THE RISK
He took the stairs at a bound, stumbling in the dark. Below, while he
mounted, an uproar broke out. “Come ahead! No! I told ye! Wait, hol’
on! What, leave him? Stave ’er in!” Through it sounded another voice,
clear as the ring of good metal in a brawl. “Afraid!” It was Anna,
crying indignantly, “And you sent him! Grown men, afraid? Then I will
without you!”
Next moment--catching his breath like a diver, at thought of what he
was about to see--he surged up through the bright square. He met an
equal shock of relief and bewilderment. A pair of boots lay on the
floor; white layers of smoke drew thinly past the gleaming brass-work
of the lamp; but except for these and the smell of gunpowder, the room
was empty. The sailor--it seemed at first glance--had vanished like a
goblin. But though the stair shook with hurried trampling, Miles heard
above it a sharp, jerky, sawing noise, cut short just as a bight of
rope, rasping double round a beam, uncoiled and flew single out at the
open window. Tony was gone, then, in no flash of fire; but why had he
shot off his pistol?
Before Miles could find the answer, a scuffle rose at the stair-head.
“Leave go! Let me go!” cried Anna furiously.
“No, ye don’t! Me first!” And Old-Hab swarmed up through the opening.
Whatever he expected to encounter, his face was white with anything
but fear. “You!” he exclaimed, lowering his gun. “You! Where’s--Thank
God, ’t any rate!”
Behind him the girl’s head rose, gleaming first in the sun, then--as
she found Miles--with an inward and more vital splendor. They did not
speak, or need to; for in one bright instant of surprise each saw the
other restored and exalted.
Behind her, in turn, came huddling upward the faces of the men, some
red, some pale, but all wide-eyed, gaping, and contorted, like faces of
hunters at the mouth of a lair.
“What in--Where’s he gone?” they shouted.
“Got away,” called Miles. “Down a rope, and pulled it after!”
The crowding heads ducked in a single impulse, the fury of the chase.
“Down ag’in, boys! Out from under, there! Git along!” roared the
voices; and below them, a seafaring bass, bawling in the deaf ears of
Lazy-Hab, “Slid down a rope! Ketch him yit!”
Slow and inquisitive, the teamster moved toward the window, leaned in
the open section, and then suddenly turned, with a grin.
“Look a-here, Mile,” he said, pointing a stubby finger.
Far below, the sailor was racing straight down the beach. His red
stockings twinkled as he leaped the rocks, scurried over the wet sand,
and, running out knee-deep, fell forward with a great splash. His arm
flailed the water in desperate over-hand strokes; his head became the
black point in a widening arrow-head of ripples.
“Let ’im go,” said Old-Hab stolidly. “We done our part. Good riddance,
bad rubbage.”
But Miles had turned.
“They’ll fire at him,” he said, and clattered down the stairs. Shouts
and curses rose to meet him, and outrageous blows set the tower
resounding like a drum. Penned at the foot of the stairway, the men
were battering the door with boot and gun-butt. And then for the first
time, Miles, half laughing, half indignant, saw how the sailor had used
him for the trick. These honest mad-caps had rushed in to his rescue;
and fairly on the heels of the hindmost, Tony had reached in, stolen
out the key, and locked the door.
For a long time it held solidly, while they clamored and pounded.
Forming a little phalanx, all hands, they flung at it together; again
and again it held, and they fell back, rubbing sore shoulders; till at
last hinge or casing crashed, splinters flew, and the captives tumbled
through into the sunshine, with an impetus that sent Lazy-Hab rolling
on the grass.
“We’ll see!” he cried ferociously, and, bouncing up, ran round the base
of the tower.
The others streamed after. On a bare ledge of pink granite, all stood
at fault, scanning the empty shore. Then Lazy-Hab, with a short, harsh
sound of merriment, pointed calmly. Out in a steel-bright strip of
water, a black disc, smaller than the tip of a buoy, bobbed with living
regularity.
“Long shot,” he chuckled, “but I’ve hit the kag on the beacon, furder.”
He had swung up his gun, when Miles, breaking through the group,
wrenched it from his hands.
“Wha’ d’ ye mean?” bellowed the marksman, raging. “You let a foreign
murd’rer--”
“That’s enough!” ordered Miles coldly. “You came near being a home-made
one.” He turned on the men, sharp and bitter. “You fellows come to!” he
said, and speaking on, with a few domineering words found himself their
master.
“That’s right,” growled one. “Talkin’ sense, Mr. Bissant,” another
nodded; “told ’em that, myself.” Old Quinn, with a sheepish, absent
grin of innocence, smuggled the cartridge from his gun. Their little
tumult was over, save in fireside history. And Miles had known his
first moment of command.
As he turned, however, his thoughts were of something quite different
and distant. He saw that black dot move down aslant the shining
channel, lose all apparent energy in the distance, and, dead as a bit
of driftwood, float past the foot of the island. But in imagination,
clearer than a spyglass, he pictured Tony swimming on, the sharp catch
of his breath, the labor of his great muscles against the tide, and
wondered, as the dark mote lessened on the water, what thoughts it
might confine. Only plans, perhaps, for his own unruly future; the
sailor, consistent to the last, had played upon them all; now he would
but change the scene and the persons. And still--“If things had been
different,” thought Miles, “if we’d started in together, somehow--” The
head drifted out of the paler surfaces, blurred into the dark, jagged
margin of the further shore, entered the inverted evergreen forest,
and, crossing the white streak where a birch trunk gleamed on the
mirror, was lost in safety. And with it, Miles felt some piece of his
old self departing.
When he turned away, at last, he found the men dispersing along the
shore toward Alward’s, and saw, through a gap in the firs, Anna and
the teamster climbing the distant field slowly, with now and then a
pause or gesture, like people in earnest talk. He was hardly at the
foot of the hill, when they had reached the house and gone indoors.
He followed, wondering why they had not waited. From between the
hackmatacks he could hear three voices contending, then two, and as his
foot grated on the doorstep, none. In the kitchen Ella and the teamster
met him with a guilty silence, while overhead a light step came and
went, and as if with a lighter spirit, the girl hummed little intervals
of song. When these sounds returned downstairs, Ella faced about with
an air that was almost gay.
“Now,” she cried, “for breakfast!”
All four sat down by the sunny window. From the outset, Miles found the
meal bewildering. Plainly his companions had shared some secret. They
glanced and laughed inconsequently; they talked of Tony and the escape,
with a curious exhilaration, and more curious gaps of silence; they
gave to this meagre breakfast a sense of banqueting, but banqueting
under the edge of some unusual event, soon to fall. The girl’s eyes,
her every word and movement, were as lamps and music to a feast. And
Habakkuk, dipping and swerving his weather-vane countenance, was
flushed with her praises like a minstrel.
“All the rest scairt, and she run slap into the lighthouse!” he was
repeating, when she cut him short.
“Come on,” she laughed, and, rising, ended their brief revel. They
trooped after her to the kitchen, where she caught up a bundle from
the floor. Hab wrested it from her arms, with the bow and flourish of
a country dancer, and still laughing as in a game, she turned to Ella,
and held out both hands.
“Good-by,” she said.
“I won’t say it!” rebelled the other violently, but next instant had
clasped her in a bear-like hug. “Oh, my old precious, good-by! Yes,
you’re right, you’re right!”
The pair, still embracing, moved clumsily out through the doorway. Then
Ella released her, crying between laughter and distress,--
“But you’ll be back!” She wrung the girl’s hand. “You’ll come back like
old Douglas, time they give him the gold cane and the speech--”
But the joke failed her, and the good creature fled into the house.
Habakkuk, with his burden, was already climbing the slope. Anna
beckoned to Miles, who followed her in bleak amazement, as if all his
friends had turned to strangers, and all their doings to some alien
by-play. Side by side, the two began the sharp ascent.
“What’s all this, Anna?” he said reproachfully. “What does it mean?”
She only laughed, stretched out a hand for help, and, falling back
at arm’s length, made him pull her by main strength, tugging and
slipping, up the tawny hillside. Not until he had paused for breath,
high in the wind above house and field, would she answer.
“It means I understand.” She looked away toward the sea, a strange,
distant light upon her face. “It means I’m happy. It means--well, Tony
showed the way.”
Miles eyed her gloomily.
“It means you’re going,” he said with bitterness. “That’s all I see.
Oh, Anna! Do you think I could change over night?”
She faced him with steady eyes but a wavering smile.
“You seem to think I can!” she retorted. Then with that sudden
elfin gravity, “When you were in the tower,” she said, “and we all
thought--Miles, I began to see, then. You must risk a person. It’s like
the wars. You must risk him, to find out all you--all he--”
She paused with a little, helpless motion, studied the ground between
them, then raised the light of her eyes.
“We three settled it before you came. An old woman that Habakkuk
knows--he’ll take me there in his wagon. No!” she laughed, “I won’t
tell you where! But she’s been sick, and all alone. Afterwards I may
come back to Ella--when you’re gone.” She tossed her radiant young head
in the breeze, and the sunshine caught it like a flying standard. “So
it’s all right, and nobody’s there to stop you any more, and you’ll
become the great man, and the lamps won’t go out, and--”
“Suppose,” he broke in, “suppose I didn’t become?”
“There it is again!” she cried in triumph. “The war! You’ll study and
work, the way men do. Yours will be all the brave part, the fighting
and broken heads; mine’s only--the risking. Perhaps they come back with
the trumpets and flags and everything, or blind, on a crutch, or never
at all. Do you think I didn’t know that? Why, we’re only--we’re all
poor river-drivers in the brook together. Go on, go out! Till you’re
out and away, I’ll never come back here in the world!”
“Anna!” he cried, and could only repeat that name, as though it were
the whole revelation. She, and she alone, had opened a great window
in his world. Never before had he felt life to be so dangerous and
inspiring, or himself, in the vast welter, so puny and so invincible.
For him, she had cut the bonds of Prometheus; for herself--she stood
there unchanged, the same distant sea-light on her face, the same
wavering smile. A sacrifice to youth had mounted here, in common words,
on a common hill of bare granite, yellow grass, and mullein, and to his
disgrace, all the offering seemed hers, and all the wonder.
“But I can’t,” he said. “You must promise when--”
“No,” she answered quickly. “Let’s not have promises. This much is
ours; the rest we can’t tell.”
He gave an inarticulate cry.
“I won’t have it!” he floundered angrily. “We can’t go, this way. I
won’t let you!”
“Miles!” She checked him, very sternly. “What about the other time?
Ella told me. You promised something once before, not just to him,
but--all the others. You almost--Had you better make any more promises
yet?”
He felt his cheeks burn, and was unfit to lift his eyes toward her.
“Don’t you see,” she went on with an altered voice, “why we stopped
right in this place?”
He saw only the parched grass quivering between them, and about their
feet a silly multitude of grasshoppers snapping upward with thin, dry
clicks, to sail in short curves deflected by the wind. In some former
silence it had been so; but where he could not tell, nor could he raise
his head out of this present shame. Far more visible before him lay his
broken purpose, stripped of all disguise and easy palliation.
“Do you see why?” said Anna once more, and when he still made no
answer, suddenly clapped her hands like a child. “I’ve made him mad,
I’ve made him mad!” she chanted. “Now he’ll fight like a trooper!”
She laughed, a queer, short, hurried laugh, and went on breathlessly.
“We say good-by here because it’s the best place. And you don’t
remember it! And I do, and always did and always will, and I told you a
dreadful fib in the boat, for the morning was just like this, and the
grasshoppers just the same, and you had the thorn in your cheek, right
exactly--there!”
Her volley of words was swift, her movement swifter. The breath was
still warm on his cheek as he reached out with a cry. But once more
she was bounding up the path, light as the wind in her hair. He heard
her laughing as she ran, plunged a few steps after, but halted as he
saw her, without a glance behind, overtake the plodding figure of
Habakkuk. It was ended, she was right.
The two moved slowly over the crest, sank to their shoulders in the
shimmering grasses of the sky-line. For a time the black cap of the
one, the bright head of the other, went bobbing and dwindling against
the whiteness of a cloud. Then these also blurred into the rim, and
sank. A wind--the first wind of early autumn--followed them over the
hill, whitening the grass in little scallops and waves, in puffs and
whirls, and sudden scurrying lines, like the breath of a colorless
flame, passing incessantly upward.
He stood watching, alone with the wind and the cloud. When at last
he gave over, and wheeled about, the whole valley was darkened and
vacated. He did not see it, or the house, or the river, for in this
opposite direction lay only something unpalatable, necessary, with a
short name that was no less trite than wonderful. Toward that he went
downhill resolutely, eager to begin, anxious, exulting, like a man who
has set his face toward the wars.
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
U · S · A
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Transcriber’s note:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.