The Best Short Stories of 1920 13 – Anonymous · Library Across
Literature · Short Stories
The Best Short Stories of 1920 13The Anonymous (part 4)
18
Literature · Short Stories
The Best Short Stories of 1920 13
The Anonymous (part 4)
AnonymousEnglish
She heard him as one hears music far away, only the accents and the climaxes coming clear. He asked her questions, and she was conscious of answering them: How long had she known Mr. Ayling?--He and her husband had been boyhood friends; she had met him first at the time of her marriage to Major Lonsdale. Had they kept up the friendship during all these years?--No, she had heard nothing of Mr. Ayling since her husband's death; she knew that he was in India; they had renewed the friendship when he returned to England a short time ago.--Ah, it was probable, then, that she knew very little about any attachments Mr. Ayling might have had?--Here Mr. Burke shifted his position, coughed slightly, and said:
"I ask you these questions, Mrs. Lonsdale, because of a very--may I say--a very unfortunate element in connection with the case. It appears that there was a woman with Mr. Ayling at the Homebury St. Mary inn."
Bessie Lonsdale waited, she did not know for what. Whole minutes seemed to go by with the elderly Mr. Burke sitting there in his attitude of formal sympathy before his voice began again.
"I have only been free to mention this to you, Mrs. Lonsdale, because of the fact that you will hear of it in any case, since it must come out in the formalities--"
"Formalities?" Her voice cut sharply into his.
"There will, of course, be an inquest--an investigation--the usual thing. I have been in communication with the coroner's office by telephone, and I have promised to drive down to Homebury St. Mary myself this afternoon. He was away on another case, and will not reach there himself until six. Meantime we must do what we can. They will necessarily make an effort to discover the woman."
Bessie Lonsdale must have given some sort of involuntary cry, the implication of which Mr. Burke interpreted in his own way, for he changed his tone to say:
"I'm afraid, my dear Mrs. Lonsdale, that she was a bit of a rotter, whoever she was, for she--ran."
"Ran?" She repeated the word.
He nodded. "Disappeared."
She did not know what expression it was of hers that caused him to say: "I don't wonder you look so shocked. I was shocked. Women don't often do that sort of thing...." She wanted to cry out that that sort of thing didn't often happen to women, but he was going on. He had risen and was walking slowly up and down before the smoldering fire, and in his incisive, deliberate, well-bred voice he was excoriating the woman who had been so cowardly as to desert a dying man. "Even if she hadn't seriously cared, or if, for that matter, she hadn't cared at all, it would seem that mere common decency.... It puts, frankly, a very unpleasant light on the whole affair.... Ayling was a gentleman, and--you will forgive me for saying so, I'm sure--just the decent sort to be imposed upon, to allow himself to be led into the most unfortunate affair."
She wanted to stop him, to cry out, to protest. But his words were like physical blows which stunned her and made her too weak to speak. She felt that if he went on much longer she would lose consciousness altogether. Even now she heard only fragments of words.
Suddenly she heard the word "publicity." He had stopped before her and was looking down at her.
"I think, Mrs. Lonsdale, that the thing we both wish--that is, we at the club, and you, as his friend--is to do what we can to save any unnecessary scandal in connection with poor Ayling's death. It is the least we can do for him."
"Yes!" She grasped frantically at the straw. "Yes, by all means that!"
"You would be willing to help?"
"Yes, anything! But what is there I can do?"
He was maddeningly deliberate. "You are the only person, it appears--at least the only person available--who has been aware of the condition of Mr. Ayling's heart. You can say, can you not, with certainty, that he did suffer from a serious affection of the heart?"
"He came home from India on account of it."
"Very well, then. It was also the verdict of the doctor who was called. I think together we may be able to obviate the necessity of a too public investigation--at any rate, we shall see. It must be done, of course, before the official investigation begins. Therefore, if you will come down with me this afternoon, in my car--"
"Come with you? Where?"
"To the inn, at Homebury," he said.
She was trapped ... trapped.... The realization of it sprang upon her, but too late, for already she cried out, "Oh, I couldn't--I couldn't do that!"
Mr. Burke was looking down at her. He loomed above her like the figure of fate.... She was trapped.... There was no way out, and suddenly she realized that she had risen and said: "Forgive me! To be sure I will go."
"I understand," said Mr. Burke, "how one shrinks from that sort of thing."
She did not know what she was going to do. She only knew that for this step, at least, she could no longer resist. Again she had the sensation of speaking and moving automatically, of decisions making themselves without the effort of her will.
She asked how soon he wished to go, and he said, consulting his watch, that they ought to start at once; his car was waiting in the street, since he had planned to go on directly from her house. She excused herself, and went to her room. She did not change her dress, but put on a long, warm coat, her hat, her veil, her gloves, and made sure of her key in her purse. Then she came out and said she was ready to go. He complimented her, with a smile, on the short time it had taken her, and she wondered if he had really seen her hesitation of a few moments before. They went down the stairs together. At the curb a chauffeur stood beside a motor, into which, with the utmost consideration for her comfort, Mr. Burke handed her. Then he gave his instructions to the chauffeur, and followed her in.
And there began for Bessie Lonsdale that fantastic ride in which she felt herself being carried forward, as if on the effortless wings of fate itself, to the very scene from which she had fled.
She had no idea, no dramatization in her mind, of what awaited her or of what she intended to do. Her imagination refused to focus upon it; and, strangely, she seemed almost to be resting, leaning back against the tufted cushions, resting against the time when she should be called upon for her strength. For she only knew that when the time came to act she would act.
It was curious how she did not think of Peggy. She was like a lover who has been set a herculean task to accomplish before he may even think of his beloved.
Beside her, Mr. Burke seemed to understand that she did not wish to talk. Perhaps he was thinking of other things; after all, he had not been Richard Ayling's friend; it was only a human duty he performed.
Long stretches went by in which she saw nothing on either side, and other stretches in which everything--houses, trees, objects of all kinds--were exceedingly clear cut and magnified....
"I'm afraid," said Mr. Burke's voice, "that we're running into a storm."
Bessie Lonsdale looked up, and saw that those fleecy, light-gray clouds which she had seen in the sky early that morning as she stood waiting for Ayling in the garden of the inn, and which had been gathering all day, hung now black and menacing just above her head.
It descended upon them suddenly; torrents ran in the road. The wind veered, and sent great gusts of rain into the car. The chauffeur turned and asked if he should stop and put the curtains up. Mr. Burke said no, to go on, they might run through it, and it was too violent to last. Meantime he worked with the curtains himself, and she helped. But it was no use; they were getting drenched, and the wind whipped the curtains out of their hands. Mr. Burke leaned forward and called to the chauffeur to ask if there was any place near where they might stop.
"There's an inn about half a mile farther on. Shall I make it?"
"By all means."
They ran presently into the strips of light that shed outward from the lighted windows of the inn. A half-dozen motors already were lined up outside. They got out and together ran for the door.
Inside, the small public room was almost filled. People sat at the tables, ordering things to eat and drink, and making the best of it. They chose a small corner table, a little apart from the rest. The landlord bustled up and took their coats to dry before the kitchen fire. A very gay, very dripping party of six came in, assembled with much laughter the last two tables remaining unoccupied, and settled next to them, so that they were no longer in a secluded spot.
In a few moments there came in, almost blown through the door by a violent gust of wind and rain, a short, stout, ruddy person, who, when the landlord had relieved him of his hat and coat, stood looking about for a vacant seat. The landlord came toward the table where sat Mrs. Lonsdale and Mr. Burke.
"Sorry, sir," he said; "it's the only place left."
"May I?" asked the stranger, and at Mrs. Lonsdale's nod and smile, and Mr. Burke's assent, he drew out the chair and sat down. The two men spoke naturally of the suddenness of the storm, of the good fortune of finding a refuge so near.
Bessie Lonsdale was glad of some one else, glad when she heard the stranger and Mr. Burke fall into the easy passing conversation of men. It would relieve her of the necessity to talk. It would give her time to think; for it seemed, dimly, that respite had been offered her. Into her thoughts broke the voice of Mr. Burke addressing her:
"How very singular, Mrs. Lonsdale! This gentleman is Mr Ford, the coroner, also on his way to Homebury!"
The stranger was on his feet, bowing and acknowledging the introduction of Mr. Burke. Bessie Lonsdale had the sensation of waters closing over her, yet she, too, was bowing and acknowledging the introduction of Mr. Burke. She had a vivid impression of light shining downward upon the red-gray hair of Mr. Ford, as he sat down again; and of Mr. Burke saying something about "the case," and about Mrs. Lonsdale being an old friend of the dead man; about her having been good enough to volunteer to shed whatever light she might have upon the case, and of their meeting being the "most fortunate coincidence."
Mr. Ford signified that he, too, looked upon it in that way. They would go on to Homebury together, he said, when the storm had cleared.
"I suppose," he asked, leaning forward a little, confidentially, "that Mrs. Lonsdale knows of the--peculiar element----"
"The woman--yes," said Mr. Burke. And Bessie Lonsdale inclined her head and said, "I know."
"And do you know who she was?"
She had only to make a negative sign, for Mr. Burke, with nice consideration, anticipated her reply:
"Unfortunately, Mr. Ford, no one appears to have the least idea who she might be. Mrs. Lonsdale, however, has been able to clear up a point which may, I fancy, make the identity of the woman less important than it might otherwise appear to be. Mrs. Lonsdale has known for some time of the serious condition of Mr. Ayling's heart. It was because of it, she tells me, that Mr. Ayling came home from India. Mrs. Lonsdale's testimony, together with the statement of the physician who was called, would seem to leave little doubt that it was merely a case of heart."
Mr. Ford was nodding his head. "So it would," he said. "Yes, so it would." He stopped nodding, and sat there an instant, as if he were thinking of something else. "If that's the case," he broke out, "what a rotter, by Jove! that woman was!"
"Rotter, I think," said Mr. Burke, "was precisely the word I used."
And Bessie Lonsdale listened for the second time that day while two voices, now, instead of one, were lifted in excoriation of some woman who seemed to grow, as they talked, only a shade less real than herself.
She had again the sensation of the words beating upon her like blows which she was powerless to resist. She lost, as one does in physical pain, all sense of time....
"However," Mr. Ford brought down his hand with a kind of judicial finality, "if Mrs. Lonsdale will come on down with us now--the storm seems to have slackened--we'll see what can be done." He turned in his chair as if he were preparing to rise.
At the movement Bessie Lonsdale seemed to grow rigid in her chair.
"Wait."
Mr. Burke and Mr. Ford turned, startled by the strangeness of her tone. They waited for her to speak.
"I can't go."
"Can't go?" They echoed it together. "Why not?"
"Because," said she, "I am the woman you have been talking about."
For an instant they sat perfectly motionless, the three of them. Then slowly Mr. Burke and Mr. Ford turned their heads and looked at each other, as if to verify what they had heard. Mr. Burke put out his hand toward Bessie Lonsdale's arm, resting on the table, and he spoke very gently indeed:
"My dear Mrs. Lonsdale, this is impossible."
"Impossible," she said, passing her hand across her eyes, "impossible?"
"Yes, Mrs. Lonsdale." He spoke reasonably, as if she were a child. "It couldn't be you." He turned now to include Mr. Ford, who sat staring at them both. "I myself gave Mrs. Lonsdale the news of Mr. Ayling's death, over the telephone. She was at her home, in Cambridge Terrace, quietly having tea with a friend; the friend was still there when I arrived. You have been at home, in London, all day."
"No," she said. "No, Mr. Burke."
"I think," said Mr. Ford, also very gently indeed, "that perhaps Mrs. Lonsdale is trying to shield some one."
Until that instant Bessie Lonsdale had no plan. She had only known that she could not go with them to Homebury St. Mary, there to be recognized. But something in the suggestion of Mr. Ford--in the tone, perhaps, more than the words--caused her to say, looking from one to the other of these two men so lately strangers to her:
"I wonder--I wonder if I could make you understand!"
They begged her to believe that that was the thing they wished most to do.
"I did it"--she paused, and forced herself to go on--"because of my daughter."
Intent upon her truth, she did not even see by the shocked expression of their faces the awfulness of the thing they thought she confessed, and the obviousness of the reason to which their minds had leaped.
Mr. Burke put out his hand again and laid it upon her arm, which trembled slightly at his touch. "Mrs. Lonsdale," he said, and this time he spoke even more gently, but more urgently, than before, "are you sure you wish to tell?"
"No," said Bessie Lonsdale, "but I've got to, don't you see?"
Mr. Ford moved in his chair, and spoke, guarding his voice, judicially. "Since we have gone so far, it will be even better, perhaps, for Mrs. Lonsdale to tell it to us here."
Mr. Burke nodded, and they looked toward her expectantly.
"Yes, Mrs. Lonsdale?" said Mr. Ford.
An instant the brown-flecked eyes appeared to be searching for some human contact which she seemed vaguely to have lost. And then she began at the beginning--with her daughter's engagement to young Andrew McCrae, her happiness, her security--and quietly, with only now and then a slight tension of her body and her voice, she told it all to them, exactly as it happened, without plea or embellishment. She had only one stress, and that she tried to make reasonable to them--her child's security.
And they waited, attentive and patient, for the motive to emerge, for the beginning of that complication between her daughter and Richard Ayling, which they believed was to be the crux of her narrative.
And as her story progressed their bewilderment increased, for never, it appeared, had Bessie Lonsdale's daughter so much as heard of the existence of the man who lay dead at Homebury inn. She seemed even to make a special point of that.
They thought she but put it off against the time when it should be forced from her lips; but her story did not halt; she was telling it step by step, accounting for every hour of the time.
They waited for her to offer proof of the condition of Ayling's heart. She did not mention it, except to say, when she came to relating the moment of her discovery, that she had not thought of it; that even when she opened the door of his room she did not think directly of his heart; and only when she saw him actually lying there so peacefully dead did she remember the danger in which he constantly lived. She seemed to offer it as proof of the suddenness and completeness of her shock, and in extenuation of the thing she afterward did.
Slowly, gradually, as they listened, and as the light of her omissions made it clear, it had begun to dawn upon them that Bessie Lonsdale was telling the whole of the truth. And by it she sought to disprove something, but not the thing they thought.
She had paused, at the point of her flight, to attempt, a little hopelessly, to make her impulse real to them. She spoke of the inflexible honor of the McCraes, of the great respect which had for generations attached to their name. Then suddenly, as if she saw the utter hopelessness of making them understand, she seemed with a gesture to give up abstractions and obscurities and to find in the depth of her mother's heart the final simple words:
"Don't you see?" she said. "I hadn't thought how my being there at the same inn with Mr. Ayling would look--and then, all at once, it came over me. The whole thing, how it would look to the world, how it would look to the family of my daughter's fiancé,--and that it might mean the breaking of the engagement,--the wreck of her future happiness--don't you see--I didn't think of 'being a rotter'--I only thought of her!"
They uttered, both of them, a sudden exclamation, as if they had been struck. By their expressions one might have thought the woman the accuser and the two men the accused.
"Oh, my dear Mrs. Lonsdale--!" they both began at once, but she stopped them with a gesture of her hand.
"I don't blame you," she said, "I don't blame you. I was a rotter, to run, but I simply didn't think of myself."
Her tone, her gentleness, were the final proof. Only the innocent so graciously forgive.
"And now," she was saying, a great weariness in her voice, "I've told you. Do you want me to go on? It isn't raining any more."
"Perhaps, Mr. Ford--" Mr. Burke began. A look passed between them, like a question and an assent.
"If you, Mr. Burke," said Mr. Ford, "will come on with me, I think we can let your man drive Mrs. Lonsdale home. It will not be necessary for her to appear."
Bessie Lonsdale's thankfulness could find itself no words; it was lost in that first moment in astonishment. She had not really expected them to believe. It had not even, as she told it, seemed to her own ears adequate.
"I think," said Mr. Burke, seeing her silent so long, "that Mrs. Lonsdale hasn't an idea of the seriousness of the charge she has escaped."
"Charge?" she repeated--"Charge?--" and without another word, Bessie Lonsdale fainted in her chair. And as she lost consciousness she heard, dim and far away, the voice of Mr. Ford reply: "That--the fact that she hadn't an idea of it--and that alone, is why she has escaped."
"I'm perfectly sure," said Peggy Lonsdale, on Saturday afternoon, "that you did let yourself have a dull time!" She was exploring the flat before she had taken off her things, and had stopped to sit for a moment on the arm of her mother's chair. "Anyway, mother dear, you didn't have to think of me! That must have been a relief!"
She put down her head and kissed her, and Bessie Lonsdale patted the fragrant young cheek.
"Oh, I thought of you occasionally," she said.
Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers. Copyright, 1921, by Fleta Campbell Springer.
OUT OF EXILE
#By# WILBUR DANIEL STEELE
From The Pictorial Review
Among all the memories of my boyhood in Urkey Island the story of Mary Matheson and the Blake boys comes back to me now, more than any other, with the sense of a thing seen in a glass darkly. And the darkness of the glass was my own adolescence.
I know that now, and I'm sorry. I'm ashamed to find myself suspecting that half of Mary Matheson's mature beauty in my eyes may have been romance, and half the romance mystery, and half of that the unsettling discovery that the other sex does not fade at seventeen and wither quite away at twenty, as had been taken somehow for granted. I'm glad there is no possibility of meeting her again as she was at thirty, and so making sure: I shall wish to remember her as the boy of sixteen saw her that night waiting in the dunes above the wreck of the "India ship," with Rolldown Nickerson bleating as he fled from the small, queer casket of polished wood he had flung on the sand, and the bridegroom peering out of the church window, over the moors in Urkey Village.
The thing began when I was too young to make much of it yet, a wonder of less than seven days among all the other bright, fragmentary wonders of a boy's life at six. Mainly I remember that Mary Matheson was a fool; every one in Urkey Village was saying that.
I can't tell how long the Blake boys had been courting her. I came too late to see anything but the climax of that unbrotherly tournament, and only by grace of the hundredth chance of luck did I witness even one act of that.
I was coming home one autumn evening just at dusk, loitering up the cow street from the eastward where the big boys had been playing "Run, Sheep, Run," and I watching from the vantage of Aunt Dee Nickerson's hen-house and getting whacked when I told. And I had come almost to the turning into Drugstore Lane when the sound of a voice fetched me up, all eyes and ears, against the pickets of the Matheson place.
It was the voice of my cousin Duncan, the only father I ever knew. He was constable of Urkey Village, and there was something in the voice as I heard it in the yard that told you why.
"Drop it, Joshua! Drop it, or by heavens----!"
Of Duncan I could see only the back, large and near. But the faces of the others were plain to my peep-hole between the pickets, or as plain as might be in the falling dusk. The sky overhead was still bright, but the blue shadow of the bluff lay all across that part of the town, and it deepened to a still bluer and cooler mystery under the apple-tree canopy sheltering the dooryard. I never see that light to this day, a high gloaming sifted through leaves on turf, without the faintest memory of a shiver. For that was the first I had even known of anger, the still and deadly anger of grown men.
My cousin had spoken to Joshua Blake, and I saw that Joshua held a pistol in his hand, the old, single-ball dueling weapon that had belonged to his father. His face was white, and the pallor seemed to refine still further the blade-like features of the Blake, the aquiline nose, the sloping, patrician forehead, the narrow lip, blue to the pressure of the teeth.
That was Joshua. Andrew, his brother, stood facing him three or four paces away. He was the younger of the two, the less favored, the more sensitive.
He had what no other Blake had had, a suspicion of freckle on his high, flat cheek. And he had what no one else in Urkey had then, a brace of gold teeth, the second and third to the left in the upper jaw, where Lem White's boom had caught him, jibing off the Head. They showed now as the slowly working lip revealed them, glimmering with a moist, dull sheen. He, too, was white.
His hands were empty, hanging down palms forward. But in his eyes there was no look of the defenseless: only a light of passionate contempt.
And between the two, and beyond them, as I looked, stood Mary, framed by the white pillars of the doorway, her hands at her throat and her long eyes dilated with a girl's fright more precious than exultation. So the three remained in tableau while, as if on another planet, the dusk deepened from moment to moment: Gramma Pilot, two yards away, brought supper to her squealing sow; and further off, out on the waning mirror of the harbor, a conch lowed faintly for some schooner's bait.
"Drop it, Joshua!" Duncan's voice came loud and clear.
And this time, following the hush, it seemed to exercise the devil of quietude. I heard Mary's breath between her lips, and saw Andrew wheel sharply to pick a scale from the tree-trunk with a thumb-nail. Joshua's eyes went down to the preposterous metal in his hand; he shivered slightly like a dreamer awakening and thrust it in his pocket. And then, seeing Duncan turning toward the fence and me, I took the better part of valor and ran, and saw no more.
There were serious men in town that night when it was known what a pass the thing had come to; men that walked and women that talked. It was all Mary's fault. Long ago she ought to have taken one of them and "sent the other packing." That's what Miah White said, sitting behind the stove in our kitchen over the shop; that's what Duncan thought as he paced back and forth, shaking his head. That's what they were all saying or thinking as they sat or wandered about.
Such are the difficulties of serious men. And even while it all went on, Mary Matheson had gone about her choosing in the way that seemed fit to youth. In the warm-lit publicity of Miss Alma Beedie's birthday-party, shaking off so soon the memory of that brief glint of pistol-play under the apple-trees, she took a fantastic vow to marry the one that brought her the wedding-ring--promised with her left hand on Miss Beedie's album and her right lifted toward the allegorical print of the Good Shepherd that the one who, first across the Sound to the jeweler's at Gillyport and back again, fetched her the golden-ring--that he should be her husband "for better or for worse, till death us do part, and so forth and so on, Amen!"
And those who were there remembered afterwards that while Joshua stood his ground and laughed and clapped with the best of them, his brother Andrew left the house. They said his face was a sick white, and that he looked back at Mary for an instant from the doorway with a curious, hurt expression in his eyes, as if to say, "Is it only a game to you then? And if it's only a game, is it worth the candle?" They remembered it afterward, I say; long afterward.
They thought he had gone out for just a moment; that presently he would return to hold up his end of the gay challenge over the cakes and cordial. But to that party Andrew Blake never returned. Their first hint of what was afoot they had when Rolldown Nickerson, the beachcomber, came running in, shining with the wet of the autumn gale that began that night. He wanted Joshua to look out for his brother. Being innocent of what had happened at the party, he thought Andrew had gone out of his head.
"Here I come onto him in the lee of White's wharf putting a compass into the old man's sail-dory, and I says to him, 'What you up to, Andrew?' And he says with a kind of laugh, 'Oh, taking a little sail for other parts,' says he--like that. Now, just imagine, Josh, with this here weather coming on--all hell bu'sting loose to the north'rd!"
They say that there came a look into Joshua's eyes that none of them had ever seen before. He stood there for a moment, motionless and silent, and Rolldown, deceived by his attitude, was at him again.
"You don't realize, man, or else you'd stop him!"
"Oh, I'll stop him!" It was hardly above a breath.
"I'll stop him!" And throwing his greatcoat over his shoulders, Joshua went out.
You may believe that the house would not hold the party after that. Whispering, giggling, shivering, the young people trooped down Heman Street to the shore. And there, under the phantom light of a moon hidden by the drift of storm-clouds, they found Andrew gone and all they saw of Joshua was a shadow--a shadow in black frock-clothes--wading away from them over the half-covered flats, deeper and deeper, to where the Adams sloop rode at her moorings, a shade tailing in the wind. They called, but he did not answer, and before they could do anything he had the sail up, and he, too, was gone, into the black heart of the night.
It is lonesome in the dark for a boy of six when the floor heaves and the bed shivers and over his head the shingles make a sound in the wind like the souls of all the lost men in the world. The hours from two till dawn that night I spent under the table in the kitchen, where Miah White and his brother Lem had come to talk with Duncan. And among the three of them, all they could say was "My heavens! My heavens!" I say till dawn; but our kitchen might have given on a city air-shaft for all the dawn we got.
It is hard to give any one who has lived always in the shelter of the land an idea of the day that followed, hour by waiting hour--how folks walked the beaches and did not look at each other in passing, and how others, climbing the bluff to have a better sight of the waters beyond the Head, found themselves blinded by the smother at fifty yards and yet still continued to stare.
Of them all, that day, Mary Matheson was the only one who kept still. And she was as still as an image. Standing half-hidden in the untidy nook behind the grocery, she remained staring out through the harbor mists from dawn till another heavy night came down, and no one can say whether she would have gone home then had not the appalled widow, her mother, slipped down between the houses to take her.
She was at home, at any rate, when Joshua Blake came back.
After all that waiting and watching, no one saw him land on the battered, black beach, for it was in the dead hour of the morning; of the three persons who are said to have met him on his way to Mary's, two were so tardy with their claims that a doubt has been cast on them. I do believe, tho, that Mother Polly Freeman, the west-end midwife, saw him and spoke with him in the light thrown from the drug-store window (where, had I only known enough to be awake, I might have looked down on them from my bed-room and got some fame of my own).
She says she thought at first he was a ghost come up from the bottom of the sea, with his clothes plastered thin to his body, weed in his hair, and his face drawn and creased like fish-flesh taken too soon out of the pickle. Afterward, when he spoke, she thought he was crazy.
"I've got it!" he said, taking hold of her arm. Opening a blue hand he held it out in the light for her to see the ring that had bitten his palm with the grip. "See, I've got it, Mother Poll!" She says it was hardly more than a whisper, like a secret, and that there was a look in his eyes as if he had seen the Devil face to face.
She meant to run when he let her go, but when she saw him striding off toward Mary Matheson's her better wisdom prevailed; following along the lane and taking shelter behind Gramma Pilot's fence, she waited, watched, and listened, to the enduring gain of Urkey's sisterhood.
She used to tell it well, Mother Poll. Remembering her tale now, I think I can see the earth misting under the trees in the calm dawn, and hear Joshua's fist pounding, pounding, on the panels of the door.
It must have been queer for Mother Poll. For while she heard that hollow pounding under the portico, like the pounding of a heart in some deep bosom of horror--all the while she could see Mary herself in an upper window--just her face resting on one cold, still forearm on the sill. And her eyes, Mother Poll says, were enough to make one pity her.
It was strange that she was so lazy, not to move or to speak in answer while the summons of the triumphant lover went on booming through the lower house. He must have wondered. Perhaps it was then that the first shadow of the ghost of doubt crept over him, or perhaps it was when, stepping out on the turf, he raised his eyes and discovered Mary's face in the open window.
He said nothing. But with a wide, uncontrolled gesture he held up the ring for her to see. After a moment she opened her lips.
"Where's Andrew?"
That seemed to be the last straw: a feverish anger laid hold of him. "Here's the ring! You see it! Damnation, Mary! You gave your word and I took it, and God knows what I've been through. Now come! Get your things on and bring your mother if you like--but to Minister Malden's you go with me now! You hear Mary? I'll not wait!"
"Where's Andrew?"
"Andrew? Andrew? Why the devil do you keep on asking for Andrew? What's Andrew to you--now?"
"Where is he?"
"Mary, you're a fool!"
Her voice grew if anything more monotonous; his, higher and wilder.
"You're a fool," he cried again, "if you don't know where Andrew is."
"He's gone."
"Gone, yes! And how you can say it like that, so calm--God!"
"I knew he was going," she said. "He told Rolldown he was going to other parts. But I knew it before that--when he turned at the door and looked at me, Joshua. He said it as plain: 'If that's love,' he said, 'then I'm going off somewhere and forget it, and never come back to Urkey any more.'"
The deadness went out of her voice, and it lifted to another note. "Joshua, he's got to come back, for I can't bear it. I gave you my word, and I'll marry you--when Andrew comes back to stand at the wedding. He's got to--got to!"
Mother Poll said that Joshua stared at her--simply stood there and stared up at her in the queer, cold dawn, his mouth hanging open as if with a kind of horror. Sweat shone on his face. Turning away without a word by and by he laid an uncertain course for the gate, and leaving it open behind him went off through the vapors of the cow street to the east.
As they carried him along step by step, I think, the feet of the cheated gambler grew heavier and heavier, his shoulders collapsed, the head, with the memory in it he could never lose, hung down, and hell received his soul.
It is impossible in so short a space to tell what the next ten years did to those two. It would have been easier for Mary Matheson in a city, for in a city there is always the blankness of the crowd. In a village there is no such blessed thing as a stranger, the membership committee of the only club is the doctor and the midwife, and all the houses are made of glass.
In a city public opinion is mighty, but devious. In a village, especially in an island village, it is as direct and violent as any "act of God" written down in a ship's insurance papers. A word carries far over the fences, and where it drops, like a swelling seed, a dozen words spring up.
"It's a shame, Milly, a living shame, as sure's you're alive."
"You never said truer, Belle. As if 'twa'n't enough she should send Andy to his death o' drownding----"
"Well, I hope she's satisfied, what she's done for Joshua. I saw him to the post-office last evening, and the hang-dog look of him----"
"Yes, I saw him, too. A man can't stand being made a fool of...."
So, in the blue of a wash-day morning the words went winging back and forth between the blossoming lines. Or, in a Winter dusk up to the westward, where old Mrs. Paine scuttled about under the mackerel-twine of her chicken-pen:
"Land alive, it's all very well to talk Temp'rance, and I'm not denying it'd be a mercy for some folks--I ain't mentioning no names--not even Miah White's. But, land sakes how you going to talk Temp'rance to a man bereft and be-fooled like Joshua Blake? Where's your rime-nor-reason? Where's your argument?"
Or there came Miah White himself up our outside stair on the darkest evening of our Spring weather, and one glance at his crimson face was enough to tell what all the Temperance they had preached to him had come to. Miah turned to the bottle as another man might to prayer.
"By the Lord!" he protested thickly. "Something's got to be done!"
"Done? About what?" I remember my cousin peering curiously at him through the smoke and spatter of the sausage he was frying.
"About Josh, of course, and her. I tell you, Dunc, 'tain't right, and I'll not bear it. I'll not see Josh, same as I seen him this night, standing there in the dark of the outside beach and staring at the water like a sleep-walker, staring and staring as if he'd stare right through it and down to the bottom of the sea where his brother lay, and saying to himself, Who's to pay the bill? Who's to pay the bill? No, siree! You and I are young fellows, Dunc, but we ain't so young we can't remember them boys' father, and I guess he done a thing or two for us, eh?"
"Yes," Duncan agreed calmly. "But what's to be done?"
"God knows! But look here, Dunc, you're constable, ain't you?"
Duncan smiled pityingly, as if to say, "Don't be an idiot, Miah."
"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.
