Judith had vanished! Our maid-servant, astir in the child's behalf
before dawn, in her anxious way, was returned breathless from Whisper
Cove with the report. There was no Judith with the wife of Moses
Shoos: nor had there been that night. 'Twas still but gray abroad--a
drear dawn: promising a belated, sullen day. We awoke the harbor to
search the hills, the ledges of the cliffs, the surf-washed shore.
'Twas my uncle hither, the maid-servant thither, myself beyond.
Clamorous knocking, sudden lights in the cottages, lights pale in the
murky daylight, and a subdued gathering of our kind men-folk: I
remember it all--the winged haste, the fright of them that were
aroused, the shadows and the stumbling of the farther roads, the
sickly, sleepy lights in the windows, the troubled dawn. We dispersed:
day broadened, broke gray and glum upon Twin Islands--but discovered
no lost maid to us.
'Twas whispered about, soon, that the women had spoken evil of Judith
in our harbor; and pursuing this ill-omened rumor, in a rage I could
not command, I came at last upon the shameful truth: the women had
spoken scandal of the maid, the which she had learned from Aunt Esther
All, the Whisper Cove gossip. The misfortune of gentle Parson Stump,
poor man! who had in the ear of Eli Flack's wife uttered a sweetly
jocular word concerning Judith and the honorable intention of John
Cather, who walked with her alone on the roads, about his love-making.
But, unhappily, the parson being absent-minded, 'twas into the dame's
deaf ear he spoke, and his humor became, in transmission, by pure
misfortune, an evil charge.
There was then no help for it, old wives being what they are:
authorized by the gentle parson, depending upon the report of a dame
of character, the tittle-tattle spread and settled like a mist,
defiling Judith to the remotest coves of Twin Islands. And Judith was
vanished! I knew then, in the gray noon of that day, why the child had
cried in that leafy nook of the Whisper Cove road that she could go
nowhere.