lips moving as if with pain, I knew I should
not be where I was, watching; I knew that no casual ears of mine should
hear the cry that came out of her heart:
"No, No, No! They're still trying to kill him--still trying to kill
him--all of them! But they sha'n't! They sha'n't!"
I tell you it shook me and it shamed me. I thought I ought to cough or
scuff my feet or something, but it seemed too late for that. Moreover
the play had taken another turn that made me forget the moralities,
quite, and another actor had come quietly upon the scene.
I can't say whether Joshua, seeing Mary on her way to the Dome, had
followed her, or whether he had been strolling that way on his own
account. He was there, at all events, watching her from beyond the
grave, his head slightly inclined, his hands clasped behind him, and his
feet apart on the turf. The color of dusk lent a greenish cast to his
bloodless face, and the night wind, coming up free over the naked curve
of the Dome and flapping the long black tails of his coat, seemed but
to accentuate the dead weight of his attitude.
When a minute had gone by I heard his dry voice.
"So, Mary, you're at it again?"
"But they sha-n-t!" She seemed to take flame. "It's not right to Andrew
nor me. They do it just to mock me, and I know it, and oh! I don't care,
but they sha'n't, they sha'n't!"
"Mary," said Joshua, all the smoldering anger of the years coming in his
voice, "Mary, I think it's time you stopped being a fool. We've all had
enough of it, Mary. Andrew is dead."
She turned on him with a swift, ironical challenge.
"You say it _now_? You _know_ now? Perhaps you've just made sure;
perhaps you've seen his body washed up on one of the beaches--just
to-day? Or then why so tardy, Joshua? If you _knew_, why couldn't you
say it in so many words ten years ago--five years ago? _Why_?"
"Because----"
"Yes, because? Because?" There was something incredibly ruthless,
tiger-like, about this shadow-dwelling woman. "Say it now, Joshua; that
you know of a certainty Andrew went down. I dare you again!"
Joshua said it.
"I know of a certainty Andrew went down that night."
"_How_ do you know? Did you _see him go down_? Tell me that!"
For a moment, for more than a long moment, her question hung unanswered
in the air. And as, straining forward, poised, vibrant, she watched him,
she saw the hard, dry mask he had made for himself through those years
grow flabby and white as dough; she saw the eyes widening and the lips
going loose with the memory he had never uttered.
"Yes," he cried in a loud voice. "You bring me to it, do you?" The man
was actually shaking. "Yes, then, I saw Andrew go down that night. I
heard him call in the dark. I saw his face on the water. I saw his hand
reaching up as the wave brought him by--reaching up to me. I could
almost touch it--but not quite. If you knew what the sea was that night,
and the wind; how lonely, how dark! God! And here I stand and say it out
loud! I couldn't reach his hand--not quite.... I've told you now, Mary,
what I swore I'd never tell.... _Damn you_!"
With that curse he turned unsteadily on his heel and left her. The
shadows among the gravestones down hill laid hands on his broken,
shambling figure, and he became a shadow. Once the shadow stumbled. And
as if that distant, awkward act had aroused Mary from a kind of
lethargy, she broke forward a step, reaching out her arms.
"Joshua!" she called to him, "Joshua, Joshua, come back!"
In the last faint light from the sky where stars began to come, her face
was wet with tears of pity and repentance; pity for the man who had
walled himself in with that memory; repentance for the sin of her
blindness.
"Joshua!" she called again, but he did not seem to hear.
It was too much for me. Feeling more shame than I can tell, and with it
a new gnawing bitterness of jealousy, I sneaked out of hiding by the
"Lillian" stone and down the Dome toward the moors.
"Good Grandmother!" I know I grew redder and redder as I walked. "I hope
I don't have to see _her_ again--the old thing!"
But I did, and that before many minutes had elapsed. For fetching back
into the village by the ice-house and the back-side track, I was almost
in collision with a hurrying shade in the dark under Dow's willows. It
was Mary. I shall not forget the queer moment of suspense as she peered
into my face, nor the touch of her fingers on my arm, nor the sigh.
"Oh--you're--you're the Means boy."
An embarrassment, pathetic only now in memory, came upon her.
"I--I wonder----" Her confusion grew more painful and her eyes went
everywhere in the dark. "You don't happen to have seen any
one--any--you haven't seen Mr. Blake, have you?"
"No!" I shook off the hand that still lay, as if forgotten, on my
outraged arm. "What you want of _him_? _He's_ no good!"
With that shot for parting I turned and stalked away. Behind me after a
moment, I heard her cry of protest, dismal beyond words.
"Why do you say that, boy? What do you mean by that?"
Having meant nothing at all, except that I would have slain him gladly,
I kept my bitter peace and held my way to the westward, leaving her to
find her way and her soul in the blind, black shadows under the
willow-trees.
No one who lived in Urkey Village then will forget the day it was known
that Mary Matheson was going to marry Joshua Blake, at last. An isolated
village is like an isolated person, placid-looking to dullness, but in
reality almost idiotically emotional. More than anything else, when the
news had run, it was like the camp-meeting conversion of a simple soul.
First, for the "conviction of sin," there was the calling-up of all the
dark, forgotten history, the whispered refurbishing of departed gossip,
the ghosts of old angers. Then like the flood of Mercy, the assurance
that all was well, having ended well. Everything was forgiven and
forgotten, every one was to live happily ever after, and there must be a
wedding.
Surely a wedding! The idea that Minister Malden should come quietly to
the house and so have it done without pomp or pageantry--it is laughable
to think how that notion fared at the hands of an aroused village.
Flowers there were to be, processions, veils, cakes, rice, boots, all
the properties dear to the heart of the Roman mob. In the meantime there
was to be a vast business of runnings and stitchings, of old women
beating eggs and sifting flour, of schoolgirls writing "MARY BLAKE" on
forbidden walls with stolen chalk. Dear me!
You might think Mary and Joshua would have rebelled. Curiously, they
seemed beyond rebelling. Joshua, especially, was a changed man. His old,
hard mask was gone; the looseness of his lips had come to stay, and the
wideness of his eyes. One could only think that happiness long-deferred
had come under him like a tide of fate on which he could do no more than
drift and smile. He smiled at every one, a nervous, deprecatory smile;
to every proposal he agreed: "All right! Splendid! Let's have it done--"
And one got the sense somehow of the thought running on: "--right away!
Make haste, if you please. Haste! For God's sake, haste!"
If he were hailed on the street, especially from behind, his eyes came
to the speaker with a jerk, and sometimes his hand went to his heart.
Seeing him so one bright day, and hearing two old men talking behind me,
I learned for the first time that the Blake boys' father had died of
heart-disease. It is odd that it should have come on Joshua now, quite
suddenly, along with his broken mask and his broken secret, his
frightened smile, and his, "All right! Splendid!"--("Make haste!")
But so it was. And so we came to the day appointed. We had a dawn as red
as blood that morning, and tho it was clear, there was a feeling of
oppression in the air--and another oppression of people's spirits. For
the bride's party had the "hack," and Mrs. Dow had spoken for the only
other polite conveyance, the Galloway barge, and what was to come of all
the fine, hasty gowns in case it came on for a gale or rain?
Is it curious that here and there in that hurrying, waiting afternoon a
thought would turn back to another day when a storm was making and a
tall ship standing down to weather the Head? For if there was a menace
of weather to-day, so, too, was there a ship. We seemed to grow
conscious of it by degrees, it drew on so slowly out of the broad, blue,
windless south. For hours, in the early afternoon, it seemed scarcely to
move on the mirroring surface of the sea. Yet it did move, growing
nearer and larger, its huge spread of canvas hanging straight as
cerecloth on the poles, and its wooden flanks, by and by, showing the
scars and rime of a long voyage put behind it.
Yes, it seems to me it would have been odd, as our eyes went out in the
rare leisure moments of that afternoon and fell upon that presence, worn
and strange and solitary within the immense ring of the horizon, if
there had not been somewhere among us some dim stirring of memory, and
of wonder. Not too vivid, perhaps; not strong enough perhaps to outlast
the ship's disappearance. For at about five o'clock the craft, which had
been standing for the Head, wore slowly to port, and laying its course
to fetch around the western side of the island, drifted out of our sight
beyond the rampart of the bluffs.
Why it should have done that, no man can say. Why, in the face of coming
weather, the ship should have abandoned the clear course around the Head
and chosen instead to hazard the bars and rips that make a good three
miles to sea from Pilot's Point in the west--why this hair-brained
maneuver should have been attempted will always remain a mystery.
But at least that ship was gone from our sight, and by so much out of
our minds. And this was just as well, perhaps, for our minds had enough
to take them up just then with all the things overlooked, chairs to
fetch, plants to borrow, girls' giggling errands--and in the very midst
of this eleventh-hour hub-bub, the sudden advent of storm.
What a catastrophe that was! What a voiceless wail went up in that hour
from all the bureaus and washstands in the length of Urkey Village! And
how glad I was! With what a poisonous joy did I give thanks at the
window for every wind-driven drop that spoiled by so much the wedding of
a woman nearly twice my age!
The lamps on the street were yellow blurs, and the wind was full of
little splashings and screechings and blowing of skirts and wraps when I
set out alone for Center Church, wishing heartily I might never get
there. That I didn't is the only reason this story was ever told. Not
many got there that night (of the men, that is), or if they did they
were not to stay long, for something bigger than a wedding was afoot.
The first wind I had of it crossed my path at Heman Street, a huge
clattering shadow that turned out to be Si Pilot's team swinging at a
watery gallop toward the back-side track, and the wagon-body full of
men. I saw their faces as they passed under the Heman Street lamp, James
Burke, Fred Burke, Sandy Snow, half a dozen other surfmen home for the
Summer from the Point station, and Captain Cook himself hanging on to
Sandy's shoulder as he struggled to get his Sunday blacks wriggled into
his old, brown oil-cloths. In a wink they were gone, and I, forgetting
the stained lights of Center Church, was gone after them. Nor was I
alone. There were a dozen shades pounding with me; at the cow street we
were a score. I heard the voices of men I couldn't see.
"Aground? Where to?"
"On the outer bar; south'rd end of the outer bar they tell me."
The voices came and went, whipped by the wind.
"What vessel'd you say? Town craft?"
"No--that ship."
"What? Not that--that--_India ship_!"
"Yep--that India ship."
"India ship"--"India ship!" I don't know how it seemed to them, but to
me the sound of that legendary name, borne on the gale, seemed strangely
like the shadow of some one coming cast across a stage.
I'll not use space to tell how I got across the island; it would be only
the confused tale of an hour that seems but a minute now. I lost the
track somewhere short of Si Pilot's place, and wading the sand to the
west came out on the beach, without the slightest notion of where I was.
I only know it was a majestic and awful place to be alone; majestic with
the weight of wind and the rolling thunder of water; the more awful
because I could not see the water itself, save for the rare gray ghost
of a tongue licking swiftly up the sand to catch at my feet if I did
not spring away in time. Once a mother of waves struck at me with a
huge, dim timber; I dodged it, I can't say how, and floundered on to the
south, wondering as I peered over my shoulder at the dark if already the
ship had broken, and if that thing behind me were one of the ribs come
out of her.
That set me to thinking of all the doomed men near me clinging to
slippery things they couldn't see, cursing perhaps, or praying their
prayers, or perhaps already sliding away, down and down, into the cold,
black caves of the sea. And then the shadows seemed to be full of
shades, and the surf-tongues were near to catching my inattentive feet.
If the hour across the island seems a minute, the time I groped along
the beach seems nights on end. And then one of the shades turned solid,
and I was in such a case I had almost bolted before it spoke and I knew
it for Rolldown Nickerson, the beachcomber.
He was a good man in ways. But you must remember his business was a
vulture's business, and something of it was in his soul. It came out in
good wrecking weather. On a night when the bar had caught a fine piece
of profit, I give you my word you could almost see Rolldown's neck
growing longer and nakeder with suspense. He would have made more of his
salvaging had he carried a steadier head: in the rare, golden moments of
windfall he sometimes failed to pick and choose. Even now he was loaded
down with a dim collection of junk he had grabbed up in the dark, things
he knew nothing of, empty bottles and seine-floats, rubbish he had
probably passed by a hundred times in his daylight rounds. The saving
circumstance was that he kept dropping them in his ardor for still other
treasures his blind feet stumbled on. I followed in his wake and I know,
for half a dozen times his discards got under my feet and sent me
staggering. Once, moved by some bizarre, thousandth chance of curiosity,
I bent and caught one up in passing.
Often and often since then I have wondered what would have happened to
the history of the world of my youth if I had not been moved as I was,
and bent quite carelessly in passing, and caught up what I did.
Still occupied with keeping my guide in eye, I took stock of the thing
with idle fingers; in the blackness my finger-tips were all the eyes I
had for so small a thing. It was about the size of a five-pound butter
box, I should say; it seemed as it lay in my hand a sort of an old and
polished casket, a thing done with an exotic artistry, broad, lacquered
surfaces and curves and bits of intricate carving. And I thought it was
empty till I shook it and felt the tiny impact of some chambered weight.
Already the thing had taken my interest. Catching up I touched
Rolldown's arm and shouted in his ear, over the roll of the wind and
surf:
"What you make of this, Rolldown?"
He took it and felt it over, dropping half his rubbish in the act. He
shook it. It seemed to me I could see his neck growing longer.
"Got somethin' into it," he rumbled.
"Yes, I know. Now let me have it back, Rolldown."
"Somethin' hefty," he continued, and I noticed he had dropped the rest
of his treasures now and clung to that. "Somethin' hefty--and valu'ble!"
"But it's mine, I tell you!"
"'Tain't neither! 'Tain't neither!"
He was walking faster all the while to shake me off, and I to keep with
him; our angry voices rose higher in the gale.
I can't help smiling now when I think of the innocent pair of us that
night, puffing along the sand in the blind, wet wind, squabbling like
two children over that priceless unseen casket, come up from the waters
of the sea.
"It's mine!" I bawled, "and you give it to me!" And I grabbed at his arm
again. But this time, letting out a squeal, he shook me off and fled
inshore, up the face of the dune, and I not far behind him.
And so, pursued and pursuing, we came suddenly over a spur of the dunes
and saw below us on the southward beach the drift-fire the life-savers
had made. There were many small figures in the glow, a surf-boat hauled
up, I think, and a pearly huddle of alien men.
But on none of this could I take my oath; my thoughts had been jerked
back too abruptly to all the other, forgotten drama of that night, the
music and the faces in Center Church, the flowers, the bridegroom, and
the bride.
For there on the crest before me, given in silhouette against the
fire-glow, stood the bride.
How she came there, by what violence or wild stratagem she had got away,
what blind path had brought her, a fugitive, across the island--it was
all beyond me. But no matter; there she stood before me on the dune at
Pilot's Point, as still as a lost statue, tulle and satin, molded by the
gale, sheathing her form in low relief like shining marble, her
stone-quiet hands at rest on her unstirring bosom, her face set toward
the invisible sea.... It was queer to see her like that: dim, you know;
just shadowed out in mystery by the light that came a long way through
the streaming darkness and died as it touched her.
Peering at her, the strangest thought came to me, and it seemed to me
she must have been standing there just so, not for minutes, but for
hours and days; yes, standing there all the length of those ten long
years, erect on a seaward dune, unmoved by the wild, moving elements,
broken water, wailing wind, needle-blown sand--as if her spirit had
flown on other business, leaving the quiet clay to wait and watch there
till the tides of fate, turning in their appointed progress, should
bring back the fabled ship of India to find its grave on the bars at
Pilot's Point.
She must have been all ready to go to the church; perhaps she was
actually on her way, and it was on the wind of the cow street that the
blown tidings of the "India ship" came to her ears. I can't tell you how
I was moved by the sight of her in the wistful ruin of bride's-clothes.
I can't say what huge, disordered purposes tumbled through my brain as I
stood there trying to cough or stir or by some such infinitesimal
violence let her know that I, Peter Means, was there--that I
understood--that I was stronger than all the men in Urkey Island--that
over my dead body alone should any evil come to her now, forever and
ever and ever.
As I tell you, I don't know what would have happened then, with all my
wild, dark projects of defense, had not the whole house of trance come
tumbling about my ears to the tune of a terrified bleating close at
hand. It was Rolldown Nickerson, I saw as I wheeled; my forgotten enemy,
flinging down the precious old brown casket he had robbed me of, and,
still giving vent to that thin, high note of horror, careening, sliding,
and spattering off down the sandslope. And as he vanished and his wail
grew fainter around a shoulder of the dune, another sound came also to
my ears. It was plain that his blind gallop had brought him in collision
with another denizen of the night; the protesting outburst came on the
wind, and it was the voice of Miah White--Miah the prophet, the avenger,
drunk as a lord and mad as one exalted.
There was no time for thought; I didn't need it to know what he was
after. Mary had heard, too, and knew, too; it was as if she had been
awakened from sleep, and her eyes were "enough to make one pity her," in
the old words of Mother Poll. Seeing them on me, and without so much as
a glance at the casket-thing which the roll of the sand had brought to
rest near her feet, I turned and ran at the best of my legs, down the
sand, around the dune's shoulder out of sight, and fairly into the arms
of the angel of vengeance. I can still see the dim gray whites of his
eyes as he glared at me, and smell the abomination of his curse. But I
paid no heed; only made with a struggle to go on.
"This way!" I panted. "To the north'rd! She's heading to the north'rd. I
saw her dress just there, just now----"
A little was enough to turn him. As I plunged on, making inland, I heard
him trailing me with his ponderous, grunting flesh. His ardor was
greater than mine; as we ran I heard his thick voice coming nearer and
nearer to my ear.
"'She shall come back,' says I, 'with the hand of iron,' says I."
As always in this exalted state his phraseology grew Biblical.
"'Thou shalt stay here,'" I heard him grunting. "'Here to the church
thou shalt stay, Joshua,' says I. 'And she shalt come back with the hand
of iron--the hand of iron!'"
"Yes!" I puffed. "That's right, Miah; only hurry. _There!_" I cried.
The rain had lessened, and a rising moon cast a ghost through the wrack,
just enough to let us glimpse a figure topping a rise before us. That it
was no one but Rolldown, still fleeing the mystery and bleating as he
fled, made no difference to the blurred eyes of Miah; he dug his toes
into the sand and flung forward in still hotter chase--after a
still-faster-speeding quarry.
I'll tell you where we caught Rolldown. It was before the church, within
the very outpouring of the colored windows. When Miah discovered who his
blowing captive was his rage, for a moment, was something to remember.
Then it passed and left him blank and dreary with defeat. The
beachcomber himself, pale as putty through his half-grown beard, was
beseeching us from the pink penumbra of the Apostle Paul: "You seen it?
You seen what I seen?" but Miah wouldn't hear him, and mounting the
steps and passing dull-footed through the vestry, came into the veiled
light and heavy scent of breath and flowers. Following at his heels I
saw the faces of women turned to our entrance with expectation.
Do you know the awful sense of a party that has fallen flat? Do you know
the desolation of a hope long deferred--once more deferred?
Joshua was standing in the farthest corner, beyond the pews where Miss
Beedie's Sunday School class held. Looking across the sea of inquiring
and disappointed faces, I saw him there, motionless, his back turned on
all of us. He had been standing so for an hour, they said, staring out
of a window at his own shadow cast on the churchyard fence.
It was a distressing moment. When Miah had sunk down in a rear pew and
bowed his head in his hands I really think you could have heard the
fall of the proverbial pin. Then, with a scarcely audible rustle, all
the faces became the backs of heads and all the eyes went to the figure
unstirring by the corner window. And after that, with the same accord,
the spell of waiting was broken, whispering ran over the pews, the
inevitable was accepted. Folks got up, shuffling their feet, putting on
their wraps with the familiar, mild contortions, still whispering,
whispering--"What a shame!"--"The idea!"--"I want to know!"
But some among them must have been still peeping at Joshua, for the hush
that fell was sudden and complete. Turning, I saw that he had turned
from the window at last, showing us his face.
* * * * *
Now we knew what he had been doing for himself in that long hour. His
face was once more the mask of a face we had known so many years as
Joshua Blake, dry, bitter, self-contained, the eyes shaded under the
lids, the lips as thin as hate. He faced us, but it was not at us he
looked; it was beyond us, over our heads, at the corner where the door
was.
There, framed in the doorway, stood the tardy bride, a figure as white
and stark as pagan stone, and a look on her face like the awful,
tranquil look of a sleep-walker. Neither did she pay any heed to us, but
over our heads she met the eyes of the bridegroom. So for a long breath
they confronted each other, steadily. Then we heard her speak.
"He's come!" she said in a clear voice. "Andrew's come back again."
Still she looked at Joshua. He did not move or reply.
"You understand?" I tell you, I who stood under it, that it was queer
enough to hear that voice, clear, strong, and yet somehow shattered,
passing over our heads. "You understand, Joshua? Andrew's come back to
the wedding, and now I'll marry you--_if you wish_."
Even yet Joshua did not speak, nor did the dry anger of his face change.
He came walking, taking his time, first along the pews at the front,
then up the length of the aisle. Coming down a few steps, Mary waited
for him, and there was a kind of a smile now on her lips.
Joshua halted before her. Folding his hands behind him he looked her
over slowly from head to foot.
"You lie!" That was all he said.
"Oh, no, Joshua. I'm not lying. Andrew has come for the wedding."
"You lie," he repeated in the same impassive tone. "You know I know you
lie, Mary, for you know I know that Andrew is dead."
"Yes, yes--" She was fumbling to clear a damp fold of her gown from
something held in the crook of her arm. "But I didn't say----"
With that she had the burden uncovered and held forth in her
outstretched hand.
She held it out in the light where all of us could see--the thing
Rolldown had discarded from his treasures, that I had picked up and been
robbed of in the kindly dark--the old brown casket-thing with the
polished surfaces and the bits of intricate and ghastly carvings that
had once let in the light of day and the sound of words--the old, brown,
sea-bitten, sand-scoured skull of Andrew Blake, with the two gold teeth
in the upper jaw dulled by the tarnishing tides that had brought it up
slowly from its bed in the bottom of the sea. And to think that I had
carried it, and felt of it, and not known what it was!
It lay there supine in the nest of Mary's palm, paying us no heed
whatever, but fixing its hollow regard on the shadows among the rafters.
And Joshua, the brother, made no sound.
His face had gone a curious color, like the pallor of green things
sprouting under a stone. His knees caved a little under his weight, and
as we watched we saw his hands moving over his own breast, where the
heart was, with a strengthless gesture, like a caress. After what seemed
a long while we heard his voice, a whisper of horrible fascination.
"_Turn it over!_"
Mary said nothing, nor did she move to do as he bade. Like some awful
play of a cat with a mouse she held quiet and watched him.
"Mary--do as I say--_and turn it over_!"
Her continued, unanswering silence seemed finally to rouse him. His
voice turned shrill. Drawing on some last hidden reservoir of strength,
he cried, "Give it to me! It's mine!" and made an astonishing dart, both
hands clawing for the relic. But my cousin Duncan was there to step in
his way and send him carroming along the fringe of the crowd.
The queer fellow didn't stop or turn or try again; sending up all the
while the most unearthly cackle of horror my ears have ever heard, he
kept right on through the door and the packed vestry, clawing his way to
the open with that brief gift of vitality.
It was so preposterous and so ghastly to see him carrying on so, with
his white linen and his fine black wedding-clothes and the gray hair
that would have covered a selectman's head in another year--it was all
so absurdly horrible that we simply stood as we were in the church and
wondered and looked at Mary Matheson and saw her face still rapt and
quiet, and still set in that same bedevilled smile, as if she didn't
know that round tears were running in streams down her cheeks.
"Let him go," was all she said.
They didn't let him go for too long a time, for they had seen the stamp
of death on the man's face. When they looked for him finally they found
him lying in a dead huddle on the grass by Lem White's gate. I shall
never forget the look of him in the lantern-light, nor the look of them
that crowded around and stared down at him--Duncan, I remember,
puzzled--Miah cursing God--and three dazed black men showing the whites
of their eyes, strange negroes being brought in from the wreck: for the
ship was no India ship after all, but a coffee carrier from Brazil.
But seeing Miah made me remember that long-forgotten question that the
lips of this dead man had put to the deaf sea and the blind sky.
"Who is to pay the bill? Who is to pay the bill?"
Well, two of the three had helped to pay the bill now for a girl's
light-hearted word. But I think the other has paid the most, for she has
had longer to meet the reckoning. She still lives there alone in the
house on the cow street. She is an old woman now, but there's not so
much as a line on her face nor a thread of white in her hair, and that's
bad. That's always bad. That's something like the thing that happened to
the Wandering Jew. Yes, I'm quite sure Mary has paid.
* * * * *
But I am near to forgetting the answer to it all. I hadn't so long to
wait as most folks had--no longer than an hour of that fateful night.
For when I got home to our kitchen I found my cousin Duncan already
there, with the lamp lit. I came in softly on account of the lateness,
and that's how I happened to surprise him and glimpse what he had before
he could get it out of sight.
I don't know yet how he came by it, but there on the kitchen table lay
the skull of Andrew Blake. When I took it, against his protest, and
turned it over, I found what Joshua had meant--a hole as clean and round
as a gimlet-bore in the bulge at the back of the head. And when,
remembering the faint, chambered impact I had felt in shaking the
unknown treasure on the beach, I peeped in through the round hole, I
made out the shape of a leaden slug nested loosely between two points of
bone behind the nose--a bullet, I should say, from an old, single-ball
dueling pistol--such a pistol as Joshua Blake had played with in the
shadow of apple-trees on that distant afternoon, and carried in his
pocket, no doubt, to the warm-lit gaiety of Alma Beedie's birthday
party....