Chapter 36

I couldn't bolt; he was too close for that. The wonder was that he failed to see me, for he stopped within two yards of where I cowered in the shadow and stood for a long time gazing in between the trees at the pillared porch, and I could hear his breathing, uneven and laborious, as though he had been running or fighting. Once I thought he struck out at something with a vicious fist. Then his trouble was gone, between two winks, and he was gone too, up the walk and up the steps, without any to-do about it. I don't know whether he tapped on the door or not. It was open directly. I caught a passing glimpse of Sympathy Gibbs in the black aperture; the door closed on them both, and the Pillar House was dead again.

Now this was an odd way for Minister Malden to fast and pray in the Wilderness--odd enough, one would say, to keep me waiting there a while to see what would come of it all. But it didn't. I had had enough of mysteries for one Summer's night, or at any rate I had enough by the time I got my short legs, full tilt, into the shore street. For I had caught a fleeting glimpse, on the way, of a watcher in the shadow behind the _other_ box-tree--Yen Sin, the heathen, with a surprised eyeball slanting at me over one shoulder.

* * *

Among the most impressive of the phenomena of life, as noted in my thirteenth year, is the amazing way in which a community can change while one is away from it a month. Urkey village at the beginning of my 'teens seemed to me much the same Urkey village upon which I had first opened my eyes. And then I went to make a visit with my uncle Orville Means in Gillyport, just across the Sound, and when I came back on the packet I could assure myself with all the somber satisfaction of the returning exile that I would scarcely have known the old place.

Gramma Pilot's cow had been poisoned. There had been a fire in the Selectmen's room at Town Hall. Amber Matheson had left Mrs. Wharf's Millinery and set up for herself, opposite the Eastern School. And Mate Snow, all of a sudden, had bought the old Pons house, on the hill hanging high over the town, and gone to live there. With a leap, and as it were behind my back, he sat there dominating the village and the harbor and the island--our Great Man.

He took Minister Malden with him, naturally, out of the two rooms over the store, into one room in the third story of the house on the hill--where Sympathy Gibbs could see him if she chose to look that way, as frankly and ignominiously a dependent as any baron's chaplain in the Golden Days.

"She'd have done better with Mate, after all," folks began to say.

But of all the changes in the village, the most momentous to me was the change in Yen Sin. I don't know why it should have been I, out of all the Urkey youth, who went to the Chinaman's; perhaps it was the spiritual itch left from that first adventure on the scow. At any rate, I had fallen into a habit of dropping in at the cabin, and not always with a collar to do.

I had succeeded in worming out of him the meaning of that first set of bird-scratches on my collar-band--"The boy who throws clam-shells"--and of a second and more elaborate writing--"The boy who is courageous in the face of all the water of the ocean, yet trembles before so much of it as may be poured in a wash-basin." There came a third inscription in time, but of that he would not tell me, nor of Mate Snow's, nor the minister's. It was a queer library he had, those fine-written collars of Urkey village.

He had been growing feebler so long and so gradually that I had made nothing of it. Once, I remember, it struck me queer that he wasn't working so hard as he had used to. Still earliest of all and latest of all, he would sometimes leave his iron cooling on the board now and stand for minutes of the precious day, dreaming out of the harbor window. When the sun was sinking, the shaft through the window bathed his head and his lean neck with a quality almost barbaric, and for a moment in the gloom made by the bright pencil, the new, raw things of Urkey faded out, leaving him alone in his ancient and ordered civilization, a little wistful, I think, and perhaps a little frightened, as a child waking from a long, dreaming sleep, to find his mother gone.

He had begun to talk about China, too, and the river where he was born. And I made nothing of it, it came on so gradually, day by day. Then I went away, as I have said, and came back again. I dropped in at the scow the second day after the packet brought me home.

"Hello, there!" I cried, peeping over the counter, "I got a collar for you to--to--" I began to stumble. "Mr. Yen Sin, dear me, what's the matter of you?"

"Mista Yen Sin fine," he said in a strengthless voice, smiling and nodding from the couch where he lay, half propped up by a gorgeous, faded cushion. "Mista Yen Sin go back China way pletty quick now, yes."

"Honest?"

He made no further answer, but took up the collar I had brought.

"You been gone Gillypo't, yes? You take colla China boy, yes?"

"Yessir!"

"He pletty nice man, Sam Low, yes?"

"Oh, you know him, then? Oh, he's all right, Yen Sin."

It was growing dark outside, and colder, with a rising wind from landward to seaward against the tide. A sense of something odd and wrong came over me; it was a moment before I could make it out. The fire was dead in the stove for the first time in memory and the Vestal irons were cold. Yen Sin asked me to light the lamp. In the waxing yellow glow he turned his eyes to mine, and mine were big.

"You know Mista God?" he questioned.

"Oh, yes," I answered soberly. "Yes, indeed."

"Mista God allee same like Mista Yen Sin, yes?"

I felt myself paling at his blasphemy, and thought of lightning.

"Mista God," he went on in the same speculative tone, "Mista God know allee bad things, allee same like Mista Yen Sin, yes?"

"Where is the minister?" I demanded in desperation.

"Mista Yen Sin likee see Mista Minista." When he added, with a transparent hand fluttering over his heart: "Like see pletty quick now," I seemed to fathom for the first time what was happening to him.

"Wait," I cried, too full of awe to know what I said. "Wait, wait, Yen Sin. I'll fetch 'im."

It was dark outside, the sky overcast, and the wind beginning to moan a high note across the roofs as it swept in from the moors and out again over the graying waters. In the shore street my eyes chanced upon the light of Center Church, and I remembered that it was meeting-night.

* * *

There was only a handful of worshippers that evening, but a thousand could have had no more eyes it seemed to me as I tiptoed down the aisle with the scandalized pad-pad of Emsy Nickerson's pursuing soles behind my back. Confusion seized me; I started to run, and had come almost up to Mister Malden before I had wit enough to discover that it wasn't Minister Malden at all, but Mate Snow in the pulpit, standing with an open hymn-book in one hand and staring down at me with grim, inquiring eyes. After a time I managed to stammer:

"The Chinaman, you know--he's goin' to die--the minister--"

Then I fled, dodging Emsy's legs. Confused voices followed me; Aunt Nickerson's full of a nameless horror; Mate Snow's, thundering: "Brother Hemans, you will please continue the meeting. I will go and see what I can do. But your prayers are needed here."

Poor Minister Malden! His hour had struck--the hour so long awaited--and now it was Mate Snow who should go to answer it. Perhaps the night had something to do with it, and the melancholy disaster of the wind. Perhaps it was the look of Mate Snow's back as he passed me, panting on the steps, his head bowed with his solemn and triumphant stewardship. But all of a sudden I hated him, this righteous man. He had so many things, and Minister Malden had nothing--nothing but the Chinaman's soul--and he was going to try and get that too.

I had to find Minister Malden, and right away. But where _was_ he, and on prayer-meeting night too? My mind skipped back. The "Wilderness."

I was already ducking along the Court to reconnoiter the Pillar House, black and silent beyond the box-trees. And then I put my hands in my pockets, my ardor dimmed by the look of that vacant, staring face. What was I, a boy of thirteen, against that house? I could knock at the door, to be sure, as the minister had done that other night. Yes; but when I stood, soft-footed, on the porch, the thought that Sympathy Gibbs might open it suddenly and find me there sent the hands back again into the sanctuary of my pockets. What did I know of her? What did any one know of her? To be confronted by her, suddenly, in the dark behind a green door--I tiptoed down the steps.

If only there were a cranny of light somewhere in the dead place! I began to prowl around the yard, feeling adventurous enough, you may believe, for no boy had ever scouted that bit of Urkey land before. And I did find a light, beneath a drawn shade in the rear. Approaching as stealthily as a red Indian, I put one large, round eye to the aperture.

If I had expected a melodramatic tableau, I was disappointed. I had always figured the inside of the Pillar House as full of treasures, for they told tales of the old whaler's wealth. My prying eyes found it bare, like a deserted house gutted by seasons of tramps. A little fire of twigs and a broken butter-box on the hearth made a pathetic shift at domestic cheer. Minister Malden sat at one side of it, his back to me, his face half-buried in his hands. Little Hope Gibbs played quietly on the floor, building pig-pens with a box of matches, a sober, fire-lined shade. Sympathy Gibbs was not in the picture, but I heard her voice after a moment, coming out from an invisible corner.

"How much do you want this time, Will?"

"Want?" There was an anguished protest in the man's cry.

"Need, then." The voice was softer.

The minister's face dropped back in his hands, and after a moment the words came out between his tight fingers, hardly to be heard.

"Five hundred dollars, Sympathy."

I thought there was a gasp from the corner, suppressed. I caught the sound of a drawer pulled open and the vague rustling of skirts as the woman moved about. Her voice was as even as death itself.

"Here it is, Will. It brings us to the end, Will. God knows where it will come from next time."

"It--it--you mean--" An indefinable horror ran though the minister's voice, and I could see the cords shining on the hands which gripped the chair-arms. "Next time--next year--" His eyes were fixed on the child at his feet. "God knows where it will come from. Perhaps--before another time--something will happen. Dear little Hope--little girl!"

The child's eyes turned with a preoccupied wonder as the man's hand touched her hair; then went back to the alluring pattern of the matches.

Sympathy Gibbs spoke once more.

"I've found out who holds the mortgage, Will. Mr. Dow told me."

His hand slid from Hope's hair and hung in the air. During the momentary hush his head, half-turned, seemed to wait in a praying suspense.

"It's Mate Snow," the voice went on. The man covered his face.

"Thank God!" he said. I thought he shivered. "Then it's all--all right," he sighed after a moment. "I was afraid it might be somebody who would--who might make trouble." He took out a handkerchief and touched his forehead with it. "Thank--God!"

"Why do you thank God?" A weariness, like anger, touched her words.

"Why? Why do I thank God?" He faced her, wondering. "Because he has given me a strong man to be my friend and stand behind me. Because Mate Snow, who might have hated me, has--"

"Has sucked the life out of you!" It came out of the corner like a blade. "Yes, yes, he has sucked the life out of you in his hate, and thrown the dry shell of you to me; and that makes him feel good on his hill there. No, no, no; I'm going to say it now. Has he ever tried to find out what was wrong with us? No. He didn't need to. Why? Because no matter what it was, we were given over into his hands, body and soul. And now it's Mate Snow who is the big man of this island, and it's the minister that eats the crumbs that fall from his table, and folks pity you and honor him because he's so good to you, and--"

_And this was Urkey village, and night, and Yen Sin was dying._

"And he's down to the Chinaman's _now_!" I screamed, walking out of my dream. "An' the Chinaman's dyin' an' wants the minister, an' Mate Snow he got there first."

The light went out in the room; I heard a chair knocked over, and then Minister Malden's voice: "God forgive me! God forgive me!"

I ran, sprawling headlong through the shrubs.

Out in the dark of Lovett's Court I found people all about me, the congregation, let out, hobbling and skipping and jostling shoreward, a curious rout. Others were there, not of the church; Kibby Baker, the atheist, who had heard the news through the church window where he peeped at the worshipers; Miah White's brother, the ship-calker, summoned by his sister; a score of others, herding down the dark wind. At the shore street, folks were coming from the Westward. It was strange to see them all and to think it was only a heathen dying.

Or, perhaps, it wasn't so strange, when one remembered Minister Malden coming down the years with that light in his eyes, building his slow edifice, like one in Israel prophesying the coming of the Messiah.

I shall never forget the picture I saw that night from the deck of the Chinaman's scow. The water here in the lee was as smooth as black glass, save for the little ground-swell that rocked the outer end of the craft. The tide was rising; the grounded end would soon be swimming. There were others on the deck with me, and more on the dock overhead, their faces picked out against the sky by the faint irradiations from the lighted shanty beneath. And over and behind it all ran the tumult of the elements; behind it the sea, where it picked up on the Bight out there beyond our eyes; above it the wind, scouring the channels of the crowded roofs and flinging out to meet the waters, like a ravening and disastrous bride.

Mate Snow stood by the counter in the little cabin, his close-cropped head almost to the beams, his voice, dry austere, summoning the Chinaman to repentance. "Verily, if a man be not born again, he shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven." His eyes skipped to the door.

"And to be born again," he went on with a hint of haste, "you must confess, Yen Sin, and have faith. That is enough. The outer and inner manifestations--confession and faith."

"Me, Mista Yen Sin--confessee?"

A curious and shocking change had come over the Chinaman in the little time I had been away. He lay quite motionless on his couch, with a bit of silken tapestry behind his head, like a heathen halo protecting him at last. He was more alive than he had been, precisely because the life had gone out of him, and he was no longer bothered with it. His face was a mask, transparent and curiously luminous, and there for the first time I saw the emotion of humor, which is another name for perception.

His unclouded eyes found me by the door and he moved a hand in a vague gesture. I went, walking stiff-legged, awe mingling with self-importance.

"Mista Boy, please," he whispered in my ear. "The collas on the shelf theah. Led paypah--"

Wondering, I took them down and piled them on the couch beside him, one after another, little bundles done up carefully in flaring tissue with black characters inked on them.

"That one!" he whispered, and I undid the one under his finger, discovering half a dozen collars, coiled with their long imprisonment.

"And that one, and that one--"

They covered his legs and rose about his thin shoulders, those treasured soiled collars of his, gleaming under the lamp like the funeral-pyre of some fantastic potentate. Nothing was heard in the room save the faint crackling of the paper, and after a moment Lem Pigeon murmuring in amazement to his neighbor, over in a corner.

"Look a-there, will ye? He's got my collar with the blood spot onto it where the Lisbon woman's husband hit me that time down to New Bedford. What ye make o' that now?"

Yen Sin lifted his eyes to Mate Snow's hanging over him in wonder.

"Mista Matee Snow confessee, yes?"

There was a moment of shocked silence while our great man stared at Yen Sin. He took his weight from the counter and stood up straight.

"I confess my sins to God," he said.

The other moved a fluttering hand over his collars. "Mista Yen Sin allee same like Mista God, yes."

In the hush I heard news of the blasphemy whispering from lip to lip, out the door and up the awe-struck dock. Mate Snow lifted a hand.

"Stop!" he cried. "Yen Sin, you are standing in the Valley of the Shadow of Death--"

"Mista Matee Snow wickee man? No? Yes? Mista Matee Snow confessee?"

The Chinaman was making a game of his death-bed, and even the dullest caught the challenge. Mate Snow understood. The yellow man had asked him with the divine clarity of the last day either to play the game or not to play the game. And Mate Snow wanted something enough to play.

"Yes," he murmured, "I am weak. All flesh is weak." He faltered, and his brow was corded with the labor of memory. It is hard for a good man to summon up sins enough to make a decent confession; nearly always they fall back in the end upon the same worn and respectable category.

"I confess to the sin of pride," he pronounced slowly. "And to good deeds and kind acts undone; to moments of harshness and impatience--"

"Mista Matee Snow confessee?" Yen Sin shook a weary protest at the cheater wasting the precious moments with words. Mate Snow lifted his eyes, and I saw his face whiten and a pearl of sweat form on his forehead. A hush filled the close cave of light, a waiting silence, oppressive and struck with a new expectancy. Little sounds on the dock above became important--young Gilman Pilot's voice, cautioning: "Here, best take my hand on that ladder, Mr. Malden. Last rung's carried away."

It was curious to see Mate Snow's face at that; it was as if one read the moving history of years in it as he leaned over the counter and touched the dying man's breast with a passion strange in him.

"I will tell you how wicked I am, Yen Sin. Three years ago I did Ginny Silva out of seventy dollars wages in the bogs; and if he's here tonight I'll pay him the last cent of it. And--and--" He appealed for mercy to the Chinaman's unshaken eyes. Then, hearing the minister on the deck behind, he cast in the desperate sop of truth. "And--_and I have coveted my neighbor's wife_!"

It was now that Minister Malden cried from the doorway: "That is nothing, Yen Sin--_nothing_--when you think of _me_!"

You may laugh. But just then, in that rocking death-chamber, with the sea and the dark and the wind, no one laughed. Except Yen Sin, perhaps; he may have smiled, though the mask of his features did not move. Minister Malden stepped into the room, and his face was like new ivory.

"Look at me! I have wanted to bring your soul to Christ before I died. That is white, but all the rest of me is black. I have lived a lie; I have broken a law of God; to cover that I have broken another, another--"

His voice hung in the air, filled with a strange horror of itself. The Chinaman fingered his collars. Without our consent or our understanding, he had done the thing which had so shocked us when he said it with his lips; the heathen sat in judgment, weighing the sins of our little world.

"Yes?" he seemed to murmur. "And then?"

The minister's eyes widened; pain lifted him on his toes.

"I am an adulterer," he cried. "And my child is a--a--bastard. Her mother's husband, Joshua Gibbs, didn't go down with his vessel after all. He was alive when I married her. He is alive today, a wanderer. He learned of things and sent me a letter; it found me at the Infield Conference the day before I came home that time to see my baby. Since that day it has seemed to me that I would suffer the eternity of the damned rather than that that stain should mar my child's life, and in the blackness of my heart I have believed that it wouldn't if it weren't known. I have kept him quiet; I have hushed up the truth. I have paid him money, leaving it for him where he wrote me to leave it. I have gone hungry and ragged to satisfy him. I have begged my living of a friend. I have drained the life of the woman I love. And yet he is never content. And I have betrayed even _him_. For he forbade me to see his wife ever again, or even to know the child I had begotten, and I have gone to them, in secret, by night. I have sinned not alone against God, but against the devil. I have sinned against--_everything_!"

* * *

The fire which had swept him on left him now of a sudden, his arms hung down at his sides, his head drooped. It was Mate Snow who broke the silence, falling back a step, as if he had been struck.

"God forgive me," he said in awe. "And _I_ have kept you here. _You_! To preach the word of God to these people. God forgive me!"

"I think Mista God laugh, yes."

Yen Sin wasn't laughing himself; he was looking at his collars. Mate Snow shrugged his shoulders fiercely, impatient of the interruption.

"I have kept you here," he pursued bitterly, "for the good of my own soul, which would have liked to drive you away. I have kept you here, even when you wanted to go away--"

"Little mousie want to go away. Little cat say, 'no--no.'" Yen Sin's head turned slowly and he spoke on to the bit of yellow silk, his words clear and powerless as a voice in a dream. "No--no, Mousie, stay with little cat. Good little cat. Like see little mousie jump. Little cat!"

Mate Snow wheeled on him, and I saw a queer sight on his face for an instant; the gray wrinkles of age. My cousin Duncan was there, constable of Urkey village, and he saw it too and came a step out of his corner. It was all over in a wink; Mate Snow lifted his shoulders with a sigh, as much as to say: "You can see how far gone the poor fellow is."

The Chinaman, careless of the little by-play, went on.

"Mista Sam Kow nice China fella. Mista Minista go to Mista Sam Kow in Infield, washy colla. Mista Yen Sin lite a letta to Mista Sam Kow, on Mista Minista colla-band. See? Mista Sam Kow lite a letta back on colla-band. See?"

We saw--that the yellow man was no longer talking at random, but slowly, with his eyes on the collar he held in his hand, like a scholar in his closet, perusing the occult pages of a chronicle.

"Mista Sam Kow say: 'This man go night-time in Chestnut Stleet; pickee out letta undah sidewalk, stickee money-bag undah sidewalk, cly, shivah, makee allee same like sick fella. Walkee all lound town allee night. Allee same like Chlistian dlunk man. No sleepee. That's all--Sam Kow.' Mista Yen Sin keepee colla when Mista Minista come back; give new colla: one, two, five, seven time; Mista Minista say: 'You washy colla fine, Yen Sin: this colla, allee same like new.' Mista Matee Snow, his colla allee same like new, too--"

* * *

Something happened so suddenly that none of us knew what was going on. But there was my cousin Duncan standing by the counter, his arm and shoulder still thrust forward with the blow he had given; and there was our great man of the hill flung back against the wall with a haggard grimace set on his face.

"No, you don't!" Duncan growled, his voice shivering a little with excitement. "No, you don't, Mate!"

Mate Snow screamed, and his curse was like the end of the world in Urkey island.

"Curse you! The man's a thief, I tell you. He's stolen my property! I demand my property--those collars there in his hand now. You're constable, you say. Well, I want my--"

He let himself down on the bench, as if the strength had left his knees.