did. Uncle John, Reuben thought, is another who forgives much, and why

did I never think of _that_ before? It seemed to him that Uncle John, frail and gouty and gray, was somehow closely with them here in the dark. Some day, he thought, I shall be old--well, the devil with that! Why think now of poor old Reuben Cory?

Because Ben will go where I cannot? Because an old man must regret the flowers he never touched, mornings when he never saw the sun?

But if it is to be medicine--why, then I shall be going where he will not. "_If I said, however, that living is a journey_"--oh, Mr. Welland, what else could it be, and every morning a misty crossroads?

"Reuben--could Benjamin by chance have overindulged in liquor?"

"I doubt it, sir. Last Monday he did and so did I, but away from home I believe Ben would be careful."

Rob Grimes snorted. Clearing his pug nose, maybe.

"You do reassure me somewhat."

Rob Grimes was calling back: "Mind a puddle here! Och--too bad! Best go about, gentlemen!"

Reuben had already seen what lay under the glow of Rob's lantern, the horrible bulge of the puffed belly, the straightened legs, the obscene pool of blood at the nostrils. "Still warm," said Rob, kneeling, running a hand down the miserable neck, in pity or perhaps only regret at the waste of something useful. "Not of Roxbury," he said. "Know every-each nag in the village. A chapman's likely, some louse-eaten chapman bound he'd drag the last half-mile out of the poor old fart. Shit, look at them ribs! A'n't had a fair meal in months."

"Reuben! What ails thee, boy?"

"Nothing," said Reuben, vomiting.

"Well"--Rob Grimes was ignoring the commotion--"well, the knackers'll be along for 'm in the morning." The old man strode on a short way to wait, his squat back shutting the lantern light from the corpse as he studied the windy night.

"Let me be!" said Reuben, wincing at the sympathy of Mr. Hibbs' arm. "I can't help it. It's the blood, that's all."

"So? Why, only the other day you cut your hand, and bound it up yourself, no-way troubled."

"That was my blood."

"Mm. But----"

"Let me be! _Will_ you go on, Rob?"

Grimes walked on, maintaining silence for which Reuben loved him. Reuben hurried, wanting to draw nearer that moving island of light.

"Sometimes," said Mr. Hibbs gently, "I imagine I can sense it, when you have fallen to thinking of Deerfield."

"I try not to think of it overmuch."

"That's best of course." Mr. Hibbs sighed, as one whose overture of kindness has been rejected, and Reuben was ashamed. "As you know, I call myself a Seeker, the name I borrow from Mr. Roger Williams whose memory I revere; many would not even call me a good Christian. But I would venture to suggest, Reuben, that God is with you, his ways past finding out."

"You are very kind, sir." And Reuben thought in a continuing astonishment: As a matter of fact, he is.... He wished Rob Grimes would set a stronger pace, but his best intelligence told him that the old man's sturdy plodding was actually not slow, considering the darkness, the need for sheltering the lantern and sending its light from side to side so that they might watch both the right and the left of the road. Maybe they were lost, the three of them, and always had been lost, lost but following some difficult thread of purpose in this windy dark. In a kindlier night they could have found the Great Bear slanting toward the North Star. In a kindlier night there would have been no cause to fear, as in this wilderness Reuben knew he was afraid.

"In my own life," said Hibbs, "I have not seen much of violence. I cannot pretend to know how it was for you three years ago, except I know it to be a thing beyond words of comfort. Nevertheless allow me to say, Reuben, that your life, yours and Benjamin's, is yet at the spring."

Rob Grimes called: "Something ahead! I heard----"

The noise floated to them faintly, puzzling in the wind, a hallooing with an insane note of cheerfulness. Reuben felt a scattering coldness across his cheek--rain, or sea-scud torn by the east wind from the surface of Gallows Bay. Grimes mumbled: "Can't hear it now----"

"Hush!" said Reuben savagely. Then: "It's to the left."

"You mean the marshes, boy?"

"Yes. Give me the light, old man!" Grimes yielded it without a murmur, and Reuben ran, unthinking, sure-footed, avoiding the hummocks and the marshy hollows, shouting: "Where are you? Where are you?" Then he could see his brother fifty feet away, upright in grotesque dignity on a small sodden peninsula of land not much broader than the spread of his feet. Between him and Reuben was a muttering of wind-tormented marsh water, and a smooth patch of featureless gray unaffected by the wind. Ben took a wavering step. "Don't move, you damn fool! Look down!"

"'M a damn fool," said Ben agreeably, and swayed back from the quicksand, grinning at Reuben's light. "Fact 'm drunk."

Reuben laughed. "That I know. Don't move your feet. Stay as you are till I come to you." Laughing still, he picked his way along the edge of the water and the foulness, to the narrow strip of solid ground that Ben's luck had found for him in the dark. "Pee-yew!" said Reuben, and clutched a handful of Ben's shirt. "With such a breath why walk? Why not float, friend?"

* * * * *

"Was trying to. Was trying to find Polaris. Too dark. Besides I'm in a 'culiar condition."

"Lean on me. Firm ground here."

"Wherever thou art."

"I shall remember that, and thou wilt forget it."

"I forget nothing, Reuben. I _was_ trying to find Polaris."

"Well, a'n't it the nature of the children of Adam to hunt for the North Star on a cloudy night?"

"Very sound. One of thine evenings. Yaphoo!"

"All evenings are mine. But don't weep."

"I'm laughing, boy. A'n't I? Oh, Ru, I was so confused. I thought--I certainly thought----"

"What, Ben?"

"I thought it was wilderness."

"That wouldn't make thee afeared. That wouldn't make thee weep."

"I thought everything was wilderness."

"Well, what if it is?"

_Chapter Five_

In the sunlight on Reuben's bed sat two male images, the smaller one all orange-gold, the larger cross-legged and brighter than rippling gold and ivory, with brown hair, and a heartless voice saying: "This I was waiting to observe. Note, Mr. Eccles, the motions of the creature's head, how they creak. Are these actual sounds of pain, or only noises of some mechanism which creates an illusion of animation?"

"Alas!" said Ben. "I am not fit to rise and murder you--yet."

"It speaks. Note that, Eccles. Note the bleared eyes, how obscene! Will you go to the kitchen and fetch a pot of coffee for it?" Mr. Eccles yawned and filed his yellow paws. "Unfeeling animal! Have you no pity? Must _I_ wait on the needs of this moaning monster?"

"Some day when _you_ feel like dawn on the battlefield, I'll stand on your stomach and read aloud every word of _Magnalia Christi Americana_."

"You heard that, Eccles?--how it appeals to my humanity and in the same breath threatens my life? I must act." Ben watched the golden image rise, slip on a dressing-gown, and stand over him in the enormous light. "Puh, what a breath even now!" said Reuben, and stooped suddenly to kiss his forehead, and vanished out of the room.

Moving his head with care, Ben met the contemplation of Mr. Eccles, who had nothing to offer. Uncle John was accustomed to explain that the cat derived his name from a merchant Levi Eccles of Plymouth who looked and behaved just like him. But to the boys privately, after he had come to know them a little, the old man admitted this was an _ex post facto_ invention. He took them into his study and opened his much-worn Bible; over Reuben's shoulder Ben had read familiar words: _For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. Ecclesiastes iii: 19._

Reuben was displaying a different mood altogether when he returned with a pot of the blessed stuff--quiet and no longer much amused, or at least not showing it. "Drink deep, sufferer, and tell all--if you wish."

The coffee was a benediction; so long as The Head did not move suddenly, all might be well. "Oh, I ran into Mr. Shawn at Uncle John's wharf--O my God! Uncle John! Why, he must have thought----"

Reuben shook his head casually. "Beyond a broad statement to the effect that boys will be boys, for the which he claimed no great measure of originality, I saw no sign of severe displeasure. When he insisted on helping me remove your smelly boots, he--chuckled: this I affirm. You may get a few instructions this morning, but without pain. Proceed."

"Oh--a few drinks with Shawn--dinner at a tavern--I don't seem to remember all of it." But he did.

Reuben studied his finger tip that was scratching Mr. Eccles' chin. "You brought home some books. Over there on your dresser."

"They're for you."

"What!" Reuben was a long time at the dresser, his back turned, his hands on the books not turning the pages. "Ben--how did you know?"

"I guessed right, then?"

"Yes! Yes, but I--why, I only gabbled. I don't see how----"

"You did. Came to me later, what you must mean. Is it a call?"

Eyes wet, face shining and troubled and amazed, Reuben turned to him and started once or twice to speak, then said only: "Yes."

"You can--oh, damn my head!--you can be certain?"

"I'm--certain. I did go to see Mr. Welland again yesterday. He spoke of an apprenticeship."

"Oh.... Well--well, good, if it's what you wish. What about Harvard, Ru?"

"I don't know." Reuben sat on the floor by Ben's bed, a motion of effortless grace that made Ben's head throb to watch it. "I must speak to Uncle John of course. Maybe I can go to the college and study with Mr. Welland at the same time. There'll be the summers."

Ben groped at it uneasily, with some small confusion of envy. "Pills--pills and sick people and----"

Reuben shook his head. "It's not like that, Ben. I mean, that is only one part of it, and for the rest--I can't explain it because I don't know enough, but of a sudden, after a long time of not knowing what I desired, there is this, and I do seem to be certain."

"But for myself, I've not found it."

"You will," said Reuben quickly. "It'll come to you, as it has--as I know it has to me." He reached for Ben's empty cup and poured a drink for himself, sitting cross-legged, intent, a small man with a boy's face. "Ben, I think--so far as I can explain it, I think it's a desire to know."

"To know?"

"About human creatures. How they're made, why they feel, think, suffer, act as they do. I wish...." His face tightened in distress, and Ben, with some insight, knew it was merely the distress of a search for communication among inadequate slippery words.

"But medicine--that's healing the sick. That's going about----"

"It's that, and that I accept, that I desire too, but it's more, Ben, it's study. Mr. Welland says a doctor must remain a student or die on his feet. And the study is not only sickness, remedies, surgery, the study is human beings--men, women, children, in all their ways--and _that_ I desire." He smiled suddenly, vulnerably, holding up his little finger. "There are creatures so tiny--Mr. Welland showed me a book, the _Micrographia_--so tiny there might be hundreds, nay thousands of them there on the space of my little fingernail. Too small to see without the lens, but living things, Ben--separate living beings, no fancy at all but the discovery of sober men--and he says, Mr. Welland says, why mayn't these animalculae have something to do with the mysteries of disease? They've been found everywhere--pond water, earth, the surface of the skin. Why mayn't they enter us sometimes, causing the ills we can't explain? It's a speculation, Mr. Welland says--he found it not in the books, only had the thought, and now and then (he said himself) from such thoughts come discoveries. I must--_know_," said Reuben. He jumped up and crossed the room swiftly to examine the books again. "One thing I know: you wasn't drunk when you bought these."

"No, I didn't drink until supper at the tavern, and then later."

"Later?"

"Well, Mr. Shawn took me to a--place. A house, Ru--one of those."

"Oh?..." Ben wondered why he had been moved to speak of it at all: there was no need. But even now, aware of something tight and painful in Reuben's silence, he felt and suppressed a continuing impulse to brag, to invent for Reuben a story of what never happened. "Was it--any good, Ben?"

"I can't say it was. I think I'd had too much ale, and then something more there--buttered rum. That was my undoing." His laughter sounded to himself feeble and unwelcome.

"You mean nothing happened?"

"Nothing much.... No, damn it, nothing--I spilled at the gates. I think maybe I didn't really wish to go. Mr. Shawn----"

Reuben's words raced and ran together: "Well, the devil fly off with your friend Shawn, and couldn't the son of a bitch stand by you and you so drunk? Do you know you was stepping direct for that quicksand?"

"I--was?"

"We might have gone down in it."

"Well--wait, Ru! It was no fault of Shawn. I left him at the house. He was still with his wench when I was ready to go, and some-way I didn't wish to see him then, so I came off alone."

"Oh." His face still averted, his thin hands motionless on the books, Reuben muttered: "Sorry, Ben. The cork popped out of the bottle and I spattered. My regrets." He started getting dressed, and Ben knew his chatter was mainly for his own benefit: "Beware the lightning after breakfast--Pontifex is not wholly pleased with our Benjamin, and will be summoning the cohorts of Ovid, his _Tristia_; Ramus, his _Logic_; Cicero, his honorificabilitudinitatibus."

"Ow-ooh!"

"What--coach wheels?"

"I thought that was my head."

"No," said Reuben, and flung open the window. "Something's afoot."

"If on wheels, how should it be--ow! Shut that arctic window, you bloody worm!" But as Ben tried to creep under the covers, Reuben hauled a corner of them over his shoulder and marched to the door with it, his good humor restored, peeling Ben raw to the April breeze. He wadded the bedclothes into a spherical snarl out of Ben's reach, heaved that into the closet, barked in some satisfaction, and ran downstairs. Ben could plainly make out the squeak and rattle of coach wheels from the driveway before the house. He leaped for his clothes--unwisely, considering his head--and paused to reflect on the uses of sobriety.

* * * * *

The fat horses were lathered, blowing in relief at the halt. From the parlor window Reuben saw the girl alight before the coachman's hand could aid her, a square small maiden in a hurry. As Kate Dobson opened the door he heard fright, determination and embarrassment in the throaty voice: "I must speak with Mr. Kenny--'tis most urgent."

Kate was fluttering. "He's at breakfast, my dear."

Reuben intervened, startled as she abruptly swung to him, a miniature whirlwind with sea-blue eyes. Some blurred yellowish phenomenon passed her feet--a dog apparently, not relevant unless Mr. Eccles should choose that moment to come downstairs. "I'll take you to him," Reuben said, and Kate relaxed at the authority of a man in the house.

"You are Mr. Cory's brother."

"Madam, the charge is well founded."

"This," said Charity, "is no time for schoolboy levity."

"Ow-ooh!" said Reuben, and stood to attention by the dining-room doorway as Charity passed, and the dog. In a woolgathering way, the animal acknowledged Reuben's feet, but had no time for them. It was mere carelessness, not sin, that made Reuben leave the door open as he followed Charity with all the meekness of Sultan.

Pleased and then alarmed, Mr. Kenny jumped up, winced at his bad foot and clutched the table-edge. "Charity, my dear, what lucky wind----"

"Sir, Faith said I'd best be the one to bring word, seeing Mama is prostrated and--and so--so I----" she lapsed into stuttering confusion and stamped her foot in rage at her own behavior.

"Breathe slow, my dear," said the old man, no longer smiling. "Count to four, my dear, then to eight by twos. Now: two, four, six----"

"Eight, ten, twelve," said Charity, and shuddered. "Pray don't be prostrated, Mr. Kenny, the way Mama said you was sure to be. I'd not know what to do."

"Now sit thee down," said John Kenny. "I shall undertake not to be prostrated, and a'n't thy bonnet-strings a little tight?"

Standing by her chair, Reuben briefly recalled the sensation of living as a pigmy in a world of giants. "Mama saith, never no such thing happened here in all her time. My father--he--well, when they brought the news he heard something and came downstairs, but he--but he...."

Reuben noticed her fists pressing on the table. On impulse he lifted one of them. "Allow me," said Reuben, urging the fingers to open and relax. They did so, as Charity stared up at him in a trance of observation. He patted the hand and set it back on the table. "I think, Charity, my Uncle John would prefer not to have bad news broken gently. Am I right, sir? Better to hear it quick and plain?"

"Much better." John Kenny spoke absently, watching him and not Charity, who would have accomplished her errand then, Reuben guessed, but hell broke loose.

Reuben glimpsed the preliminary tableau--Sultan in the doorway, frozen in unbelieving horror at a ball of golden evil which advanced on stiff legs directly toward his nose. Reuben had time to lay a private wager entirely in favor of Mr. Eccles, but was too late for anything else--the golden ball rose up straight, reversed itself in mid-air, and dropped on Sultan's back with the ineluctable certainty of the Puritan Hell.

"Oh!" Charity cried. "Oh, the horrid beast!" She jumped up on her chair, maybe to see better. "Sultan, stop it!"

Sultan would have loved to, if he could. John Kenny swung up his aging feet as the storm swept by.

Reuben followed.

"Sultan!" Charity wailed. "Come here this instant! Sultan, shame! Abusing that poor cat!"

Mr. Kenny lifted his feet again.

Reuben followed.

A chair toppled over. If Sultan had nourished any hopes at all, they had centered around that chair. He might, like Milton's Lucifer, have had none--_Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell...._ Reuben followed, dimly aware of his brother in the doorway and Kate Dobson behind him, both shouting encouragement. Uncle John seemed rather happy too, but was preparing to lift his feet a third time. Reuben observed that everyone, in fact, was laughing except himself, and he would too if he could only _gain_ a little.... At last he was able to swoop down and grasp the loose skin of a rigid yellow neck. He hoisted it; Sultan shot away from under it. A good deal of Sultan's hair came up on the claws, but the essential dog was then able to flee under Charity's chair and leave all the rest to the judgment of history.

Reuben secured Mr. Eccles' threshing hind legs and bore him to the kitchen door. Ben dived to open it for him, doubled over and hooting but aware of the flashing forepaws.

"Ben!" said Mr. Kenny--"Ben, you a'n't got sea-room. You, Reuben, I mean Mr. Cory, do you tack a mite to la'board--la'board, sir! There--now, Ben, now you can cross his bow."

"'Sbody!" said Kate. "I wouldn't trade 'im for a mastiff!"

"Best not leave him alone out there, Kate," said Mr. Kenny. "You hear that?" Reuben had flung Mr. Eccles into the kitchen and closed the door just in time, but he could be heard marching up and down, blaspheming. "He's lonely, the little thing."

Kate bounced away whooping. Mr. Kenny wiped his eyes and finished a buttered bun. "I suppose," said Reuben, "it happens to the best of dogs."

"Why," said Charity, "he was overtaken by surprise."

"Of course he was," said Mr. Kenny. "Come, Sultan! Come here, boy, good boy!" Mr. Kenny chirped, but though Sultan was willing to explain everything in a long undertone, he was not at the moment coming anywhere, for anyone.

Charity exploded in fresh cries. "I can't stop laughing!" she wept, and dropped her head on the table. "I can't _stop_ it!" Mr. Kenny bent over her, concerned; her laughter had gone shrill and sick. "Dreadful news, and I--I _can't stop laughing_! Help!"

For Reuben, the worst of Mr. Eccles' dangerous writhing had not obscured a second's glimpse of Charity in the moment when she discovered that Ben was in the room. Under cover of her wailing laughter he muttered in Ben's ear: "Can't you see she loves you? Do something!"

He knew Ben did not quite understand nor believe it, but Ben took an uncertain step toward the chair where Charity struggled with the demons of her laughter, and that was enough. Charity flung herself at him. Reuben saw his brother's arms close around her with a natural kindness, and heard him say: "Now, now! What's the matter, Mistress Charity?"

"Cousin Jan--Mr. Dyckman." She spoke quietly into Ben's shirt, all laughter spent.

"Dyckman?" John Kenny came to them, and touched her shoulder lightly, as if it might burn him. "What of Mr. Dyckman, my dear?"

"He is dead."

"Dead! But----"

Her cheek over Ben's heart, Charity was able now to deliver plainly and bleakly the words she must have rehearsed a dozen times during the journey in the coach. "The men of the watch discovered him in an alley off Ship Street a little before dawn. Faith bade me take the coach, seeing you might wish to return in it with me. Our servant Clarissa is seeing to the house while Faith cares for Mama, so--none to send but me."

"Of course, my dear," said Mr. Kenny vacantly. "I'll go with thee at once." Mr. Hibbs had come down for breakfast, but stood apart gloomily, apparently not presuming to hope that anyone would explain matters to him. "I'll go with thee, and--and my two sons."

"I was to say, sir, that the Constable Mr. Derry hath undertook to be at your office at the warehouse this forenoon, and will summon back the men of the Select Watch if you wish to question them."

"Mr. Derry?--the watch? What art thou saying, Charity? Mr. Dyckman was murdered?"

"I alway do _everything_ wrong!" Charity mourned, but Ben patted her shoulder and she quieted again. "Yes, and they said, sir, his wallet was gone--some footpad of the water front, but Mama will have it that it was the French. She will have it that Frenchmen are a-prowl in the streets of our neighborhood seeking opportunity to murder my father and herself. Could--could it be so?"

"It could not," said Mr. Kenny, and managed a wavering laugh. "Your mother is fanciful."

"She speaks of selling our Clarissa, and away from Boston, for that Clarissa was bred and born in Guadeloupe."

John Kenny snorted; Reuben hoped he was recovering his firmness. "I trust Mr. Jenks will forbid any such thing--meaning no disrespect to your mother, Charity."

Charity sighed, burrowing her nose deeper. Reuben supposed that for her the worst was over. She went on in a brittle but steady monotone: "Cousin Jan--Mr. Dyckman was--they said he was yet alive when he was found, and must have been lying there untended for many hours, for blood was dry on his garments."

"Alive? Could he speak then?"

"He told the watch his name. And then begged that he might speak with my father, and said somewhat more of justice being done, and they said he commended his soul unto God, and there was some other word, but not clear, and when they would lift him to carry him the blood came up in his mouth, they said, and he choked, and died. He was stabbed, they said, stabbed in the back, stabbed in a dozen places."

* * * * *

Constable Malachi Derry, a sad man with excellent muscle disguised by a concave chest, a willowy neck and a jaw like a pick-axe, commonly described himself as slow to wrath, but he could be angry, and Ben saw that he was now, as he drooped on a three-legged stool in Mr. Kenny's office and tried to find space for surplus leg where the uncompromising feet of Captain Peter Jenks allowed not another inch of it and would not budge. Mr. Derry was a ship chandler by trade. Chosen for the thankless position of constable, he had done his level New England best to wriggle out of it, until informed by Governor Dudley himself that he would serve, or else pay a fine of not less than ten pounds, possibly more. Faced with that, Mr. Derry did the next best thing--tried to be a good constable.

It came hard, leaving him scant time for his rightful labors. He must waste hours in the courts, bustle about serving warrants, seeing to the daytime peace of his district, while the chandlery went to ruin. On the Sabbath, engaged in preventing others from ungodliness, how could he find proper time to look to his own soul? The supplementary emoluments, in view of the damage to his trade, were dem'd low. Besides, the work was dangerous. Still trying to find room for his legs, he rumbled on to a peroration: "I was compelled, Mr. Kenny, to say this morning to Madam Dyckman herself, poor woman: 'We do what we may, more we cannot.' I have heard Judge Sewall himself declare that disorder increaseth continually, but doth the power of my office increase also? Not at all, sir, the while this very air of the water front, as it were, spawns evildoers, the cutthroat, the footpad, the blasphemer, the piratically inclined--mostly foreigners, you understand."

"I understand," said John Kenny, "that you hold out small hope of discovering the ruffian who hath murdered the mate of my ketch _Artemis_ and so taken from me and my captain a good friend."

Captain Jenks slammed his fist down on his knee and said nothing. To Ben this morning he was almost unrecognizable as the same man who had come ashore in a flood of sunlight. His whole broad face was darkly flushed, the red skin raddled with a thousand lines. When his thick hands were not jumping like those of an old man with the palsy, a fine tremor possessed them. Bags hung like flabby udders below his bloodshot blue eyes, and the eyes were cold with wrath and confusion: a man goaded by much pain, unable to understand the source of it; a stricken leviathan unable to see the harpoon that has pierced it.

"That's true," said Mr. Derry--"small hope, I fear. You understand, sir, a cobblestone takes no footprint, a knife-blade leaves no signature. We know he was scurvily set upon, robbed, slain. But are you aware, sir, there may be as many as two or three hundred evil livers in and about the city who might have done this, and for no reason but the scent of whatever money or goods he had upon him?"

"Well..." Mr. Kenny rested his head on his shriveled hands. Reuben had drawn up a chair to sit by him at the desk, unbidden except by a silent glance that Ben had seen. Lounging across the room, Ben felt the coolness of the light, always dusty in this small office, pouring over their faces, the old man and the boy, the sick man and the well-meaning officer of the law. The stirring of pain within himself was so vague he could not know whether it was a foolish jealousy because Uncle John had sent that message to Reuben and not to him, or merely that unreasonable stab of loneliness which may assail any person at certain times. "Well," said Mr. Kenny, "I see no profit in summoning the watch. I take it, Mr. Derry, you've told us everything Mr. Dyckman was able to say before he died?"

"I think so, sir. Sadly little, seeing he was in the last extremity. He spoke his name, he begged to be taken to Captain Jenks. All of the men, sir, heard him say: 'God's will be done!' And as they were endeavoring to lift him, Mr. Dyckman did speak some word of his wife and children, but the men could scarce hear it, and that was all."

Ben fidgeted. He knew he should have spoken during the journey from Roxbury; Charity's distracted presence had restrained him. When they left her at home and the Captain took her place in the coach, certainly he ought to have spoken. Captain Jenks had made a difficult and vaguely courageous thing of the journey from the house steps to the coach, winning each step like an old man, his face rigid, red and terrible. Waiting in the coach and looking the other way, Uncle John had murmured to Ben: "Don't offer your hand to aid him into the seat." And once the Captain was installed there, Ben had barely room to breathe, let alone speak. But now in the slightly less crowded office he managed to blurt out: "Uncle John...."

The old man looked up at him dimly, and Reuben searched him with a gaze of intentness like a sword. Malachi Derry wheeled about to observe him with that kind of tight patience that operates like a thumb in the eye. Captain Jenks alone paid him no attention; earlier he had acknowledged Ben's existence with a grunt, Reuben's not at all.

"Yes, Ben?" said Uncle John.

"I saw Mr. Dyckman yesterday evening. I ought to have spoke sooner, but didn't wish to distress little Charity further." They simply waited; even Captain Jenks was looking at him now, his attention caught perhaps by Charity's name. "I met Mr. Shawn by chance, and he seemed to wish my company, so we went to dine at--I think the Lion is the name of it, a tavern on Ship Street."

"Well, young man," said Mr. Derry, "I know the place, the which----"

Jenks interrupted as if Derry were a plaguy noise in the street: "Shawn? Who a devil's name is Shawn?"

Mr. Kenny said rather sharply: "I know him, Peter. Let the boy tell it. Why--you met Mr. Shawn yourself, I remember, the afternoon you came ashore. He was with us at the wharf."

"Oh, that--yah." Jenks rubbed his face wearily and subsided.

"Go on, Ben."

"Well, sir, only that Mr. Dyckman came to that tavern while we were there, and was drinking rum with the new bosun Tom Ball, and--had evidently been drinking already for some time. He was very foxed."

"Jan Dyckman? Are you certain, Ben?"

"Of course, sir. Mr. Shawn noticed it too. I had the thought he might wish me to introduce him to Mr. Dyckman, but Mr. Shawn said nay, let it be another time, for Mr. Dyckman was not himself. In fact, Uncle John, he looked directly at me without recognition, though he knows me well enough. Knew me, I suppose I must say."

Captain Jenks was staring down into his hands as if wondering why they were empty. To them he said ponderously: "Jan seldom drank, and when he did could always hold his liquor like a man. Shit, I don't believe it."

"Peter, my boy Benjamin is not an inventor of tales."

"Tell him," said Jenks--Ben might have been in Roxbury--"tell him to spend more time with the futtering books, and less with silver-tongued bloody idlers and Irish at that."

"Mr. Jenks"--that was Reuben, an ugly softness such as Ben had never before heard in his light adolescent baritone--"you are doing an injustice, to my brother certainly, and perhaps to Mr. Shawn."

Jenks turned slowly to examine him, as one who wished to ask: Who a devil's name are you? Beside Reuben's cold furious face was the waiting quiet of Mr. Kenny. The Captain's wrath appeared to fade, a fire he could not be troubled to sustain. "D'you tell me the same, John?"

"I do."

"Then I am sorry, and will retract what I said, and hope no offense was taken."

"None, sir," said Ben quickly, inwardly very greatly offended; but Peter Jenks was Faith's father, and was at present (as Uncle John would have said) not his own man.

Mr. Derry, evidently fatigued from the labor of saying nothing, now mildly and respectfully asked: "Had you more to tell, Mr. Cory?"

"There was one thing," said Ben, but stopped at a knocking on the office door, and after a nod from Uncle John opened it.

Daniel Shawn was very clean, fresh, brisk. He smiled at Ben, not with any smirk of conspiracy or other reminder of the night, but openly and amiably. "Good morning, Ben--but it's not the good morning, now that's no lie." He turned at once to Mr. Kenny. "Sir, don't be slow to tell me if I intrude. I heard, sir--the water front is talking of nothing else the day. I wished to say, if there be anything I might do, I owe you some service, Mr. Kenny, if only for your kindness and hospitality the other night, and you may call on me for anything it's in my power to do at all."

"That's kind," said Mr. Kenny vaguely.

Mr. Derry got his legs loose at last, and moved to lean against the door, by that rambling action somehow making them all his prisoners of the moment. The room had been crowded before--Captain Jenks made any closed space seem so; now, with Daniel Shawn lean and large in his green coat, and Mr. Derry obscurely grown in stature, the little place was stifling as a shut box. "Who are you, sir?"

"Daniel Shawn, seaman. And you?"

"I am Malachi Derry, and Constable. Your name was mentioned but now, Mr. Shawn. I understand you dined yesterday evening with Mr. Cory here, at the Lion Tavern on Ship Street?"

"Oh, I did that," said Mr. Shawn lightly. "And later, Mr. Kenny, I feared maybe I had presumed, but sir, the boy and I were both at a loose end, you might say, and most pleasant conversation we had, and no harm in it, I hope?"

"Oh, none," said John Kenny, groping at something in his mind. "I wish Ben might have let me know, but that's unreasonable of me, for I don't know how he could, seeing I left early for Roxbury. Ben, you had something more to tell?"

"Yes, and I'm glad Mr. Shawn is here, for he'll remember it too. There was a man seated at the back of the tavern when Mr. Shawn and I went in, a total stranger, a one-eyed man I'd know again if I saw him, no matter how far away, and--oh, it can't be important, only a feeling I had----"

"Now I will judge of that," said Malachi Derry, and came alive, leaning away from the door with the sudden monstrous tension of a cat who has just sighted a wriggle in the grass. "A one-eyed man?"

"Ay, a black patch, over the left eye. And the only reason I mention him, sir, is that when Mr. Dyckman and Ball left the place, this man rose at once and followed them out, but until then he had been sitting idle with the flies gathered on his empty trencher, and when I first saw him I had a feeling that he was--oh, waiting for something."

Captain Jenks shook his head in grim disgust.

"The left eye, Mr. Cory? You are certain?"

"Yes, Mr. Derry, the left eye. He was--not the common sort. I'd know him again, anywhere. Shabby clothes, black, patched. Tall, thin, a gray diagonal scar across the back of his right hand, and on his face a mad fixed smile such as I never saw on any man before."

"Oh, come!" said Captain Jenks. "May we not have the precise height of this hobgoblin, in inches and fractions?"

John Kenny said carefully: "Mr. Derry, I have sometimes walked with Ben in the woods. Though an old man, I did not know until then how much the human eye can grasp." Ben warmed within; he saw Reuben smile as if the small triumph were his own. "You may take it, Mr. Derry, it was the left eye, and with this pencil--catch, Ben!--he can draw you an accurate sketch of the diagonal scar."

"No need," said Mr. Derry softly, examining the ceiling, a little relaxed. "I happen to know of mine own knowledge, the description is just." His gaze wandered here and there, and settled on Daniel Shawn. "Did you also see this man?"

Shawn considered with gravity. "I think I noticed some such person when we entered. I recall I sat facing the front of the tavern. I didn't notice him leaving, but if it's Beneen says he left soon after Mr. Dyckman, then sure he did."

"But," said Ben--"oh, I remember. When he passed our table, Mr. Shawn, you'd just then leaned to the fireplace, and likely never saw him. One other thing I remember, Mr. Derry--nay, but it was only a feeling of mine, and of no importance----"

"Tell me anyway," said the Constable.

"Why, only that when he passed our table, he looked at me, just one quick look from his one eye, and--I can't explain this, Mr. Derry. He did nothing, you understand, only glanced at me and likely with no thought for me at all, and yet I felt as if he'd spat in my face."

"Ay, that," said Constable Derry as if he found nothing strange in it at all, and Ben looked down at the little pencil in his fingers, wondering why Daniel Shawn should suddenly be angry with him. Not anger perhaps; only something probingly cold and measuring in the large blue eyes. It could not really be so, Ben thought. Or if it was so, then it meant that Shawn was hurt or offended because Ben had run away without waiting for him from Mistress Gundy's house....

* * * * *

Reuben watched the glittery ink-blots of Mr. Derry's little brown eyes; heavy brows above them danced for Reuben's troubled amusement like busy moths. "Another name was mentioned--a new bosun, Tom Ball--will that mean bosun of your ketch _Artemis_, Mr. Kenny? And could you or the Captain tell me anything of him?"

"I've met him only to shake hands. Peter?"

"Good sailor," said Captain Jenks thickly. "Obeys orders, works hard, keeps his mouth shut--more'n that I never ask of my men."

Except, Reuben thought, their souls and their lives. But how can a captain demand less than that even if he would? Reuben tried to put the thought away, and succeeded, because now every nerve of observation in him had grown taut to the edge of agony, and the focal point was not Captain Jenks. Something in this crowded room was wrong as a rattlesnake in a flower bed. It became a severe effort not to look toward the blue eyes of Daniel Shawn. Reuben forced his attention back to what the Constable was saying--something more about Tom Ball, maybe not important. "Another thing, Mr. Kenny, and I'll be on my way. Have you ever heard tell of one named Jack Marsh, or some say it should be Judah Marsh, or Judas?"

"Why, that name--it doth echo somewhere....

"Think back, sir, ten or eleven years. Eleven it is--'96. An occasion when a certain Captain Avery, or Every, alias Bridgeman and sometimes called Long Ben, was allowed to enter Boston, and that openly, to dicker for the sale of his plunder gotten under the black flag. To the great scandal, I must say, of any man who can tell a privateer from a gallows-bird, but so it was, Mr. Stoughton being acting Governor."

Mr. Kenny peered down his nose with the lopsided half of a smile, perhaps suspecting Mr. Derry of humorous intent in linking holy Stoughton with dreadful Avery. Malachi Derry appeared quite innocent. "Mph, yes, and m'lord Bellomont as Governor had his Captain Kidd, yes yes. Of course, Mr. Derry, I remember Avery, as who would not?"

"We suffered much odious brawling in the town by Avery's men."

"I recall it."

"One of them, known then as Judah or Judas Marsh, did have his left eye gouged out in a brush with--umph--some of the ruder element." A glint in the brown eyes suggested he might not be wholly innocent after all. "It happened near my establishment, though I didn't witness it."

"And I recall the roustabout who blinded him was flogged, and Marsh--(but wasn't it March, Mr. Derry?)--nursed the wound at the Alms House as an idle, drunken and disorderly person."

"And escaped."

"Oh?--that I'd forgotten. So many have done so, and we still continue to use the Alms House, damn the thing, because the House of Correction is not in fit posture to restrain ailing rats. And by the way, Constable, if the Meeting shall ever instruct the Selectmen and Justices in this particular, I predict nothing will come of it. Go on, pray."

"Amen, sir. Yes, Marsh escaped after Captain Avery had gone his way. Later Marsh was seen, oh, here and there--Plymouth, Salem Village--alway with an evil reputation. And disappeared--for good, it was thought--about the time we began to hear tell of John Quelch. A month ago I received intelligence from a worthy man of my acquaintance at Gloucester, who is a justice of the peace and a man of substance." Mr. Derry swelled comfortably and brushed lint from his jacket, applying the pressure of a genial silence.

John Kenny said reminiscently: "I was obliged to serve a year once as constable, at Roxbury--mph--must confess that lieth further in the past than 1696. Onerous occupation." He smiled like a December thaw. Mr. Derry looked politely attentive and slightly sulky. Mr. Kenny sighed and obliged: "You heard, from your friend at Gloucester--?"

"I heard that this man Marsh--sometimes his name did appear as March, it's all one--had been hanging about there recent, seeking a berth with one of the fishing vessels, but because of his foul conversation and ugly habit, none would have him. My informant advised me that Marsh had left, possibly for Boston, and recommended I be watchful, seeing trouble follows this man as stink follows a polecat. Marsh, I hear, is quick with a knife, and nowadays they do call him Smiling Jack. I believe, sir, that thanks to this timely aid from Mr. Cory, we may be able to conclude the grievous happening of last night by persuading Mister Marsh to dance without benefit of a floor."

"Still, what do we know, man?" Mr. Kenny bleakly asked. "Item, he left the tavern when Dyckman did. Any man might have done so for any of a dozen innocent reasons."

Mr. Derry smiled slowly, reached in the air for an imaginary throat, twisted it, wiped his hand lingeringly on his breeches. "Mr. Kenny, if Marsh be found anywhere in the town, I can detain and question him. Why, I dare say he'll be found before Mr. Dyckman must be buried. He shall be brought before the body, and does any man doubt the wounds will bleed?"

"May I be there!" said Captain Jenks to his tremendous hands.

Reuben felt a new sort of sternness in his great-uncle as the small old man leaned far over the desk. "Peter." He waited until the Captain turned to look at him. "Peter, I will not delay the sailing of _Artemis_. When she hath her cargo and her complement, and the tide is right, she'll go, sir, and landside justice no concern of hers."

"Well, John---" Captain Jenks sighed cavernously. "Well, John...." For the dozenth time he rubbed at his flushed face as if cobwebs clung to it; his gaze wandered until it met Constable Derry's, and then he spoke more or less as to a friend: "Find him soon, Constable."

Daniel Shawn had stepped to the window, a little behind Mr. Kenny. Reuben could see him, his gaunt and handsome face staring away through the smeary glass. "It's the hard thing such a man as Mr. Dyckman should die, and for what? The poor scrap of money he may have had with him--what's money beside a man's life, Mother of God?"

Nobody answered him. To the Captain Mr. Derry said: "I expect to find him soon enough, and you have the right to be present when he's examined. You understand, sir, there'll be no interference with the law, no cheating of the gallows, for except I be strangely deluded, the man will hang." Malachi Derry bowed to the room at large and moved to the door on the balls of his feet.

"And that no great loss, I suppose," said Mr. Kenny. A tumbling of disorderly papers on the desk had threatened to submerge his gold-headed cane. He rescued it and rubbed the handle, that was shaped into an elfin woman's leg and thigh, against the dry sagging skin beneath his jaw. "But Jan will still be dead."

Stooping for a passage of the doorway, Mr. Derry paused to stare in disapproval. "Mr. Kenny, surely you, sir, will not display a froward heart before the will of the Lord? We are insects before his footstool: we do what we may, more we cannot. Is it for us to question the judgment? Did not your friend himself commend his soul to God? He said: 'God's will be done!' Amen."

"I am sure he said it." Mr. Kenny gazed at the Constable politely. "Mr. Dyckman was a Lutheran, by the way. If you find Marsh, and if his guilt be proven on him, I shall not protest his being hanged, or hanged, drawn and quartered since that ever pleaseth the multitude, and left on the handiest gallows Boston can provide, as a plain apodeixis"--Mr. Derry winced and looked largely wise--"a veritable indicium of human justice. Good morning, Mr. Derry."

Reuben heard through the opened door into the warehouse the boom of rolling barrels, thud of boxes, metallic clang of large voices echoing back from barren walls. _Artemis_ was filling her hold with a cargo of salt cod for Bridgetown in Barbados. Word of the death had occasioned a pause in the clamor earlier in the morning; a short one: commerce and the seasons don't wait. The warehouse, Reuben thought, was a roaring djinn, the ships its only masters; it could pause in its thundering activity if someone died, as a giant might hesitate at the squeak of something under his foot, but not for long. Within him a cool voice remarked that a simile was a mischancy nag to ride--ride him easy.... He saw Ben lean down, returning that pencil to the desk, and Ben was evidently doing battle with some private unease. It was necessary, Reuben reflected with some coolness of his own, to talk with Ben as soon as they could be alone together, if only to learn what it was about yesterday evening that Ben had not told.... Outside, Mr. Derry's voice rumbled: "Yes, Mr. Eames, he's within, but engaged."

"He will have time for me." The voice was dry. The man entered the office without knocking, his dour face reminding Reuben of that portrait seen long ago in Grandmother Cory's parlor: no specific likeness to Grandfather Matthew in the lean sadness of Mr. Simon Eames, except for the tight closing of the gash below the nose, the mouth of a man who expected life to taste bitter and could not allow his expectation to be wrong.

The wealth of Mr. Eames was all ocean-born; he could have bought out Mr. Kenny twice over. Unfortunately he hated water and was said by the naughty-minded to turn seasick at the touch of a washrag. He might have sat quiet in his countinghouse and let the pounds and shillings come to him; he need not even have turned his pale eyes on the sometimes lively water of the Bay. But human nature is consistent as a lost puppy in a typhoon: whenever one of his ships came in, Mr. Eames invariably gritted his large teeth and had himself rowed out across the demoniac element. He must have this moment returned from such an ordeal. He was quite green. "Mr. Kenny, sir, if you have a moment?"

"Certainly, Mr. Eames. I saw your _Regina_ was in on the tide this morning. Had she a fair passage?"

"Middling, they tell me. The Lord maketh a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty waters. No, I thank you, I never drink," he said as Mr. Kenny fumbled at a drawer of his desk. Mr. Eames sniffed, glancing in distaste at the bowed head of Captain Jenks, which had not lifted to acknowledge his presence. "I regret, Mr. Kenny, it is my grievous Christian duty to be the bearer of ill news, in the which one must seek to discover the infinite wisdom of Providence, the Dispenser of all mercies." Reuben sickened with understanding: the ship _Regina_ was in the Virginia trade, and so was Uncle John's ship _Iris_; any moment now this pious carrion crow would come to the end of the preliminaries he was enjoying so much, and declare a disaster in plain words. Meanwhile the man was talking, and talking, and had not yet begun, and Daniel Shawn had swung away from the window to thrust his hands in the pockets of his green coat and gaze down at the sad speaker as one might watch a yapping dog. Reuben thought: What's it to Shawn? Why should _he_ step forward so, where Uncle John must be aware of him, and put on a plain show of anger at the bringer of bad news? "... as in all mischances and vicissitudes it is necessary to submit, Mr. Kenny, even to offer up gracious supplications...."

"Mr. Eames," said John Kenny, and the noise ended. Simon Eames was not accustomed to interruptions; he probably found them ill-bred. He stood patiently, expecting blasphemy. "Mr. Eames, I have not much time, not here at my warehouse this morning and perhaps not in the world. As for God's providence and disposition of the burdens men bear, may I leave such questions to God himself, rather than have them expounded unto me by men who, I suppose, share my humility as well as my mortality?"

"John Kenny, you had ever a somewhat naughty spirit."

"That may be so. Will you speak your news?"

Flushed, Mr. Eames drew a few deep breaths. Reuben sickly, inconsequently remembered another face, nothing at all like the face of Mr. Eames, a bronze painted face in a darkly reddened room. He had spat on it. In spite of the observations anyone must make, it had never become fully credible to Reuben that a human creature could find pleasure in the pain of others. His mind acknowledged the evidence, his heart refused it, and he wished weakly that magic could lift him out of this chilly crowded room into some place--the spring woods, for choice--where Mr. Welland would answer questions with mirth and kindness. "Mr. Kenny, your ship _Iris_, Captain Samuel Foster commanding, put out of Norfolk a fortnight before the departure thence of my ship _Regina_. I have this intelligence from Captain Bart of the _Regina_, with whom I was but now speaking. The _Iris_ sailed on the third day of April to be precise, for Barbados, at least that was the destination announced by Captain Foster."

"Yes, it was Captain Foster's intention to make Barbados."

"The _Regina_ sailed on the sixteenth day of April, arriving here this morning after a slow passage, having encountered contrary winds as the Lord willed. On her second day out of Norfolk, the seventeenth day of April, the weather being overcast and a dirty sea running, my Captain Bart hath told me, the _Regina_ overtook the longboat of the ship _Iris_."

"The--longboat," said Captain Jenks, and got laboriously to his feet, massive arms swinging, quite helpless.

Mr. Eames ignored him. "Three men were in it, Mr. Kenny, rather two men and a boy, the boy's name being Bartram Wilks, of Dedham, a lad of about sixteen years...."

"I remember him. Will you continue?"

"All three were wounded and famished, the Lord having seen fit to visit them with the vials of his wrath. The boy Wilks and one of the men were brought aboard. The other man--the sea running high and as God disposeth--burst his head against the strakes and sank immediate. The man brought aboard perished later, having overeaten though suffering from pistol wounds, but the boy Wilks lived two days."

His gaze not once abandoning Mr. Eames, Daniel Shawn had taken from his pocket a bright copper coin and was rubbing his broad thumb across it, turning it deftly to rub the other side, an action evidently so habitual it needed no guidance of his eyes. A farthing, Reuben thought, but not colonial. When for a moment the thumb and forefinger held the coin motionless by the finely milled rim, Reuben could make out a robed figure kneeling by a floating crown, and the legend FLOREAT REX. The pale eyes of Simon Eames were caught by the brightness and he let the silence drag. Shawn asked of no one in particular: "Had Mr. Dyckman wife and children?"

"Eh?" Mr. Kenny turned to him, startled. "He had, sir. A wife and two little girls survive him."

"Oh, hanging's too gentle," said Shawn, rubbing the coin, his eyelids lowered on a blueness like that of two bright mirrors turned to a blue sky. "Is there a blacker thing than murder in the Decalogue? Isn't it the destroying of the one thing we know we possess? Forgive me, sir--I should not be talking, belike I should not be here in your time of trouble, but I--sir, I feel it. I can't explain--steady as she goes, can I not! for didn't I see a friend murdered in a knife brawl on the brig _Terschelling_, and for nothing, a thing done in the time it'd take you to breathe twice, the time it took me, sir, to run from companionway to la'board rail and no chance, no chance to aid him at all, and then his blood blackening in the deck seams hour by hour, the way no holystone would ever rub it out?" Mr. Shawn seemed blankly startled to discover the farthing in his fingers, and put it away. "Mr. Kenny, they're saying about the docks that the poor soul was yet living when he was found. Could he not speak at all, to damn the man who'd done the thing?"

"Little enough," said Mr. Kenny slowly. "Little enough, Mr. Shawn.... Will you continue, Mr. Eames?"

"Ha? Oh.... I believe I was about to say, Wilks lived two days, and then died of an infection of his wounds, cutlass wounds, though Captain Bart tended the boy in his own cabin, bled him, did whatever he might, but--having lived long enough on this wretched earth to give Captain Bart the tidings and to prepare his soul for its going unto the Father of all mercies, the boy died, being a lad of decent conversation evidently raised in fear of the Lord, for Captain Bart saith he did make a most touching confession of faith, indeed exemplary, and may have been of the elect, we may hope...."

"Will you continue?"

"Why, as it was told by Wilks, your ship _Iris_ was set upon by a fast sloop which came out of the starboard quarter at dawn on the eighth day of April, the _Iris_ being then at about latitude thirty, having made very little southing because of scant and fitful winds, also a sudden leak near the water line--but Captain Foster, it seems, preferred to beat out the passage to Barbados with extra toil at the pumps rather than put back to Norfolk, the Lord having so moved his heart to his own sad destruction."

"What?" said Jenks. "What? What did you say?"

"Why--he was lost, Mr. Jenks, with the others. On the eighth of April the weather was fair, the sea moderate. The sloop ran up a French flag and may have been a privateer. The boy Wilks, however, said that the men who boarded the _Iris_ appeared to be plain pirates, and their general conduct of the affair would so indicate. Yet they allowed Wilks and four others, all wounded and of no mind to go on the account, to take the longboat, so to make the continental shore if they might or the Bermudas--thus carrying out the plain intent of Providence that the intelligence should come to us for a warning and a judgment. They could not row with much effect, yet the Lord sent them a southwesterly, early for the season, and by his infinite mercy they did cross the course of the _Regina_ as I have said, after nine days afloat with a trifle of water and biscuit, during which time two of the men died of their wounds, having accomplished their part in God's purpose."

"Sam Foster," Jenks said. "Sam was a sailor of King William's time. How did he die, Mr. Eames? Will you tell me how he died?"

"It would appear he placed the _Iris_ in posture to resist as best he might, but was overwhelmed. A shot at close quarters swept away the mainmast. The pirates grappled, swarmed aboard superior in numbers and weapons. They were stripping the ship of all they wished to carry aboard the sloop, when the longboat was put overside. Wilks and the others saw her burned to the water, the sloop bearing off south by southeast."

Daniel Shawn grunted. "They will have been from the Bahamas, Mr. Kenny--wolves, sir, wolves, and with the flags of a dozen nations in the locker to suit the occasion."

"Eh? Yes, I suppose. Mr. Eames, did any go alive on the sloop?"

At least, Reuben observed, the old man was letting him keep a hand on his arm, seemed even to welcome it, and must know that Ben was on his other side. John Kenny was not predictable, his manner tending to put love in its place--an acquaintance respected, possibly feared a little, and not permitted any too forward liberties.

"The boy Wilks thought not, Mr. Kenny, but was not certain. One of the cutlass blows had destroyed his right eye."

Captain Jenks panted: "Mr. Eames--I asked you--be there any word how Sam Foster died?"

"With a seaman's fortitude apparently, although not, alas, in a state of grace. He was struck down soon after the enemy boarded. Wilks saw him lying in his blood and cursing them, but did not see the moment of his death, whether he then turned his thought to the Lord."

"Well, Mr. Eames," said John Kenny, "you have accomplished your errand, and I thank you for the trouble you have taken to bring me word. I beg you also, commend me to your good Captain Bart. I will speak with him when I may."

* * * * *

"I keep thinking in what sorry fashion I came home on this road last night."

"Forget that, Ben."

"I can't, quite. I feel as though I'd given him another burden when already he hath too much to bear--well, you did say, didn't you, that he wasn't too troubled about my--my----"

"Wasn't at all. Would you have everyone perfect, devil any lapse from virtue, and yourself a saint in ivory?"

"Oh, I know.... I swear I ought not to be going to Harvard. You must go, but damn it, I'm no scholar. Uncle John himself wishes me to go into trade with him some day. I say, if I do, it ought to be now."

"I disagree."

"Ay, you too.... Ru, a few weeks ago Uncle John told me--only in passing, because then it was nothing to trouble him--that he had debts waiting on the profit the ship _Iris_ was to have brought him. Most of the debt is from the building of _Artemis_, and her maiden voyage won't have fetched enough to satisfy it. It could happen, Ru, the creditors will be on top of him like a pack of wolves."

"I--didn't know that."

"You do now. Look: wouldn't it be unwise to send _Artemis_ to be gone for months on the Barbados triangle, when she's all he owns--she and the little sloop _Hebe_ at Newport that can't give much account of herself?"

"What would you have him do?"

"I think _Artemis_ should make short voyages--should take that salt cod, for instance, maybe no further than New York, back at once for more, until the debt is cleared. I suppose the harshest of 'em would give him that much time. And then I think that when the debt is cleared, he ought to get a few more little fast vessels like _Hebe_ for the coastal trade, for heaven knows that's the bread and butter of this colony, and let the long ventures wait a few years."

"Then tell him so, Ben."

"I?... Commerce should be building, not gambling, a'n't that so? Well, I think Uncle John believes that, but is moved to gamble all the same. The great ventures draw his heart--and why not, seeing that in the past he's won them? Only, now...."

"You might as well say it: now he's old, and in trouble, and the times themselves are changing, so everyone seems to think. Tell him how you see it. I say tell him, little brother."

"Can't you be sensible, Muttonhead?"

"Sensible--mm-yas. Well, tell him, maybe not that last morsel of your wisdom, but tell him at least about the little companions for _Hebe_, and short voyages for _Artemis_."

"I'm to instruct a man of seventy, when he won't even hear to my signing on to learn a bit of seamanship and so be of use to him?"

"You could tell him anything. You only need speak in a plain voice and never let anyone stop you from smiling in your own peculiar manner. I say this fully understumbling that in this moment I stand to you _in loco Gideonis Hibborum_."

"Oh, God damn it, Ru, whenever I'm dead in earnest you're laughing on a mountaintop--yes, and when I think something comical you're a little old man a thousand years old."

"Only a thousand? As best I can discover from perusal of ancient records, I was born during the government of Pericles of Athens, _circa_ five hundred years before the birth of Christ. Plutarch doesn't specifically mention me--that's the slipshod scholarship of his times for you, obliging a man to read between the lines. It so happens I was _not_ laughing when I urged you to tell that to Uncle John. And now, what was it about yesterday evening at the tavern that you didn't tell the Constable?"

"The--Constable----"

"Yes, Ben, and yes. One-eyed man. Lion Tavern. Some part of that untold was hurting thee. What was it? Note that I stand here in the road, my bare face hung decently in front of my brains, not laughing."

"Good God! Was I so----"

"No one in that room has my eyes and ears."

"I see.... Will you undertake not to speak of it to anyone?"

"Of course, if you charge me so."

"I do. It was simply a fleeting impression I had, that while I had turned to see Ball and Dyckman leaving the tavern, Shawn also had done--something or other. Looked back, I thought, where that one-eyed man was sitting, just before he rose and followed them out. Now understand, Ru: I was drank already. It was nothing more than a fancy."

"But I know your eyes."

"No _no_! I was drunk, and did not truly see it anyway. Even if true, why should it mean anything? Why should it stick in my mind?"

"That of course is the question."

"Now what do you mean?"

"What is it in Shawn that should make the thought trouble you?... What in fact do you know about Mr. Shawn?"

"Why--why, he is a man of pleasant conversation--mostly. Of--of poetic spirit, wouldn't you say? Possessed of some learning too. He hath read Physiologus."

"That is learning? And now again you're holding something back, but I am no Malachi Derry."

"'Deed you're not, but what are you? Why do you press me so? Like a judge?"

"Not to judge you, certainly. You've seen something in Shawn to disturb you. I wish to know what it was, because--because I'm frightened, Ben; because what touches thee touches me...."

"Something at that--house. He spoke quite cruelly to the women there, poor sluts, as if he hated them, and for no cause. I don't know--I know you don't like him, Ru, I can feel it. Let's not speak of him."

"Very well. Let's go on. Pontifex awaits, I'm sure. Let's walk on--you know, decently, like Christian worthies debating how best to diddle a neighbor over a line fence and yet remain in a state of grace."

"Pagan Athenian!"

"Of course."

"I recall a time, when thou wast--"

"The boy's dead. Poor snotnose, he died near Springfield in the Massachusetts, in the reign of Queen Anne. Tell me something, Ben, and don't be angry--remember how Mother used to call me Puppy?"

"Of course. And Father called thee Sir Inquiry."

"Ha? So he did...."

"Why should I be angry?"

"She called me that, I think, because I am--I am over-demonstrative, heart on my sleeve and can't help it, Ben, it's my way, my _way_. I only meant to ask--does it trouble thee, that I like to put my arm over thy shoulder, sometimes kiss thy cheek? Because----"

"Now why in the world should it trouble me? A'n't thou my own brother, Athenian?"

"I am."

"And didn't I carry thee down the stairs at Deerfield, a small boy in a great daze at the burning and thinking it his own fault for a failure to pray--remember that?"

"He doth ask me, whether I remember it."

"I only meant, thy notion of being at fault for failing to pray." _But it may be mine own fault that he's an even greater infidel than I--what did I ever do but encourage his doubting, when perhaps--when--where is the way where light dwelleth?_

"I know, Ben. Yes, I remember it." _And if there be no Spice Islands, where shall I go?_

_Chapter Six_

On Saturday began a long lisping April rain. Mr. Hibbs pointed out that anyhow the boys' half-holiday had been used up on the Friday forenoon, and although this happened because of disaster, in logic that made no difference: the spring and summer would be all too short if Ben and Reuben were to be ready for Harvard in September. Mr. Hibbs said too that man born of woman is of few days and full of trouble; in other words they'd better quit the commotion and go to work.

Mr. Kenny spent all of that day in Boston, returning late and weary in a twitching mood. It was one of the evenings, more frequent of late, when he insisted that no one but Ben or Reuben understood how to lift the boot off his gouty foot. Ben did that, as Kate stood by in tears, and from shadow at the side of the fireplace Reuben watched the old man with the bemused intentness of one who has only recently discovered that the study of human beings may begin at home. Reuben Cory had hardly spoken all day, except as the lessons required it of him....

When the boot was safely removed and the foot installed on a cushion, Ben ventured to ask whether any more had been learned concerning the death of Jan Dyckman. "Nor is like to be!" John Kenny snarled. "The law hath the brain of a gnat, meaning no dem'd disrespect to Mr. Derry, blast him! Cease crying, Kate! I'll not be in my grave for another ten or twenty years, and should you weep even then, dear, I'll rise to ha'nt you, I swear it--now there's a good girl." Since she could not check the flow, Kate bounced away to build a hot toddy, and later beckoned from the doorway for Ben to come and take it to him, lest her continued sniffling should offend.

Marsh had not been found; no sign of him, no hint of where he might have lodged. The waiter and bartender at the Lion Tavern professed total ignorance of such a man. "They'll be lying," said Reuben from his shadow, and John Kenny shifted his head in discomfort until he was in better posture to look at Reuben down his nose. "Lying, Reuben, or unobservant or forgetful. I incline somewhat to your view. It would seem that Mr. Derry, after one day of sniffing about like an old blind ferret with a cold in the nose, is prepared to write off the happening as an act of God."

When the toddy was consumed, and Mr. Kenny's clay pipe drawing properly, and the lashing mutter of rain at the windows had become no longer a nagging but a comfortable sound, Ben stirred the logs to stronger flame and said, stuttering only slightly: "Uncle John, is there any market for salt cod in New York?"

Long and drowsily, John Kenny contemplated a mild, large-eyed boy's face, high at the forehead, the jaw square but rounded at the chin, and the benediction upon it of firelight not unlike a lamp within. Toward such a lamp one might spread cold hands to warm them. "Mph! Might be."

Reuben smiled to himself and slipped out of the room, and so did not hear it when Ben inquired whether Mr. Shawn was to be considered in the room of Jan Dyckman. "Why, Ben--as a matter of fact I must give that some further thought," said John Kenny.

Later Ben said: "Uncle John, if _Artemis_ should make a quick run, no further than New York and return, might I not--I mean, sir, I'd be gone only a few weeks, and could learn----"

"Now don't press me about that. I must give it more thought. Did we not go to Cambridge not long ago and discuss your situation with Mr. Leverett himself? Did he not examine you in beginner's Greek and in Latin, and find that even with the summer's work you may be scarce ready for the first year's studies?"

"But suppose, sir--Ru is ready, as Mr. Leverett said, and certainly he ought to begin in September--but suppose I were to wait another year? Then I might go with _Artemis_ now--might I not?--and earn something, and continue studies afterward, in the winter, and next summer when Ru could aid me, and so...."

"Ben, you would sail as a ship's boy. If you endured the hardships, and satisfied Mr. Jenks in matters of heavy labor and obedience, the which is no easy thing to do, you might fairly soon achieve the proud condition of an ordinary seaman. They have a saying: 'Six days shalt thou labor as hard as thou art able; the seventh, holystone the main deck and chip the chain cable.' They say also: 'No law off soundings'--and I'm afraid that's true, though I guess the law according to Peter Jenks is just enough in its own harsh way. They have even another saying--I suppose it was repeated by the men who followed John Quelch a few years ago and were hanged with him at Copp's Hill: 'Better a short gasp on a tricing line than a long hunger, short pay and the bloody scurvy.'"

"But at least, Uncle John, there would not be the expense of my keep here, and I would be----"

"What? You're troubled that I should spend my substance on mine own--my--like a son--why, Ben, the old have little enough they can do except give. I pray you allow me to do that much."

"And I pray you, Uncle John, understand me! I did not mean it like that. I meant--if I sailed, I'd be learning things that might make me of some use to you in the business."

"Oh? So?... Well, you know that's near my heart. A few days ago you was undecided. We spoke of it, coming home from seeing _Artemis_ return--did we not?"

"Yes, Uncle John."

"And I feared I was nursing an old man's vanity. Urging on you something that might be unwelcome.... Mind you, Ben, I am not your master and no one shall be. I will not say to you, go there, do this, as I might to the common sort. Somehow, of late years, I don't much fancy the meaning they give to the word 'gentleman' in England. Joseph Cory was a farmer, and a better gentleman than any milord in London. Yes, in this land the word doth seem to be earning a new definition, or maybe it did alway own it, but title-dazed Europe is in no posture to comprehend such a thing. You are a gentleman's son, Ben. I say there's an aristocracy which hath nothing at all to do with wealth or position, nor with ancestry neither except as a parent's good qualities do often appear in the children. I mean the aristocracy of the good mind with the good heart--you will not find that very often on earth, Benjamin. You are a gentleman, and no one may order you about, only guide a little, so far as love and friendship may do it, while you--while you are yet a boy."

Ben felt the fire in his cheeks, and dreaded stammering. "Well, sir, might it not be that sailing with _Artemis_ would help me decide, or at least understand better, what I wish to do?"

"It--might.... Mind, I've not said yea or nay. Don't press me more on it now. It may be two weeks yet before _Artemis_ is ready to go. Mr. Banning of Gloucester is delaying me. His dem'd price is too dear, noticed it a thousand times. Uh--don't you think so?"

If Reuben had been in the room he would have known how Ben, in the face of all common sense, was very nearly taking that to mean yes. He would have seen how the inner lamp steadied and brightened in a manner hardly reasonable when the overt topic was nothing more ecstatic than the current value of salt codfish. Why, the old man had not even said that _Artemis_ would put out for New York instead of Barbados....

On Sunday the rain continued. Rob Grimes, an accomplished backslider with sixty-odd years of sin to his credit, marched off to meeting as usual and retained sanctity like a best suit until Monday morning, when Mr. Kenny's nervous gray gelding acted up at sight of the saddle and caused the first lapse into blasphemy. It was a conspiracy of the Powers against Rob, that everything should always go wrong on Monday morning, so that for the rest of the week his state of grace should be nothing but a God-damned ruin. Kate Dobson slipped away to the Anglican services that she found a comfort in a barbarous land. John Kenny fretted at home--even he might have been subject to arrest and fine for unnecessary travel on the Sabbath--fretted like one under enchantment who must spend a certain twenty-four hours of every week in the guise of a rabbit, a shrewd one who knows very well that if he should venture abroad where the godly are baying he'd be a gone bunny.

In their first year at Roxbury, Ben and Reuben had been similarly housebound on the Lord's day. But on a morning of urgent springtime in the year 1705, Reuben had advanced the doctrine that one could easily pass from the back door through the orchard and to the woods with no danger of detection, and look: anyone who did observe the sin would be far from any route to the meeting-house and therefore a sinner himself; wouldn't he? "Besides, sir," said Reuben Cory, "we've a'ready done it a couple-three times." "Oh," said John Kenny. "I find your reasoning faultless but incomplete. You omit, Mr. Cory, reference to the necessity of wearing your brown suits that don't show at a distance, and of promising to avoid the sky line and open places. Some say reason doth advance, even in these times. I a'n't sure. Wear your brown suits...."

On the Sunday after the death of Jan Dyckman, the rain was heavy enough to discourage even Reuben's need to wander. He felt it unsafe to go to Mr. Welland's cottage, for part of the approach out of the back fields was visible from the main street of Roxbury; and anyway Ben shamefacedly declared he needed help with the next half-acre of Cicero.

Drearily it rained on the Monday when Jan Dyckman was buried.

More time lost to lessons: Gideon Hibbs nourished that thought so obviously that there was no occasion for him to utter it aloud. He was not attending the funeral, having been only distantly acquainted with the Dyckman family. Acidly, with a kind of humor occasionally encountered at the borders of philosophy, he remarked to John Kenny that he was the fourth son in a family of twelve; all his brothers and sisters had married and begotten young, of whom the expected percentage had died, and thus he found himself already in possession of a massive collection of pallbearer's gloves, for the which he could discover no practical application whatsoever (although familiar with the rumor that some persons of a weightier worth than himself had turned a fair penny in disposing of such); he would therefore, with Mr. Kenny's permission, remain at home and take advantage of the peace and quiet to do a trifle more on a work which had engaged him now for ten years, namely an employment of the sternest logic--(it could not be published in the colonies)--in a demonstration of the immortality of the soul. Mr. Kenny sighed and patted his dusty back.

The few who were present with Mr. Kenny and the boys bulked like a multitude in the spotless parlor of the Dyckman house. More unobtrusive than the Jenks' slave Clarissa, Constable Derry was there--so far as was known, the corpse had not bled in anyone's presence. There were Jan's two small girls red-nosed in doll-like silence, his stricken wife, a handful of dour strangers, Captain Jenks thoroughly sober and looking like the vast man he was instead of a ruin, Faith and Charity stiff and amazingly pale in black, Clarissa self-effacing, and Madam Prudence Jenks with a black enameled comb instead of a red one.

The Lutheran dominie did not exhort, nor shout, nor whine, but spoke all manner of pleasant things concerning the nature of the dead man, and then entered on the main stream of his discourse--this a poetic enumeration and description of the mercies of God, announced with mild certainty as though he had been directly instructed in the matter and had been astonished at the kindness of the Lord in assenting to some of his own small suggestions. Unhesitatingly he implied that if any soul could rest sure of heaven it was the soul of Jan Dyckman. A gentle spirit, this minister: incapable of learning how to be content with discontent, he had luckily never needed to learn it, since not every son of Adam is obliged to go to school.

At some time during this passage of consolation a kerchief tumbled from Faith's restless hand. Ben was able to find and return it to her, not prevented, not even much scared by the polar stare of Captain Jenks. He won a pressure of her fingers and a sudden blue-eyed look of such depth and sweetness that she might have been saying aloud: "I am with you." Reuben sat motionless, all gold and ivory.

The minister's tender music did not touch on the fact of murder, yet somehow conveyed that this was an aspect of the infinite wisdom of God which at the present time it was not polite to mention.

The mellow voice was larger but otherwise not changed, when in the cemetery under a slanting curtain of rain it recited the last words of commitment to the earth. Here Ben and Reuben stood together and glanced often at each other--communication, as any observer would have known, but under this quiet rain perhaps only one message passed, the simplest and the most essential: I am with you.

It rained all night.

In the morning at Roxbury pools of standing water translated the image of a warmer sky, for it was now well past the time of the return of the robins, and of the bluebirds whose color of morning is a music made visible. Once in such a pool at the base of a rock near Uncle John's private road--but that was another April, the April of last year--a distant self of Ben Cory had been revived, so that the older boy could momentarily breathe with the breath of that child and rejoice in the sunlight wantoning over the child's bare chest and legs and muddy feet. He had been five then or younger, master of a vessel on a sea of shining calm--a chip with an oak-leaf sail, a pond in a world no longer living: well, in the immediate world you must write down a Latin subjunctive a hundred times, whipping an intractable brain into retaining it, and by the way, what the devil did Ovid himself care about subjunctives when it was spring in Italy? Nothing, Ru would say--subjunctive's one small step in a stairway to a place up yonder where you might get a glimpse of Ovid; and Ru would take the book from him, and tumble across the bed in his thin-legged sprawl or sit on the floor with his almost beardless chin hooked on his knees, and listen while Ben groped and stumbled through the lesson--correcting Ben casually, guiding, sometimes ripping out lewd or startling comment to make the Latin stick in Ben's mind by association, and never once needing to open the blasted volume and make sure he was right....

By the same pool in the April of 1707, this present year of change, Reuben Cory had stared as through a window on the inverted blue of heaven; had knelt by the rock to find white violets, the first to come, miniature, early-waking, with a midget purple eye. Hurried bees had discovered them before him, since it is not enough for these restless innocent to store up summer in the honeycomb, but with the earliest warmth they must be out and seeking in hunger. He heard then the incessant whispering, the waters of the earth returning to the broader streams, to the sea, the sky, the earth again, the waters of spring.

Drifting away to the south pasture and the woods, Reuben heard also a catbird in a budding thicket, chuckling and mewling and singing in a dozen voices, attempting alone the merriment of a full choir, sounding the bravura of summer before its time, fantastic, strong and sweet as the reed of the horned god. Furry silver softness of pussy willows shone at the edge of the woods; further in, he found the never-distant symbols of struggle and pain, for the tips of the wild grape were becoming fingers, later to grow aggressive, cruel in silent pressure, though all they seek is an island of space in the sunlight. He heard the peeper frogs, the delicate violence in their amorous throats, and now and then the ponderous grumble of a big frog, not yet sustained in the organpoint of summer but large as the owl-voices that had been disturbing the night woods all winter long. He watched a robin carrying mud with a purpose, and other small architects concerned with the foundations of secret houses, and sat long silent in his watching; silent and thinking now and again of something said by Mr. Welland which seemed not unrelated to springtime and the nesting of birds: "I do believe in God, Reuben, but I must tell you my faith is rather like that of a man on a cloudy day who hath some notion the sun may come out before evening. Should the sky remain overcast he will not be too sadly dismayed and may fall asleep with ease. And I suggest, it is no belittling of mine own faith, that I reject the arrogance of certainty."

Silent--so long that a box turtle placed a blundering claw on his shoe before it understood that Reuben was no rock. Reuben moved his hand idly to make it withdraw hissing into the sanctuary; he held his foot motionless, until by degrees the little bothered head emerged, vague and sad like Jesse Plum's, and the creature lurched away to safety. Reuben forgot it, listening to the wind and the voices of a thousand hungers within him, almost but not quite seeing the airy rising in mist of castles in Spain, almost but not quite hearing the reed of the horned god that makes a mockery of everything but blind desire and the need to embrace the fleeing sun-dappled body in the country of Arcadia.

Then from near bushes another music streamed, three notes of purity, the last one twice repeated; notes at intervals true to the human scale but sung as no one sings them except a white-throated sparrow who has come home to April in New England. But even under the glow of this music Reuben's human brain must at once observe how bounteous nature includes the porcupine's quill festering in helpless flesh, the needle teeth of a weasel in a rabbit's neck, the scar on Ben Cory's lip, the drop of a hawk, smallpox, the death of Deerfield, a pencil sketch of unredeemable sorrow in Mr. Welland's surgery, the husband-eating habits of spiders, the right eye of the boy Wilks gouged out by a cutlass; and so it would seem there's no help for it, but the brain must continue, trying in some confusion to kill wolves and learn how to be content with discontent. It will not say: _What is man, that thou art mindful of him?_ Such mock humility, Reuben thought, is iniquitous rubbish, in the presence of the whitethroat's music and the drawings of Vesalius, for if the human creature and the sparrow are not beings of wonder and infinite depth then nothing is wonderful under the North Star.

On cool mornings after fog, Ben Cory liked to search out the green of poplar bark still damp, a green softer and stranger than any other on earth, seeming translucent, leading the mind to green oceans.

Ben Cory knew as well as anyone that the country beyond the magic of poplar bark is not to be entered, and may be declared what you will.

There as here, like the reed of the horned god demanding and perilous, the west winds move beyond the green land and over blue-green waves remote from land.

* * * * *

The days crawled with inky toil into another Saturday afternoon, and Ben Cory was once more free to invade Boston. This time he could ride his mare to the Jenks house--ride like a gentleman, with a solid determination not to fall from grace, no, not in the lightest particular.

In the morning, Uncle John also had gone to Boston, as he seldom did on a Saturday. Since that evening a week ago when Ben had presumed to speak out, Uncle John had appeared withdrawn in a puzzling way--even more since the gray hours of the funeral--almost as though he regretted having allowed young Benjamin to talk up like a man. It created a background trouble for Ben's thought: maybe he had made a fool of himself after all; maybe on second thought Uncle John had found it downright insulting, the idea that his _Artemis_ should abandon the rich journey to the Indies and operate like a cheap ferry tub in the coastal trade. Only background: even the fear he had managed to discuss with Reuben, that John Kenny's fortune might tumble suddenly at the assault of creditors, could not dominate such an afternoon as this, when the warmth of June had arrived to blend with the crystal freshness of the end of April, and the girl Faith was in the garden by the house, alone, kneeling to lift with a pink finger tip the golden face of a jonquil.

Ben jumped down, not able to look again and pretend to discover her until he had made a careful business of hitching his mare to the post in the street, rubbing the hairy foolish nose and murmuring the words old Molly usually required before she would stand quiet and go to dreaming in the sun. He could turn then, but (such is the bewildering skill of women) Faith was still engaged with the daffodil. Only at that moment did she rise, glance toward the house, lift a hand in the light to push back a strand of hair under her little cap, brush away a clinging leaf from the softness of her brown skirt, and then at long last step away from the bed of flowers to find Ben Cory at the gate, with a wondrous flush of surprise. "Oh, Benjamin, you startled me!" Her right hand jumped to her mouth, blue eyes laughing over it in mirthful self-reproach at having used his first name when of course she ought to have spoken with proper reserve in spite of the violets swaying at her feet, and called him Mr. Cory.

"I didn't mean to. I'm not dangerous, now that's no lie."

"That, sir, remains to be seen. You did cause me to forget myself." She was still silently laughing--from natural good spirits, or from kindness, or because Ben Cory was the most comical savage under the sun. "Surprising me so, Mr. Cory!" That in drawling mimic reproach, as her hands held down the latch of the picket gate, in mimic warfare declining to open it.

"May I come in then?"

"Oh-h--mmm," she said, her tone a singing. "I'll consider it, I suppose. I suppose it would be cold and unkind if I obliged you to stand out there in the street. Though perhaps you ought to, as a punishment for surpri-ising me so."

"I'm most sorry for that."

"Are you now? Why, Mr. Cory, if I thought so I might decide you were a poor thing of no enterprise, and so away into the house closing the door, and you might sit out here lorn and lonely enough until the lamplighter cometh in the evening." She blinked both eyes. "Or I could send Charity to you, sir? With another picture maybe, so to keep you company?" She glanced down at her hands.

Out of breath in an April gust of wisdom, Ben lifted their unresisting warmth from the latch, opened it, found himself inside the garden and closing the gate without commotion. She had drawn away from him, laughter fallen from her like a ravished shield. Not too far away, grave, with veiled downward-looking eyes, the hands he had briefly touched holding each other as if for safety between her breasts. Ben could neither move nor speak unless she did so. "Would you like to come look at the daffodils? They were timid, Mr. Cory. They would not bloom in March, but now I think the sun's a little kinder."

The daffodils, yes, but not yet. Ben stooped to the purple glow and wind-stirred motion at his feet, plucked a single violet perfect in fragility and held it near her eyes, so that she must lift them presently to look at him, frightened with discovery, as young in all ways as himself and unsure. He recaptured the memory of a breath of music from the dingy library of John Kenny, and found a glory of pride that he could bring these words to himself out of some dusty hour that must have passed without love, and speak them for her pleasure, and not sound in the least like a fool.

"You violets that first appear, By your pure purple mantles known, Like the proud virgins of the year, As if the spring were all your own; What are you when the rose is blown?"

"Ah! What's that?"

"The verse is--oh, if I remember, by Sir Henry Wotton, to his mistress the Queen of Bohemia. But I did make it mine," said Ben. "I made it mine, to give you today."

"Why--why, Ben!" He saw the tears start to her eyes. A few appeared on her cheeks. He could not touch them; understood how she must turn her face away quickly, for the tears were no pretense at all, and she as much startled by them as the boy who loved her--no part assigned to that sort of tears in the undertakings of mimic reproach and mimic warfare. "Is that why you came? To--to say something beautiful I couldn't forget, even though...."

"Even though----?"

She smiled down at dainty shoes that were somehow not very muddy in spite of the spring ground, trying again to be distant and a lady. "My mother and father, 'deed they'd be much put out to know I was speaking thus alone with you, Mr. Cory.... I meant to say: even though the words cannot be for me."

"Cannot--why, for you and no other, ever."

"Well, we might----" she glanced at the house, and at him, and at the house again, so that Ben grasped what she would never be so brazen as to put in words, namely that the stone seat on the other side of the bed of daffodils stood very near the house wall, and that this part of the wall was blind, without any windows to overlook the seat; that the jonquils would not tell and the stone would be warm in the sun so much like a sun of June. She sat there with a woman's grace; without a smile, shyly touched the stone beside her. The seat was small, yet she could only mean that he was to be there, that near to her, breathing her fragrance even as fantasies of twelve troubled nights had dwelt upon it. "Now tell me, Benjamin, tell me truly the reason that brought you here?"

"Oh, to--to pluck this violet, and look on it, whether it be, as they tell, the flower of modesty."

"Now you laugh at me."

"Never."

"Any scholar may laugh at me, Benjamin. I'm not learned."

"Nor I. But as I remember--well, not the books but what my mother used to say, maybe I ought to take from this garden a sprig of rosemary, but there'll be none in the bloom this time of year. Oh, Faith, I'm no scholar at all. My brother is the wise one."

"Ay, faraway Reuben. Monday, you know, was the first and only time I've laid eyes on him. I thought only his body was there, and he the other side of the moon--but of course a funeral is a poor time to meet anyone.... Rosemary? Why rosemary? Rosemary's for remembrance."

"That's what my mother used to tell. You see, I may be going away," said Ben, and at the moment quite believed it.

"Going away?" Her face was a new miracle because of nearness.

"You heard what happened to the _Iris_?"

"Oh!" She caught his hand in both her own. "Yes, I heard of course. You mean--what do you mean, Ben?"

"I ought to be out and earning my way. I spoke of it to Uncle John the other evening. You see"--and he found that he was speaking to her very much as he had done in certain dreams before the onset of sleep: reasonably, bravely, easily, finding words without stammering. This realization of a dream was in itself so great a wonder that he could take other marvels almost lightly, even the marvel of her thigh against his own, her two hands holding his one as if they desired never to let it go. He would sail, he said. He would learn all there was for him to know of the sea, for it was the mightiest of highways for human enterprise--and the world, said Ben, is scarce explored. Faith seemed astonished to learn how few were the names of great explorers.... If, said Ben, a shipowner of Boston could build his fortune soundly on the colonial trade until his resources were great enough so that no minor disaster need shake him, there was no reason why such a man--he was not completely sure at this point whether he meant himself or Uncle John Kenny--why such a man, later on, say when the present war was over, should not fit out a fleet, maybe five or six vessels as fast and good as _Artemis_ but probably larger, and strike out for those parts of the incredible Pacific where anything might be found. Islands--continents.... Why should Spain and France sit a-straddle of half the known earth? For that matter, what did England herself really understand of the New World? "Oh," said Faith. "Why, this land of our own," said Ben--"I say this ought to be the heart and center for the exploration that's still to be done." And Faith watched him, shining, but presently let go his hand and turned her face away.

It dawned on Ben that this vision had been newborn of this moment. It was in the blue intensity of her eyes that those five or six vessels as fast and good as _Artemis_ were setting out, breaking out the full splendor of white canvas and turning south--across the Line, and then the Horn? Or should they rather beat across the South Atlantic and round da Gama's Cape and so on through the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean toward their goal? Well, Shawn--Daniel Shawn would know what way they ought to go, and would go with them of course. But not just yet; not for a few years; not until.... Born of this moment, and so perhaps all his earlier imaginings of the sea had been no more than prelude--including those of a great while past, when he had never seen so much as the tame waters of Boston harbor, but his brother (at some moment of that past so far away that Ben could not now locate it in time or place) had said: "I'll go with thee to the Spice Islands."

Faith was saying: "I see those things for you. It's very fair and brave." She was not happy. "I see you will go away."

"Why, I'll come back."

"I don't know," said Faith to the faces of the jonquils. "I don't know, whether they ever do. I am not sure my father ever cometh back, Ben. He is here and not here."

For that Ben found no answer, but a new wave of courage allowed him to recapture her hand. "I suppose, Faith, it sounds as if I were talking the stuff of dreams."

"Brave dreams, but--why to me?"

"I think you made them."

"Oh, Ben, you'll break my heart. I am not--I--never mind, I don't wish to speak of it. But you should not be telling these things to me. I should not allow it. When we first met I thought you were only a green boy. Now I see you're--not, quite, and I...."

His own courage amazing him, Ben said: "And thou, Faith? How old art thou?"

"I am seventeen. But women are much older."

"I have heard that, and don't believe it."

"Oh! Oh! Must I now be angered with you?"

"No," said Ben, still dizzily courageous--"no, you must not. But you must tell me why you should be suddenly distressed, and--and why I shouldn't tell you what's in my heart. What is it, Faith?" The courage, he supposed, could hardly last much longer, but he could take some pride in it, this courage faintly like cruelty, that seemed to have swept away her needless defenses.

"We should not be speaking thus together." As though the dutiful assertion itself had given her confidence, she went on more tranquilly: "Have you ever thought, Benjamin--but, la, why should you?--that the lot of women is none so easy? We must stay at home. In many concerns we may not even speak. We marry, d'you see, and bear children, and must mind the house--no matter if those we love are on the far side of the earth, yet we must do that, and keep our own counsel too.... One day, Benjamin, I shall marry a rich man, and I hope"--but as she said it she clutched his hand and her eyes filled--"I hope and pray he'll have nothing whatsoever to do with the old gray sea. Oh, I _will_ not marry a sailor, never! Only think," she said, warming to it and laughing now with some mischief--"he my husband shall be a pillar of the colony, like Judge Sewall, ha?--or even a royal governor, Benjamin, with _such_ a wig!--oh, Ben, Ben, have I hurt thee?"

Helplessly Ben said: "I love thee."

She rose quickly and moved away. He dared not look up until she spoke again. "I am--sorry.... Marry, yes, and bear children and mind the house, and grow old little by little--why, that Magellan of yours, tell me, how long was _he_ gone when he made the circuit of the world? I shall be old and gray when you--come back. Oh yes yes, an old gray dame with wrinkled cheeks and shaking hands, and belike I'll say, 'Why, grandchildren, I knew him, the great Benjamin Cory----'"

"Don't!" said Ben, and knew her hands were on his shoulders.

One of them curled under his chin to lift his face. "There!" she said--"do you see? You see what a naughty heartless old woman I am already? But promise me, Ben--promise me you _will_ come back."

Ben knew he could have stood up then and kissed her--if someone had not passed by in the street. Faith herself seemed not displeased by that intrusion of alien noise, only took her hands away and stood back smiling at him, the moment irretrievable. "I will come back."

"Ben, I wish I had known you'd be here today. We have a guest arriving soon--I must dress, and aid Mama with a few things, and I cannot invite you to stay. I wish I might, but you understand--not my place to do so, and I dare say Mama would be upset."

"Of course."

"But you will come again--that is, if you wish to," she said, and laughed herself at the high absurdity of the notion that a time could ever come when he would not wish to see her.

"Of course--whenever I may, Faith."

"I do wish you might stay this evening, but--well, 'tis a----" she sighed in some private trouble or exasperation, moving her hands vaguely--"one of those occasions."

Dimly frightened and not intending his own words, Ben asked: "Someone important?"

Faith made a wry face. "_He_ would think so." Her hands sketched a wig on her head, and she strutted a little in mimicry of self-importance. "A man of substance, la. A little wintry in years to be sure. A merchant, a pillar of the church, and a--widower."

"I see...."

"Take care," she said with what might be a show of real anger, "that you do not see too much. He is a good man--I am sorry I was so naughty and forward as to make light of him. Good day, Mr. Cory!" Then in a lightning change at sight of his stricken face, Faith hurried to him and framed his face in her hands and whispered: "Did I not make you promise to come back? Oh, make your voyages--if you must. Make them for me, Ben, and forgive my cruelty!"

"You----"

Lightly and quickly, Faith kissed his lips. "Queer little scar," she said, and touched it with a finger tip, breathing hard. "Tell me of it some time. Why, I--Benjamin Cory, I would wait for you a thousand years." And she ran away across the garden, vanished utterly, in some place where Ben supposed there would be a door to safety.

He passed through the gate in a golden haze. Molly was restless. She meant no disrespect, but sometimes found it humorous to fidget and dance ponderously at the moment he was lifting his foot for the stirrup. She did so now, perhaps in comment at the obvious remoteness of Ben's mortal mind. It had the effect of drawing him back to the present world, a few mild expletives quivering on the edge of utterance, when the brown girl Clarissa, returning from some bit of marketing with a parcel under her arm, observed his difficulty, set the parcel on the steps and came to him. "May I hold her for you, sir?"

"Oh, thanks!" Ben smiled without knowing it, and mounted easily as she competently held the bridle and stroked Molly's friendly repentant nose. He was in the saddle, but her hand remained there a moment longer, and her look held him, a look profounder than a touch, demanding nothing, declaring nothing except some kind of understanding which (until he thought about it later) seemed to Ben quite natural. As if they, the two of them alone, understood and recognized certain things that concerned no one else, that no one else had ever guessed.

Clarissa spoke also, quietly, looking up at him in the sun with no smile: "Good fortune, wherever you go."

"And to you," said Ben--involuntarily, in a way, or because no other words could possibly have been spoken. She turned aside to take up her parcel, and Ben rode home--across Boston Neck, past the waters of Gallows Bay, the marshes and the quicksands.

* * * * *

In the nights that followed Ben's return from Boston with a glowing dreambound face, April became May, but Reuben did not slip outdoors while the house was slumbering to walk in the dark woods. He had done so sometimes last year and the year before--usually on summer nights of light airs and starshine when beauty like something dangerous commanded him to approach, even though it be madness or immolation, because to retreat was a sure kind of dying. The summery warmth was continuing; the nights following Ben's return were as soft and full of sorcery as any that had ever called outside his window, but Reuben did not go. A certain new trouble had come on him, and part of it was a simple and shameful physical fear, like that of the boy who watched the careful advance of a wolf.

Shawn--that devil Shawn.

To Reuben, on the morning after Jan Dyckman's death, the office at the warehouse had stunk of guilt from the moment Shawn strode into it. He could rule that out as a morbid fancy for which Mr. Welland might have chided him; he could damn himself half-heartedly for owning a suspicious nature; nevertheless one fact remained clear to him (and apparently to nobody else): the death of Jan Dyckman was simply too convenient for Mr. Shawn, and Shawn was a man driven by a demon of ambition. Never mind whether the ambition itself was good or bad: whatever it was, Reuben felt, it crowded to fullness that part of the man's nature which in most human beings held the capacity for love, kindness, and compromise with the needs of other lives.

And now, Reuben knew, he would find no calm out there in the calling, sweet-breathing night if he must imagine that devil Shawn behind every tree, and fear the moonlight itself because it would illuminate his body for--what? A knife-throw? A lethal rush?

Once Reuben had supposed that everyone possessed something like his own electric awareness of the emotional state of others. In school at Deerfield he used to foresee disaster whenever the teacher was about to break into rage at Johnny Hoyt or Tom Hawks or some other favorite butt; Reuben had never been wrong, wincing in sympathy for five or ten minutes before the ruler slammed on a palm or the birch was lifted in ceremony from the wall. At fifteen he still found it difficult to credit that few actually did possess that awareness. The thing itself, he guessed, was merely a sharp observation for tiny shifts of expression or inflections of the voice.... Shawn had reeked of guilt--but more. The large blue eyes had met Reuben's once above the glittering coin; and had understood.

Unable to suggest anything in the realm of proof, Reuben quailed at thought of speaking out. On Sunday, briefly alone with Uncle John, he did attempt it, and fumbled it; the old man was shocked, confused, a little angry and apparently not in a mood to listen; Reuben in misery cancelled his own words. After that, with pain but doggedly, Reuben considered the possibility that he was suffering from green vicious jealousy because Ben so plainly admired the big Irishman. But the one fact that needed no proof, the fact of the convenience of Jan Dyckman's death for a man who wished to be mate of _Artemis_, remained like a cold lump of indigestion, inescapable and sour.... That devil Shawn would not have used the knife himself. That would be Judas Marsh. It could be one-eyed Marsh behind the peaceful dark trees of John Kenny's orchard.

When Reuben could sleep at all, Shawn invaded sickly dreams, his features rather changed, sometimes carrying a flintlock, but always rubbing the brilliant coin, sardonically ready to tell Reuben something or other. His words (usually) were no more than "_Floreat_ Rex"--but the Irishman's true meaning appeared to be that the house was afire, or that somebody, somewhere, was being flogged, and Reuben too much a womanish coward to do anything about it. "_Floreat Rex_," said Shawn, meaning also of course: "I think I'll cut that off--you can't plant anything with it." Three times Reuben woke in a sweat from such a snarling dream, the third and worst time being on the Saturday night after Ben's return from his hour with Faith in the garden--of which he told Reuben with shy self-deprecating astonishment, a need to speak, a need to marvel aloud that anyone could be as fortunate as himself.

On Monday night Reuben dreamed that he was (as he truly was) lying in his bed in this familiar lovely room, but frozen to immobility, the house as silent as though everyone had died and no wind would ever again rattle a shutter or chuckle outside in the expanding leaves. One sound, however, could be felt--leisured footsteps on the stairs. Reuben's eyes were glued shut; he knew that, knew also that the stairs were dark, the night-light somehow blown out; but with another kind of vision he could watch the man Shawn coming up-black patch over left eye, bright farthing in the busy fingers of the left hand, flintlock in the right. If Reuben could have spoken, as he tried to do, he would have said: "I killed a wolf." He could not. He knew that if he did, the man would merely lift him with gouging fingers under the cheekbones and toss him aside, because it was not for Reuben, or rather not only for Reuben, that he was gliding up the stairway. A halting then, a steady, purposeful raising of the flintlock until Reuben must stare down into the small black eye of the muzzle and understand that it was all over. Then waking, swift cool wave of understanding how once more the thing was a dream.

It had been much like that not so many years ago, when the dreams were of Hell.

The moon was not shining, but the sky was a field of a million untroubled lights. As Reuben got up and stretched a cramp out of his arms--his body must have been locked like iron in the dream--he could make out something of his brother's face, enough to sense the tranquillity of Ben's healthy sleep, and envy it.

Ben's smooth forehead was turned away; his hand, firm and large, curled childishly under his rounded chin. Ben's eyelashes were long as a girl's, darker than his brows and curling upward at the tips, darker than the thickening down on his lip that he must now shave every other day. Reuben sat quiet, staring in the dark, until the dim pattern of his brother's face was set free from natural bounds, became incomprehensibly vast, all else a background, then dizzyingly small and far away, unreachable as an image in the bottom of a well.

_What are you? What am I?_

What is fear?

What is happiness?--well, that arrives unsought, if at all: to seek it, I know, is to stumble in a quicksand; to wait wearily hoping for it is simply one tedious way of dying.

What if nothing is real at all except the present moment?

Why, if so, then eternity is only a word. As I look on him now, I look on him forever. But there's deception here, for we do move and change: eternity is a word.

If the present alone is real, then do we ourselves create it from moment to moment? What is memory? I remember looking over hemlocks to the North Star, and Ben looked there too, and I have no way of knowing, ever, what he saw. I remember a day of summer----

Mid-July, for the hay was ripe then, and Reuben and his mother were returning from carrying a noon meal and a jug of beer to the outer fields. Other men beside Father were there, and Ben too, and some other older children and women to help with the raking, but Reuben at seven years old was no use with a rake. He had been allowed to carry the beer, sipping one mouthful and no more on the way. This was the homeward journey, and she in a smiling mood, tanned cheeks flushed, dark eyes full of mischief.

She sat in the long grass by the palisade gate, sweeping her skirt about to cover her feet in one graceful glide of her arm, lightly as any young girl----

(And so she was of course. Always young. Never to be old.)

"Sit by me, Puppy." No one else was about: only the men in the fields now toylike with distance, a flock of cloud-sheep radiant in the lower sky, a bumblebee lighting with clumsy abruptness on Reuben's knee. "Ah, don't stir! He won't sting thee. See!--yellow packets on his legs, he's been a-gathering. Tell me where he's been and what did he see?" (Warmth of a laughing face expecting nonsense.)

"Why, Mother, he went away over England, away over France, even way away over Boston, and he went awa-a-ay over the places in Ben's Hakluyt book where the Spice Islands are, and there was a king with ten thousand courtiers and he stung them. Every one."

"Now why? Did they do wrong?"

"They stole the king's beer."

"What, all ten thousand of 'em?"

"Every-each of the ten thousand."

"Now, love, what a selfish old pig the king must've been, for if there was beer enough for all ten thousand, I vow that was more than he'd ever drink alone, la?"

"Phoo, he was a big king."

"Ah, I see.... And was there a queen of the Spice Islands?"

"There was, and she did try to prevent them stealing the beer, but one would be tying spoons to her apron the while the rest was after it, she could no-way catch 'em."

"Wicked things!... Was she beautiful?"

"Ay, but not like you."

"Reuben, thou'lt have me weeping."

"Why, Mother? What for?"

"I don't know, Puppy. They say women must weep sometimes, if only because--I don't know.... Don't ever leave me."

* * * * *

On the same Monday night Ben Cory dreamed:

Faith arrived in the coach to call politely on those who lived in the stockade, and Ben was embarrassed for them, because they allowed her blue skirt to become draggled in the mud as she stepped from the coach at the stockade gate. She was not annoyed, but walked in grace to the inner citadel under the red parasol that Clarissa held unopened above her head. Ben shook hands with her pleasantly, and climbed with the girl named Clarity up the long spiral ladder to the top of the citadel. "Deerfield hath no citadel," said Clarity, Ben good-naturedly agreeing. From this eyrie they could watch the country beyond the stockade, while in the inner rooms far below, Faith and some friend of Uncle John's were enjoying cakes and coffee and Madeira. "Like crosstrees," said Clarity, Ben good-naturedly agreeing, and she placed her brown sweet sunlit hands at the edge of their perch and pulled at it to make it set up an agreeable swaying, entertaining as a swing in a garden.

The forest beyond the stockade was alive with gray dogs.

"He is compassed about," Ben said, knowing Clarity shared his anxiety. "He may be obliged to sell a tetradrachm of the time of Dyckman." Clarity nodded, moving their crow's-nest back and forth with her little brown hands, so that he could see her body arch and sway, arch and sway, bending and straightening as the wind blew her hair back to him and hid her face from time to time--still he could look down and see Faith walking out through the stockade walls into the woods. The parasol was the only thing the gray dogs were likely to desire, and Clarity had that now, under her arm; therefore the dogs were not likely to attack Faith, but Ben nevertheless felt a certain gloom, because she was too far away, too far down for him to shout a warning. No real danger of course. He said to Clarity: "Mind that thing, Mistress Coronal--I must be going."

* * * * *

"Rest, John! All evening you was like a cat on a hot stove, la, and all Sunday too. Can't you sleep? Can't I help you sleep?"

"I'd have been lost long ago but for your kindness, Kate."

"Oh, now! Something hot to drink? I could get it easy."

"I had enough in the evening, or too much. Besides, dear, I'm not certain the boys are asleep. Heard some stirring. One of them opening the window or the like. I don't think Ru's been sleeping well--red-eyed in the morning, and d'you know I can't ask? Don't know how."

"Don't fret so--'tis only their time of life. Both brave boys, and will be grand men. In a few years you'll have no cause for anything but pride in 'em, the both of 'em."

"That's true.... Kate, it would not much amaze me if the boys--Reuben at least--were quite aware that sometimes I come up here to thy room at night. They'd never speak, never show the knowledge by so much as a look; I think they'd never even discuss it with each other alone; and neither would have any unkind thought about it."

"Oh.... All the same----"

"I know. Best to remain discreet. Still, if we were wed----"

"It's not fitting, John. The gossip that's gone on about us, all these years, it's become a--a--what's the word I want?"

"A commonplace?"

"Yes, of course--that, with a pox. But don't you see?--if we was to wed now there'd be talk of another kind, and then--then I must be Madam Kenny and bear it like a lady, which I am _not_, John, and cannot be. Oh, let be as it is! I'd be most wretched, John--truly.... As you say, the boys would never speak of it. I know them too. I love them too, John."

"Well.... If it were spoken I suppose Ben would be--embarrassed, let us say, because he's much aware of social opinion. And Reuben--who looketh down upon social opinion from his own mountaintop like a puzzled angel--Reuben would hold some thought about it which I could never understand, never interpret--Kate, I don't _know_ them!... I can't see my own youth, Kate. I think of it. A thousand things keep coming back to me now that never did so in my fifties, or sixties--my father's sniff, my Aunt Jessica's passion for setting the furniture exactly parallel to the walls and washing her hands a hundred times a day--damme, the very shape of a knot in the ash stick my father used for correcting me, and didn't I count it a great thing won if I was hit with the plain part of the stick and not with the knob! How Ru would have loathed him! I did too, but a long time after he was dead I suppose I acquired a certain comprehension, even gratitude in some matters. Well, those things come back, but only like little pictures, Kate. I can't _feel_ how it was, to be a youth of Ben's age. I only know that once I was, and that in a world nothing like the one they live in, nothing like.... Mr. Welland stopped by at my office today."

"Mr. Welland!"

"Nay, nothing to do with illness. I now learn, Kate, that our Reuben hath suddenly decided he wishes to study medicine."

"Marry come up!"

"Ye-es. Well, I wish he might have discussed it with me first, but from what Mr. Welland told me, I believe the thought came suddenly, and I suppose Ru felt unready to speak to me about it, and Mr. Welland being in town anyway on some other errand--mph, anyway, so it is. Maybe a passing thing--but Welland seemed to think not, and was earnest, nay almost impassioned in telling me he thought the boy had a true call to it. I like Welland of course--honest man, courteous too, said he would be pleased to take Reuben as apprentice, by whatever arrangement suited my own plans for him. Man of learning too--I found we share many interests.... Damn the thing, I could have wished better for Reuben than--oh, pills, syrups, the whining of sick people, exposing himself to dangerous ills, but...."

"That's what troubled you today?"

"Uh--well, no. Of course I must have some talk with Reuben about this in--well, in a day or two...."

"Tell Kate."

"Kate, I have done a thing, the which seemed right to me at the time, and still does, but...."

"Tell Kate."

"_Artemis_ is to sail tomorrow. The Tuesday afternoon, if the weather be right. The sky's clear tonight--I dare say it will be fair."

"Oh?"

"Ay--Barbados. And Ben does not know it, Kate, and will not know it until she is gone."

"Oh, John!"

"I know. Now let me try to tell thee: Ben was most desirous to sail--you knew that--and I--I can't have it, Kate. Not now, and he so young--the hardships, and his study disrupted, all that. A while ago--a week ago Saturday, I think--he spoke to me of this. He had the thought that _Artemis_ might make a quick passage to New York. It was reasonable. He'd given it much thought evidently, and spoke up every inch a man, I was obliged to consider it, though I still think my own judgment is best, and so--so she's for Barbados, and will surely bring enough on her return to clear away--certain debts, and put us in good posture for some time to come.... Well, let it be I'm simply a coward, Kate: I could not face him, and tell him he was not to go--that is, not now, when I--I tell thee, Kate, I can't quite seem to recover from what happened to _Iris_. Not as I used to recover from such misfortune. Why, when _Hera_ was lost--oh, I'm getting old. I simply could not bear to see the light go out of him, as I knew it would."

"But later, when he's bound to know----"

"Kate--dear--don't you think it may be better for him to meet it as a thing already done, no room for discussion?"

"Oh, I don't know, John. He--it's not for me to say."

"But you know I wish to hear whatever you think."

"I--don't know. Some-way, it don't seem...."

"You think he may be angry with me?"

"I never saw Ben angry. Could be, I vow, if he was hurt."

"And you think this may hurt him, too much?"

"I--don't _know_, John. It seemed right to you, and--oh dearie me----"

"Well, there, never mind. It's done. I sha'n't tell him till tomorrow. Nor Reuben of course, seeing I can't burden him with the obligation to keep a secret from his brother.... I was obliged to cross Ben in one other particular--maybe it a'n't important. He put in a good word once or twice for Mr. Shawn, you see, to replace poor Jan. I considered it. I like Shawn well enough--I suppose. But then yesterday--ay, Sunday it was--Reuben said something, to me alone, that gave me pause."

"Reuben did! John, I--did not like that Mr. Shawn."

"You too?"

"I only glimpsed him the once, that evening he came here. I felt a coldness in him. I a'n't wise in the head, John, but my heart knows a little sometimes. I did feel a coldness."

"Not so far from what Reuben said. We were speaking of Jan's death, and Reuben said--blurted it, not his natural way at all, and I could see it cost him pain--Ru said: 'Ha'n't they even questioned him?' I was obliged to ask whom he meant. He said: 'Shawn, that devil Shawn.' He said: 'Will they not ask him concerning ends and means? Will they not ask him how far he would go to secure a vessel so to be another Francis Drake?' Well, I--I chided him, Kate--it shocked me, not only because he lacks a man's years. He apologized and said no more. But then today, it so happened another man applied--Will Hanson, New Haven man, a good sailor that Jenks knew from years past. Jenks wished to sign him on. I had meant to suggest Mr. Shawn, but I remembered what Reuben said and held my peace, and so--so Hanson will be mate when she sails tomorrow.... I'm getting old--fret and fume over decisions I'd've made a few years ago with a snap of the fingers--and been right too. Usually. Oh, my foot! God damn that bloody thing!"

"Lie still. You know it alway stops hurting if you lie still."

"Ah, you're kind."

"Why, John, you're mine in the sight of God. And you not even able to believe!--well, there, I made my peace with that too, long ago, for a'n't it what makes the world go 'round, a'n't I alway said so? Nay, love, never mind how I chatter. Try now if you can't get some sleep."

_Chapter Seven_

If the present alone is real, one might as well eat the damn' porridge. On Tuesday morning Reuben did so, admitting at once that the porridge was good as always, that the fault lay with his own jumpy stomach, his sandy-eyed weariness from a bad night. Ben also seemed depressed, or at least without the glow and buoyancy he had shown since his last return from Boston. Reuben had intended to offer a few not too classical flights concerning Aphrodite Anadyomene the sea-born, partly in the hope of learning whether love totally obliterated the sense of humor. He left them unsaid.

It might be abstraction, not depression, that ailed Ben. Experimentally, while his brother gazed moodily out the window, Reuben stole a sliver of bacon from his trencher; Ben never noticed. When Reuben replaced it, Ben did observe the action, vaguely startled, smiling and saying: "Thanks."

"Well, damn," said Reuben. Kate had watched the operation--vacantly and without chuckling.

"Uh? A'n't you hungry, Ru?"

"Damn again," said Reuben. "I am alway hungry. I own a tapeworm of the soul." He recaptured the bacon and popped it in his mouth. Ben was still merely looking puzzled. "'Twould appear that this morning I am penned up with mooncalves--even Kate won't laugh. And yet it's a fair day, a red sky last night." Kate turned her back with odd abruptness. And in his own dark privacy, it seemed to Reuben that he was like one who can behold the gathering of the crimson banners for Armageddon where others see only a flaming translation of natural clouds.

Something spoke then within him, so vividly that Reuben imagined at first he was recalling some remark of Mr. Welland's; but casting back, he felt certain that in their few meetings of the last weeks, the doctor had said no such thing: _Learning begins now._ Simply his own thought, taking on a verbalized form of uncommon clearness, of imperative power: LEARNING BEGINS NOW.

Ben had drifted back into his country of dream. Kate was, abnormally, not talking. Having breakfasted early as usual with Mr. Kenny, who had left for Boston, Mr. Hibbs was waiting in the schoolroom--perhaps not too impatiently, since work could always be done in odd moments on the immortality of the soul. The kitchen, not oppressed by dining-room demands of dignity, was rich with pleasant smells and the warmth of May. Reuben refilled his coffee cup.

If learning begins (ever) it must somehow begin with premises that will not betray. All men are mortal; Ben and I are men....

Death is the conclusion of known life. I am forced to doubt, what once upon a time I believed, that a knowable life continues in a heaven or hell; therefore I am forced to doubt, what once upon a time I did believe, that Ben (or I, or Mother, or honest Jan Dyckman) can continue beyond the conclusion we call death.

Knowledge (Mr. Welland said last Saturday) pertains to what can be proven by the carnal senses.

Faith is belief in a proposition that cannot be established by the carnal senses--("_My faith is like that of a man on a cloudy day...._") Faith cannot be supported by knowledge, for if proof is found the proposition becomes knowledge and faith is no longer relevant; if it be not found, the proposition comes not within the region of knowledge.

Hope and desire--(_must you rattle those pots, Kate, at this especial mortal moment?_)--hope and desire may derive partly from knowledge, but cannot possess the force of it, for they are directed to the future, which does not exist. Therefore faith, hope and desire are all in the same class: to say that once upon a time I had faith in a heaven is no more than to say that I desired it, or hoped for it, or was told I ought to desire it--all without knowledge.

They say: "Help thou mine unbelief!" But belief and unbelief are no more to be helped or hindered than the eyes' perception of a cloud. If the eyes carry out their function and if the cloud be there, I shall see it. Why, so far as belief and unbelief are concerned, will, desire, hope, fear, pain have no part to play at all, let them be cruel as flame or powerful as time.

The mind, he understood, would continue proposing premises for all its life: some false, to be rejected; some (so far as the senses themselves can be trusted) true; every one of them to be examined in the atmosphere of doubt. Since without faith there is no other atmosphere.

A few strange years ago I walked on a quicksand, in a fog. Then it never occurred to me that the seeming certainties were a quicksand, the visions of Heaven a fog of fantasy. Am I any more likely to sink or stray, now that I know it? Proposition concluded _pro tem_.

As for Hell--_Open up, old rat-hole! I may wish to spit._

"Ben," said Reuben, "do be a good boy and eat your bacon."

"Mm," said Ben, and smiled, and ate it.

Kate's unnatural silence was like a crying. Reuben made a private note to find out, if possible, what ailed her. The dregs of his coffee were still good for a bit more lingering.

You could not--in simple nature you could not listen to all the surrounding voices explaining and re-explaining, accusing, justifying, probing, forever contradicting one another and seldom pausing for an answer. You could heed only a few. Which ones? How to choose?

Love will choose some of the few, the nearest and surely the most important (including Kate). (_The most important, why? Query noted, for future consideration._) Caution will select a few that must be heard, for reasons of safety and self-defense. And some will be chosen by native curiosity, which Mr. Welland described last Saturday as one of the rarest of all virtues.

Other voices speak outside the region of individual contact, some of them urgent. _Micrographia_; the old voice of Hakluyt if only because Ben loves it; Scripture, if only because the world is so obsessed with its thunderings; many others--even Ovid. Mr. Welland spoke of the dramatist Shakespeare; Uncle John has one volume of him--_note: find and percontate, immed._ These voices are not altogether unlike the near ones--more methodical, because the pen, unlike the voice, need not move in dizzy haste to get everything said before someone interrupts; more methodical and not so much given to hemming and hawing and conversational fluff; but these voices too are engaged in explaining and re-explaining, commanding, blurred sometimes in flurries of contradiction. Sometimes (Michael Wigglesworth for example) they sound downright embarrassed and peevish, when the stubborn universe they speak of is so plainly not as they describe it.

Since not all voices may be attended, since some of them lie and many more speak loudly in the absence of knowledge, one must wait, Reuben guessed, for the sudden inner waking, the unsought recognition, the mind's clear declaration: This voice--(_Why did you say to me, "Run, boy! Run!"--why?_)--this voice is speaking not merely out of some other's need to assert, but speaking to _me_, and I understand what it says--some of it....

If we create the present by living it, then right and wrong are man-made. I will accept the verdicts of others in this matter if they seem reasonable to me, and just--not otherwise.

It was once proposed to me on excellent authority that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. It seems to be necessary to hear much nonsense while waiting for the sound that rings true. I may be deceived again, many times, but I say it shall not be from any scared wish to believe.

_Am I correct, Mr. Welland, in supposing that if doctrines of right and wrong are man-made, learning begins now?_

* * * * *

Ben struggled through Tuesday morning's Greek and logic without serious discredit, and picked up only a few minor fresh scratches from the thorns of Latin grammar. He could not quite win clear of a mental shadow that had haunted him since waking after a dream not plainly remembered--a foreboding uneasiness something like that of a child who has wandered into a strange and exciting room: he has not been specifically forbidden to enter here, but knows he has not been granted permission either; presently someone may arrive and with the cool finality of adults chivy him back to the nursery where the toys have lost all magic.

In the afternoon Ben achieved brief glory, encountering an area of _De Finibus_ in which Reuben had drilled him so briskly that error was nearly impossible. After this victory the deadly hour hand, the slightly less cruel minute hand, appeared to be creeping with better speed toward the beautiful moment of three o'clock, when Mr. Hibbs would snap his books shut, blow from the tops of them a little imaginary dust, and go away. Ru said once (a dreamy voice coming out of the dark of the bedroom when Ben thought he was asleep): "If I live to be old, I shall alway consider that the immortality of the soul sets in at three o'clock post meridian."

A resolution to go once more into Boston had grown today, less like a rational decision than like the climbing of a fever. With the lessons concluded, he would not, like a schoolboy, ask permission: he would simply go, as casually as Ru had been strolling over to Mr. Welland's cottage lately; if there should be consequences of disapproval from Mr. Hibbs or Uncle John himself, Ben supposed they would not be serious--in any case he could meet them with a man's calm, surely?

He tried (from two o'clock on) to lay it out serenely as a plan of campaign. One: he must speak with Faith again--briefly, soberly, a man of affairs saying a temporary good-bye. Two: he must interview Uncle John at the warehouse, in the cool atmosphere of business affairs, and pray for a definite answer, on the grounds that the time of _Artemis'_ departure must be quite near. At this point the plan hazed up a little--Uncle John seldom stayed at the warehouse later than five o'clock. Well, Molly could make fair time into the city, and he would not remain long with Faith--he spent some effort here, defining a few poignant answers he would make to what she would say. Still, he had better prepare a second line of approach: if Uncle John had already left for Roxbury, he would seek out Captain Jenks himself, no less, beat down the devils of fear and self-consciousness so to put the matter plainly to the iron mountain and get an answer. After all, Jenks wasn't so bad. Honest and human. In fantasy Ben saw a gleam of rugged friendliness (respect?) in the little blue eyes....

Better have a third line. If Uncle John had left and Jenks could not be reached, lost in liquor or otherwise unavailable, then he could--oh, hell, ask around at the wharf anyway, find out when _Artemis_ was expected to sail, since it seemed that Uncle John was unwilling to tell him. Tom Ball ought to know. Maybe he would run into Daniel Shawn again, and could, at the very least, learn whether Shawn was to sail as mate. On Sunday, Uncle John had been immune to approach, shut up in his study the better part of the day; yesterday evening he had displayed an impossible mood, his manner testy and faraway, his foot tormenting him. But with a plan of campaign you could always accomplish something. Couldn't you?...

He found it infuriating that as three o'clock drew very near the whole thing seemed more and more like a fever. His breath was difficult; he looked into damp palms and thought: What the devil am I contemplating? Running away? _From what?_ Good God, not from Uncle John Kenny, the soul of generosity! _From what?..._ He watched the inexorable dwindling of the pie-slice made by the hour-hand and the minute-hand as ten minutes of three became five minutes of three. At three minutes of three he felt downright sick, and then jumped like a fool when the dry uncomprehended monologue of Mr. Hibbs ended with a quite familiar snap of a closed volume. He sat still, demoralized, watching Mr. Hibbs stride away; waited for inner quiet and was again grotesquely startled when Reuben, in one of those warm moods which Ben nowadays found almost as strange as his moods of withdrawal, came behind his desk and leaned over to lock thin arms under Ben's chin and murmur: "What's the matter, Mooncalf?"

"Nothing, Ru--nothing. I think I'll go into Boston."

"Oh." Reuben broke the contact; Ben had found it vaguely comforting as well as disturbing. Reuben came around the desk, and re-established nearness by placing his hands over Ben's, hands thinner and smaller, but harder, sometimes even stronger. "Would you," said Reuben presently, "care to take a creeping crawling student of medicine into your confidence, not that the ancient creature wishes to intrude, but----?"

It was not always possible to look directly at Reuben. He saw too much, or if he did not, his quiet intentness made it seem that he did. The faces of others were apt to make it plain enough that they were not so much concerned with you as with themselves; Reuben (who surely thought about himself as much as anyone) somehow could put that preoccupation aside, and make you believe that nothing mattered to him at the moment except that jumble of thought and image and desire which you had grown accustomed to calling your Self. And it was, Ben thought, no illusion: the boy did search, and he did care for what he found. Ben fumbled for an evasion: "Student of medicine for sure?"

This proved to be no evasion after all, for Reuben smiled, and used the question itself as a part of the effort to illuminate the self of Ben Cory. "Yes, truly, and I wish you could find the same kind of certainty, Ben, because it's good. Why, I almost think, Ben, that anything could happen to me now--anything, no matter what--and though I might be hurt as much as I would have been, say a year ago, I could defend myself against my trouble, whatever it was: I could go and study another page of Vesalius' Anatomy. Or the books you bought for me. They wouldn't fade, I think. They wouldn't betray me.... Find something like that, Ben. Suppose you did change your mind about it after a while, at least you'd have it for now."

"But when I search myself I don't find it. I only...."

"Only what?" Reuben tightened his hands, relentless.

"I only wish--oh, I wish to God Uncle John would allow me to sail with _Artemis_."

Reuben let go his hands, and perched on Mr. Hibbs' sacred desk, swinging his feet, drooping a little, boyish and old, perhaps no longer searching. "You put it to him a few days ago, did you not?"

"Mm--he wouldn't say ay or no."

"You know Uncle John would find it difficult to disappoint thee."

"I am not a child."

"No," said Reuben, and with nothing in his voice to contradict the word. "What about this afternoon, that is what's left of it?"

"I thought I might see Uncle John at the warehouse. Ride home with him maybe."

"Ay, might be easier--he's a rather different man there at the office."

"It--seems not wrong to you, that I wish to sail?"

Reuben was long silent, drooping, looking into his empty hands. "Ben--'d I ever recount to thee the story of the woodcutter's stupid son who tamed a lion?"

"Woodcutter's son--I don't think so. Is it from Aesop?"

"No. Well, that's nearly the whole tale already. He found it as a cub. They grew up together, played together, the lion learning not to unsheath his claws, the woodcutter's son trying to roar like a lion, but 'tis said he made only some poor squeaking sounds that carried no great distance. They were yet friends when the lion was full grown, but then the poor brute in some manner sickened, fretted, vanishing at whiles and returning unwillingly, until at length the woodcutter's stupid son did arrive at one moment of wisdom, and took his friend into the forest and said to him, 'Go thy way.'"

"I am no lion."

"Marry come up, I am a shade more learned than that woodcutter's son. Ben, I'm only trying to say I don't think anyone should try to possess you, as I suppose Uncle John does, as maybe I've done--but if you wish to sail, if it's your decision and your heart in it, d'you think I'd impede you? Supposing I could?"

"No, I don't think you would."

"And I will not," said Reuben, and jumped off the desk. "I'm for Mr. Welland's, by the back fields. Best change thy jacket, Ben--that one beareth the slight saffron memory of an egg which hath gone before. I'll saddle Molly for thee, meanwhile."

When Ben rejoined him in the stable, Reuben had nothing more to say, except the light random murmuring that Molly enjoyed. Ben led her out into the yard--not in sight of Mr. Hibbs' window. Reuben said again, unnecessarily: "I'll go by the fields, you by the road."

As Reuben held the bridle, Ben was bewildered at his reluctance to set his foot in the stirrup. "Ru, what ails thee? It's not as if we were saying a good-bye."

"No. Why, man, if you sail, I also--well, I hope it turns out as you wish. I believe Uncle John heeds what you say, more than you suppose. Why the knife, little Benjamin?"

"Oh, I might be in the city after dark. I rather missed it that other night, coming home."

"Well, tuck it under your britches, can't you?--so to look less like a bloody cutthroat and more like my little brother?"

"Very well.... Ru, I don't know how to say this--lately I've been some-way troubled about thee."

"Oh, why, why? Have I two heads?--but don't answer that."

"As if we no longer understood each other--my fault, I think."

"It is not. It is not even true." Reuben still held the bridle, his face stiff and white and smiling. "No cause for trouble about me. I am one of the fortunate, didn't you know?"

"I don't understand."

"I own a shield. I walk in the woods. I read the _Anatomy_ of Vesalius, and the books you bought for me. And I told you, Ben--they do not fade."

"Ay, there's that. Still, if I live to be a thousand I don't suppose I'll ever understand you."

"Must you, Ben?"

"I try."

"I have never understood another, and yet I think about them as much as you do."

"But--oh, I _don't_ know how to say it--I don't think I meant that kind of understanding. There's more than one kind...."

"Ben, you'd best hurry a little if you're to have any time with Uncle John at the office."

"Yes," said Ben unhappily, and was in the saddle looking down, more than ever reluctant to be going away. "I'll tell you after supper, what he says. Ru, what was that?--you started to say that if I sail, then you also--?"

Ben had spoken softly, in his confusion. He supposed Reuben had not heard, for he did not answer, and that was a discourtesy Ben had never known him to employ. Ben saw him rub his hand along Molly's fat neck. "Be a good horse," said Reuben, and was gone, walking quickly around the stable, the shortest way to the back fields.

* * * * *

The cottage with the green shutters sat comfortably under the dignity of twin elms--like its owner mild, and quiet, and rather old, carrying age as an elm does with rugged awkwardness, with many scars, without pomp and circumstance.

Reuben had learned the inside of the cottage--simple, on the same stark plan as the house in Deerfield, with two main downstairs rooms and a garret, but where the Deerfield house had owned a small lean-to off the kitchen, Mr. Welland had a larger annex, more solidly built, which he called the surgery. It was also his reception room for patients, his library, his study, his room of contemplation. The gray striped lady, Goody Snively, who kept the cottage rather constantly supplied with kittens (often yellow), lived here in a box of her own beside the wood-box at the fireplace. Very few patients ever came to Mr. Welland here at the cottage, so few that he did not try to keep precise hours for them, but it was understood that he would ordinarily be at home in the late hours of the afternoon. Most of his work was done in visits that often took him a considerable distance to outlying farms. A small stable stood separate from the cottage, home of the brown mare Meg, who carried Mr. Welland on his labors in all weathers, all times of day or night. He claimed that Meg was a better diagnostician of the purse than himself, being always restless outside the houses of wealthy patients, who were invariably the slowest to pay his charges. That puzzled Reuben. "You'll learn," said Mr. Welland. "Your great-uncle is one of perhaps five exceptions to the rule that I can remember."

Mr. Welland kept no servant, and no one came in to clean or cook for him. He took most of his meals at the ordinary down the street; messages were left for him there more often than at the cottage. In the cottage he maintained a monastic neatness--no dust, no clutter, very few possessions and those necessary, functional and in good order. "It's not difficult," he had explained on Reuben's first visit, "but a servant or woman-by-the-day would make it so, and by the way, Reuben, my house is never locked, this door from hall to surgery never closed except when I have a patient with me. I like simplicity, seeing it leaves one free to consider complexity--especially that of persons who a'n't so smart as you and me. Don't trouble to knock, I don't like it. I hate knocking. If it's loud I jump out of my skin, if it's soft I blame it on the mice." "Mice, with that cat?" "Mice is a general term, boy. Mice includes everything that bothers by day or goes thump in the night. If a door squeaks I blame it on the mice for a week before I oil it. Everyone needs a devil, Reuben, and mice have served me bravely in that capacity for lo, these many years. Pull up a chair and be at ease."

On this Tuesday afternoon Reuben entered without knocking, an action that still caused him some shy discomfort, and spoke Mr. Welland's name unanswered. The door to the surgery stood open; also the stable door, as Reuben noticed through the window; the doctor was away, and this new loneliness an unexpected blow. "I am most unreasonable," said Reuben to Goody Snively, who rubbed his leg, and purred, and exercised a cat's privilege of trotting ahead and sitting down in front of his feet as he was about to go into the surgery. Reuben hooked her on his shoulder; she sang casually and damply in his ear as he went to the doctor's bookshelves and took down the Vesalius.

"_This is a man----_" well, certainly, but also not a man. A man is motion and thought; a man is foolishness, courage, love, pain. Reuben turned the pages at the desk, rather blindly trying to force them into some clearness, and he wondered if there had been any truth at all in what he had said to Ben less than half an hour ago. Vesalius had not faded--that much was true. The mist is in the observer.

Not only now, he thought, but always, in every observation, whether made at a favorable time or not. If I were happy, that also could deceive, a rosy mist no easier to penetrate than a gray one. If I were calm, neither sad nor happy--still a mist, of accepted thoughts that may be false as fog over quicksand. "But don't you see, Goody Snively?--we know one thing: we know the fog is there. And that, by the way, is my tender thigh and not a tree trunk. If you regard me as a tree, I may bark." Goody Snively retired--shocked, maybe.

The drawing before his face was lost to him a while, the room also, in a trance not of thought but of stillness avoiding thought. Then, as the body itself will usually shatter such a refuge with its own cantankerous insistence, Reuben's nose itched, his hands upholding his cheekbones grew sweaty and cramped. He gave it up and wandered about disconsolately. He knelt by the box to which Goody Snively had returned. Her latest kittens were quite new, their open eyes not focusing, their legs uncertain. He lifted the black-and-brindle one of the four and held it against his cheek, liking the harmlessly wild kitten smell; it mewed in small wrath, and Goody Snively began to look stern, so he replaced it at the consolation of the nipple and strolled away. He leaned in the open doorway of the front room, the room where Mr. Welland slept. Curious, but somehow not inappropriate, that this room like the rest of the house should be bare of ornament. Monastic was the word, but it held a sense of comfort too. A plain narrow bed, made up with sharp precision. One armchair, much worn in the seat; beside that an unpainted table, bearing a Betty lamp, a pitcher and a basin, nothing else. Two pairs of shoes--so the doctor owned three altogether--lined up at the side of the bed like little soldiers. Reuben thought of his own five expensive pairs, of the days in Deerfield when he had not always owned two pairs, of time and change and human virtue, of the froth of bright embroidery Kate had stitched at the buttonholes of the fine maroon waistcoat he now wore, and shut his eyes, wondering if that enameled snuffbox was the doctor's only luxury.

Opening them--but still holding away thought, or letting his eyes alone think for him--Reuben observed that one pair of Mr. Welland's shoes bore the marks of dried mud. The man must have changed in haste with no time to take care of them, or had forgotten. Reuben recalled noticing on a kitchen shelf a few cleaning rags and a jar of neatsfoot oil. He carried the yellowed shoes out there, refreshed the fading hearth-fire and sat by it to polish them. The crackle of new wood and the noise of his cleaning covered the light sounds of Mr. Welland returning and putting up Meg in the stable. Reuben was aware of it as the doctor opened the door, but the task was not quite done; he did not want to abandon it, or even to rise respectfully: work started ought to be finished, and as for the trivia of politeness, Amadeus Welland wouldn't care.

"What's this, Reuben?"

"It was something to do, sir. I couldn't bring my mind properly to the study, some-way. Besides, if this mud stays here too long it'll spoil the leather."

"Ay, but--thou, scrubbing _my_ shoes? It's kind, Reuben, but I don't find it fitting."

"Sir, _I_ do."

"Eh?" Reuben could not answer, nor look up when after a silence the doctor drew a chair to the hearth and sat there spreading his hands to the warmth. Yet he was not disturbed, nor worried--if Mr. Welland was annoyed, that would pass. It occurred to Reuben as his fingers (remembering Deerfield) worked the oil into the leather, that he had in fact never felt less troubled about his own behavior and how it might appear to another. It was simple, satisfying and natural that you should scrub mud from the shoes of someone you loved, taking it for granted that if the occasion ever happened to suggest it he would do the same for you. "Each time you have come here," said Mr. Welland at last, "you have been in some degree different, and also the same. Each time I must become acquainted with you again, and each time, I suppose, a little better, since I change too if only by learning."

"You remarked that living is a journey."

"Oh," said Welland, and sighed, "I fear that was little better than a simile after all, for what is the thing that travels and cannot itself remain wholly constant? All is change; all things flow; and what's more, I'd no idea those dem'd shoes had so much virtue left in 'em." Reuben could look up then and smile. "Well, Reuben, being in Boston yesterday, I called at thy great-uncle's office and spoke to him concerning thine apprenticeship. He is not averse to it, not at all, but would have thee continue for Harvard, and perhaps not be formally bound immediate, but later, if it is still thy wish in a year or so.... Pleased, my dear?"

"I--am. I would--I would...."

"What, Reuben?"

"I would study, and--serve, if I may, whether formally bound or not. I think that is what I was trying to say. It won't fade, Mr. Welland. I was never so certain of any other thing.... I ought to have spoken of it to Uncle John, but rather feared to because he hath had so much to distress him lately, the death of Mr. Dyckman, the loss of the _Iris_."

"The _Iris_? I heard about Mr. Dyckman of course, everyone has."

"A ship, that should have brought him a great return, taken by pirates off Virginia. Ben is worried about his affairs, knowing more of them than I do. That's one reason why he hath so set his heart on sailing and earning his own way."

"So?"

"Yes. Mr. Welland, you and Uncle John--you are both very kind. I will not disappoint you. I can work."

"Not exactly kindness. On my part at least, let us call it--mm-yas--recognition, and no more of it for the present, because--well, because the subject is complex and I must presently be off again, almost to Dorchester, damn the luck. There was a message for me at the ordinary. I've only time to snatch a bit of rest for me and Meg, and a quick meal, and a--I think, a change of shoes.... He never spoke of the _Iris_--well, he and I are not well acquainted. Certainly he hath a marvel in that ketch _Artemis_. He was good enough to take me aboard for a few minutes. I'm no sailor, but even I can see she's no common sort."

"Was Shawn there? A black-haired Irishman with a green coat?"

"Why, no, I noticed no such man, but there were many about."

"You would have noticed and remembered him."

"Mm? Mr. Kenny introduced me to two or three there at the wharf--Captain Jenks, and the mate, who was here, there and everywhere with scant time for landsmen."

"The mate? What was his name?"

"Why, Hanson, I think--don't you know him? We exchanged some little talk about New Haven, where he comes from, seeing I lived a year there once. Everyone was in a whirl of last-minute business. I felt in the way. Never knew there were so many different ropes to trip over."

Reuben set the shoes aside. "Last-minute business?"

"Why, yes." The doctor glanced down, puzzled. "What's the matter, Reuben? What did I say to disturb thee?"

"Did Uncle John say when _Artemis_ was to sail?"

"Why, today. You didn't know?"

"No, I--pray tell me about it."

"Well--he said she ought to have sailed that day, yesterday, but they were waiting on some cargo from Gloucester, salt fish I believe, that hadn't come, and Captain Jenks all of a growl about it. They left it that they would wait till today, and if it still had not come she'd sail and--let me think--put in at Sherburne on Nantucket, and find what the islanders might offer to fill her hold. To my ignorant eye she already looked low in the water, but Captain Jenks was swearing she'd ride sweeter for another twenty ton, and a dirty shame--not his exact words--she should sail light."

"And then New York, from Sherburne?"

"Why, no, Reuben--Barbados, thy great-uncle said."

"Ah!... Thunder!--she may be gone before he's at the office. Ben hoped to sail, Mr. Welland. His heart was set on it. He was all one ache for it. He left for Boston only an hour ago, with no notion that _Artemis_ was to sail today, only hoping to persuade Uncle John to let him sign on. I felt, sir, as if I was saying good-bye. He felt it too."

"I'm confused. Isn't he for Harvard in the autumn, with thee?"

"Yes, but he hoped to make a quick voyage to New York and return. It was his idea she should go there, and damn it, the proposal was most sensible. Uncle John might at least have considered it. Now he'll be heartbroken. Maybe I _was_ saying good-bye to him, and not in the way I thought. He won't be the same when he comes home, not after this."

"Surely, Reuben, you're making too much of it."

"I know him, Mr. Welland. Certainly Uncle John meant it for the best, but it won't do. You can cross Ben, disappoint him, be harsh with him, but damnation, you can't deceive him, never mind if it may be for his own good--he won't bear it." And yet even as he spoke Reuben knew that his own strongest feeling was unwelcome, unreasonable relief: Ben would not sail, not yet.

"Mm-yas, I begin to see.... Reuben, why do you speak as if he were somehow your charge? He's the older. He must find his own way."

"That's true, sir. I even tried to tell him so this afternoon. To tell him that I had been--oh, too much my brother's keeper, and was sorry for it. I think he understood."

"Then let it be. If he's hurt and angry about this, it will pass. You've only to stand by and be a friend to him until it does. Don't make it more important than it is. I'm sure that after the first day or so, Ben will not."

"I hope so." Reuben hugged his knees, watching the fire. "I hope so, and I'll do as you say. And still I feel as if I had said good-bye to him."

"I suggest that much of living consists of saying good-bye. I suggest that a man says good-bye to his wife when they fall asleep in the same bed, the morrow's morn being a new region in the journey that can't be known till they meet there together. If they do. At certain times we are more aware of saying good-bye, that's all. As presently I must h'ist my creaky bones out of this comfort, change to those good shoes, and say good-bye to thee for a while. By the way, if study should come hard this evening, let it go. Thou dost look, as a matter of fact, very tired."

"Nay, I--maybe I am.... Dorchester, you said? Might I not go with you? You said a while ago that soon I could go with you on your rounds."

Reuben heard Mr. Welland catch his breath. "Not this one!" As often in bothered moments, Mr. Welland took snuff. "The message at the ordinary was--fi-_choo_-shoo!--garbled as usual, but having dissected out the fleck or two of not-so-golden truth from the rubbish, I have some reason to fear smallpox. That's in confidence, Doctor." He poked Reuben's shoulder, smiling a little but also stern. "Not a word to anyone. If it's true we'll all know it shortly, but if not there's no reason to set people's hearts a-squirming. Lord God, it comes, and comes again, and again, and we live like sheep on the side of Vesuvius, never knowing. Reuben, I sometimes think--and you'll have bad moments of thinking it too--that all we doctors do is no whit better than what the Inj'ans do, howling and screaming and beating drums around a sick man's hut to scare away the demons. Do you know that in all history no epidemic hath ever been overcome, nor even much lightened? It strikes, runs its course, and we stand helpless, making motions in the air. And yet one would think that if contagion could somehow be prevented--but where doth it breed? We don't know. What _is_ contagion? We don't know. Why should a thing like the black plague have struck at England as it did some thirty years ago, and then after blazing and slaying for a time, simply fade away, for no reason men can see? Don't know, don't know. Sir Thomas Sydenham, a great venerator of Hippocrates by the way, was much concerned with epidemiology; I remain skeptical as to his conclusions. Galen, the great Galen to whom they say we must all bow down--Galen evades; I would have thee most cautious, Reuben, with regard to all the doctrines of Galen. If at Harvard they give you Galen as a final authority, be polite, but read in private the works of Sydenham--and even Paracelsus for that matter.... I'll tell thee an almost comical thing: I have lived fifty-three years, have read much and pondered, have spoke with a goodly number of learned and thoughtful men, and I have never, never satisfied myself as to a proper definition of good health."

"May it be, that state wherein flesh and spirit (the two indivisible, I think) are free to act as fully as the condition of a social being will allow?"

"Reuben...." The doctor was leaning forward in his chair, frowning intently, hands clasped before him. "Reuben, you did not give me that on the spur of the moment."

"Why, no, sir. I was fretting at that question the other night--only I came to it from the other side, wondering, what is disease? I wished a broader definition than any I found in the books, and so searched a little, but I don't know that it satisfies me altogether."

"I think--mm-yas--I think I will accept it until such time as you give me a better.... It takes no account of theology of course. But then, I cannot entertain the thought of a punishing God. Nor even a personal God perhaps. If personal, then in some way well beyond man's imagination. It often amazes me, that others can find such great comfort in the notion of a punishing God. Yet they do."

"It saves them from thought."

"Eh? How's that?"

"I think it saves them, sir, from the pains and trials of thought."

"Keep thy sharpness, Reuben. Thou hast already a summer heart and will not lose it. Keep that thorn in the tongue. Hide it almost always, but use it at need, never mind if others wince or even hate thee for it. Sir William Harvey was an angry man, too much perhaps, yet without the thorn in his tongue I dare say no one would ever have heeded him. I have none myself." Mr. Welland bent down, short of breath, to fumble at his shoes. "In anger I am--mm-yas--most ineffectual, a poor thing. I flush and mumble, lose all command of my thoughts. Anger requires a coolness I do not possess." He groped for the shoes Reuben had cleaned, and slipped his feet into them, and sighed. "Ah, that's better--my most comfortable pair. Thou art both cool and warm." Mr. Welland's fingers fussed awkwardly at the shoelaces; Reuben would have helped him, but had been unreasonably shaken by the words and did not trust his face. "I suppose that is one reason why I love thee."

Reuben thought: He is speaking only as convention allows; I must not make it mean what it cannot. He said rather clumsily: "Mr. Welland, if I'm to be a doctor, some time I shall be obliged to attend smallpox cases, whether or not I have the disease and the immunity it brings."

"But not now!" said Mr. Welland sharply. "Well--they say it's worse for the young--and mine own observation--thou art still growing. I will not see--I will not allow--no, not now!" he said, and having laced the shoes after a fashion, he rose and went to the door. "I must go."

Still at the hearth, watching the fire because his vision needed a refuge, Reuben asked: "Sir, may I detain you for one question more?"

"Of course."

"Mr. Welland, I am fifteen. I have a man's body--came to the change two years ago, nor am I ignorant of its meaning. Why have I never desired women?"

The fire murmured in peace; Reuben held out his hand to it, watching the aureole of light around the fingers cleanly defined. Eventually Mr. Welland spoke. "Never ask that of anyone else. I am glad, I suppose, that you asked me. Never ask it of anyone else."

"I never could," said Reuben to the fire. "It would never occur to me."

"Especially not of a priest."

"I have no need for any sort of priest," said Reuben Cory.

"I know. I say that because a priest is commonly the most earnest in nourishing and supporting men's hate for whatever is unlike themselves. I have never understood why it should be so--Jesus, if I rightly remember, did not assert that there was only one path of virtue. Well--the desire of women may come to thee at a later time."

"It came to Ben before he was fourteen."

"And in France, I believe, they still burn at the stake the ones who--never mind--my wits are wandering. Thou may'st have wondered too, why I live so like a monk? Why I have never married?"

"Mr. Welland, I don't think I've ever wondered much, about your life, because--oh, because you're as you are, because I don't seem to have any wish that you should be in any way different."

"What art thou saying now?"

"Is that strange?" Reuben was able then to rise and go to him, seeing his crinkled hands hanging motionless, his face that most would have found supremely ugly, lowered, eyes downcast, hidden. "Is it strange?"

"To me, yes. Since no one ever said the like to me. Reuben, thou art still growing--many more changes--let them come to pass--heavens, what else can anyone do? But remember: whatever thou art, that is good. I have no fantastic heart's image of thee, Reuben. I love thy self, whatever it is and will become. Now let me only kiss thy forehead, once, and I must go."

* * * * *

The garden was empty but for the daffodils, and the violets by the fence, and, near the empty stone seat, a hyacinth that had opened blue eyes for the sacrament of May. In the house itself Ben imagined too much quiet.

His uneasiness had not lessened but grown. His hands had been shaking when he hitched Molly; now they wobbled again when it was necessary to lift the knocker, but they lifted it, and let it fall, and Ben winced at the outrageous clamor his ears made of it in the silent street. Foolish of course, a green boy's idiocy, to stand here shivering and hoping everyone had gone away. No sound of footsteps within. Ben made vague resolves to try the knocker once more and then hurry for the warehouse. He was not late, however; it was still short of four o'clock, so Uncle John would not have left. No sound of steps, but the door opened, and Clarissa at sight of him looked unmistakably astonished.

"May I have a word with Mistress Faith, or"--Ben gulped, and applied finishing touches to half a dozen plans in the time it took Clarissa to glance down in slight embarrassment at the soft slippers she was wearing, and up to his face again--"or with Captain Jenks, if he...."

"Why, I'm sorry, sir. They're all away. They left within the half-hour."

"All away?" Ben thought: This is--relief? _Relief?_

"Yes, sir. Madam Jenks and the girls might be returning within an hour or two--or, I think, you might find them at the docks. They all left in the coach."

"Oh.... The--docks?" _I must stop this parrot-babbling._

"Yes, sir." That answer had been slow in coming; when it did her voice had subtly changed, softened. "The Captain is sailing today, Mr. Coree. Did you not know it?"

"The--_Artemis_--is sailing?"

Not relief. Something dull, heavy, unreal, as if friendly trustworthy Molly had swung her rump about and let him have her heels; presently, when he could scramble up from the ground, the pain would start. He felt prepared--maybe this was the pain beginning--quite prepared to be savagely angry with the little brown slave if he discovered that she was amused at his ignorance of the sailing. Let her laugh, just once, or merely smile, with that cool superior wisdom----

She did not. He had known all along that she would do nothing of the sort; had known also that he would not have been angry if she had, seeing it was no fault of hers that part of the world had fallen down.

The look in her brown face--widening of brown eyes, slight parting of friendly lips--not pity, surely? Why should the slave pity him? Yet Ben's mother had worn that look at times--when Ru cut his finger trying to prove he could whittle with the knife in his left hand; when, on a certain evening, Father had spoken of the French butchery at Schenectady.... "Sir, you must have ridden hard--I see your horse is a-sweat. Will you not come in and rest a moment?"

"_Artemis_, sailing today.... I dare say I have no occasion now to--to go----"

"Sir, come inside. I'll fetch you a drop of brandy, isn't it? I think you rode too hard, and the day that warm it might be June." She touched his arm lightly, almost commandingly. Ben stepped into the cool entry, and she closed the door. "Come into the parlor. I won't be a moment. Do sit down, sir, and be at ease."

Ben sat down, his eyes avoiding the stern, badly stitched sampler on the wall, seeking instead the graceful model of a full-rigged ship on the mantel. He had been about to get up for a better look at that model, he recalled, when Charity and Sultan ambushed him. Clarissa spread open the drapes at the window, startling him; he had thought that in her noiseless slippers she had already left the room. He said clumsily: "I remember you did that when I was here before."

On her way out of the room she looked down at him--not smiling, he was sure, though the light shone strong behind her face and he could not see her very well. "Yes," she said thoughtfully, and was gone, and Ben turned to the model, finding in this better light the name painted on the side: HERA. Then this was she that went down off the Cape in a fog, seven years ago--not a man lost.

Uncle John's telling of the story had never given Ben much realizing sense of the smothering terror of fog at sea. He had it now, in the delicate presence of the _Hera's_ image. Wet smoke pressing on the eyeballs of men seeking to live; no guide, no refuge, no gleam of direction anywhere, only merciless whiteness concealing fangs. A whiteness like snow, a silence like the silence of snow that muffles footsteps in a winter night.

No wind: fog flows in where the wind is not. Under the fog, no weakening of the rolling invisible currents that could drag man's creation into the snag teeth of a reef or against the crushing mass of a dead hulk. "_Stove in her la'board side, filled in twenty minutes...._"

Fog....

They would have prayed, the men of the _Hera_, and perhaps Captain Jenks with them if he had time for it. When they came safe ashore, not a man lost--but first the long blind groping, in one boat and one damned little dory, never knowing what might answer the next weary thrust of the oars--why, safe ashore they would have praised God for hearing them--the same God who strangely failed to hear a myriad others praying in extremity--and with some leftover gratitude to Peter Jenks as God's instrument. "_Ben, hear me. I say God is far away, no whit concerned with man...._"

"Sir, will you not look up?" There was a trace of most gentle laughter in that. Ben wondered when she had come in her silence, how long she had been standing there with the brandy glass on a little tray.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I was far off indeed."

"I know."

"Thank you--this is very kind.... You are from one of the French islands, are you not?"

"Guadeloupe."

A sip of the brandy warmed him a little. It was old, and smooth, the glass fantastically lovely--probably the best in the house, and probably English or continental, since nothing of the kind was made in the colonies; Uncle John's house had nothing to match it. "This must seem a cold foreign place to you."

"Oh, I have been more than eight years in Boston, sir. It used to be, I must think in French and translate before I spoke--I do not do that now. Perhaps I do not look as old as I am."

"I had thought you was near my age."

"I am twenty-seven, Mr. Coree. I know it to the very day, because Monsieur Lafourche--of Lyons, who later settled at Guadeloupe--used often to say that I was born but two days after his other--after his daughter. He wished me bred up as maid and companion to her. I had lessons with the same teachers when we were little girls, even the reading and writing. I cannot read English with any comfort. She, the little Mademoiselle, she died at sixteen of a consumption. I think my presence hurt him with reminders of her." Clarissa's voice was passionless, cool and distant; Ben noticed his hands were no longer shaking. "Monsieur Lafourche his fortune was much impaired in the war of--of your King William's time. Then in 'ninety-eight, between the wars, he sold his plantation at Guadeloupe and returned to France, and so was obliged to let me go, to a merchant of Boston, who later sold me here. Where," she said mildly and remotely, "I have received much kindness."

Anger moved in Ben, severe but directionless, formless, thwarted, without an object and seeking one. One _could_ not be angry with Uncle John. He must have meant it for the best--somehow, somehow. "Where--do you know where _Artemis_ is bound for?"

"Barbados, sir."

"I see.... Clarissa, I cannot think of you as a slave."

She moved into the light at the window, looking out; presently said with neutral calm: "But I am a slave."

The anger moved blindly, a flooded river seeking any low spot, any outlet at all. "Don't you know there's talk in these times that slavery itself is wrong? Why, Judge Samuel Sewall hath said it, written it too, and maybe not many will agree with him, but--but before God, I do," Ben said, wondering at the wiry clang of his own voice.

"One hears of it," she said gently, "but I think there will alway be slavery."

"Oh, why?"

"Perhaps because no one is ever wholly free."

"Oh, don't put me off with philosophy! I understand you, but--that was not--well, my brother, and my Uncle John too--I have heard my Uncle John say he would never own a slave, for that the thing itself is wrong. And later I talked of it with my brother, he was most passionate, he said it was vile and contemptible that any man should pretend to possess the life of another, or be privileged to command it and drive it where he may please. My brother is strangely wise--younger but a better scholar than I, much wiser. Somehow I can't ever do anything without first wondering, how would he do it, what would he think of it? I lean on him too much--well, I suppose it's because we went through much together, and I love him so, and we--I don't know--I'm confused."

"I am not so sure," she said, speaking into the light. "I think you have your own wisdom, Mr. Cory. Perhaps, if he be the quicker scholar, it is only that your brother can speak his thoughts more easily."

"No," said Ben, and sighed shortly. "No, he's truly wise. I have alway known it, am even pleased it should be so. He hath chosen a most difficult life work, medicine. I have alway known he would go where I cannot."

"You wished to sail with _Artemis_, did you not?"

"I did so."

"Mistress Faith spoke of it a few days ago, when I was dressing her hair, and charged me hold it in confidence because, she said, she was not sure you were ready to discuss it with the Captain."

It never occurred to Ben that there might be something strange in his lack of interest as to what else Faith Jenks had said about him. "Yes, I wished to sail, and it seems to me--I don't know why I never saw it before--it seems to me the best reason I could have for learning my great-uncle's trade and making myself of some account in it, would be that then I could aid my brother. It must be difficult to be a doctor. No one seems to grant them much respect. Mr. Welland of Roxbury is a very learned man, Reuben tells me, and yet I never heard of anyone deferring to him. He lives more or less in poverty."

"And still," said Clarissa, to the light--"and still, perhaps even wisdom is not everything."

"Nay, I'm sure it's not," Ben said, and wondered whether it was wisdom he was searching for in the brandy glass, where half of the beautiful amber sparkled as yet untouched. He saw her then, with a more naked vision, as she stood in the light and shadow slight as a child and wholly a woman, in her feminine grace no longer alien. He rose with no thought for the action and entered the same sunlight. "Clarissa, there is more here than I should drink. Will you not share it?"

Her eyes held him, not once lowering to look at the glass, her hand not moving to take or reject it. She was not shocked, he saw; not afraid of him, perhaps not afraid of the brandy glass. It might be that she was only considering what to do, like Reuben considering a position on the chessboard; but then he understood it was nothing like that. Nudged by his own heart, Ben said: "I assure you, no red comb will pop."

She stepped back, staring rather wildly. Her hand flew up to her mouth, but that was no defense, for mischief and delight were brimming over, uncontrollable. As Ben himself began to chuckle, she gave way to it completely, throwing back her head, pointing at him helplessly, the laugh going up and up in a golden rocket. "_Oh, le peigne, le peigne, le bon Dieu me garde!_ Whoo!" Clarissa wailed, and slapped her thigh, and swayed toward him--sobering completely as Ben's arm went around her waist, but not drawing away, studying him a while with a dark and new sweet gravity, then at last taking the brandy glass, turning it about so that when she raised it the small mark left by his lips was covered by her own as she drained it. The glass dropped to the floor from her drooping hand; Ben felt she would not have cared if the lovely thing had broken, or perhaps she wished it to break, but it did not. "_Une heure, fugitive et immortelle, une heure et alors----_"

"I have no French." Ben's fingers lost themselves in her dark sweet-smelling hair. "My dear, what art thou saying?--tell me."

"Ah, little or nothing," Clarissa mumbled. She unfastened his shirt, her fingers swift and petulant, until she could rub her cheek over his bare skin; her mouth groped for his nipple and clung lightly a second with soft pressure of her teeth. "One hour, I think I said, one hour and then nothing more, because you will go away, because one hour given by chance is all we may have, _mais ton sourire_--but your smile I shall yet see, as I saw it first when you gave it to my little Charity there at the wharf, and I could look into you and know you, and my loins hurt me and my empty flesh, and my silly heart cried out I love you, I love you." Her hand sought for his wrist and clutched it hard. She spoke in a breathless tone like anger: "Come to my room!"

It was small, and bleak, and very clean, a room under the eaves with not even a bed but a pallet on the floor, a chair, a few hooks on the wall for her few garments. As he followed her half blindly, Ben had received a dim impression of passing, on the second floor, the open doorway of some luxurious room. It didn't matter. In her room she turned to him, suddenly grave but no less urgent. A small laugh came and passed like a breeze, impatient, as she helped him with his clothes and her own, her hands a bridge of warmth between them.

Slowness he felt then in the upward reaching of her mouth to find his lips. She was embracing him, a small column of urgent softness, and slipping down, kneeling, falling away--a slow and graceful falling until she lay on the pallet at his feet, no longer looking at him but knowing he would come to her.

There were the fears, shy, ridiculous but now amusingly so, not even shameful when with another faint gust of laughter Clarissa helped him again. Time thereafter was measured in roaring heartbeats, in the grotesque innocent throes where Ben at last discovered a strength that was his own, a sureness and a rightness. Some part of him could still observe at the very crests of the waves. He could see, perhaps pity, her rich mouth squared down as in suffering, her brown dear face suddenly drenched in tears and twisting from side to side, and yet know that nothing of this could be held back, nor softened, nor in any way denied, and that pain was of no importance whatever until the cup should be drained.

He was aware of most of the words she spoke--random and wild, fantastic or pitiable, they all owned a rightness in the moment and were a part of the climbing waves. "O God, hurt me! Set thy mark on me, Benjamin, Benjamin. I want thy seed. _À moi!_ Now! Now! Benjamin--thy bright mouth--_ainsi je vais, je vais avec toi jusqu'à la fin de la terre._"

Out of limitless quiet, his face on her satin shoulder, Ben asked: "Have I hurt thee?"

"No. Yes...." And again with the faintest moth-wing touch of laughter: "No...."

He drew away from her; presently sat up and saw her lying still, with wet cheeks and closed eyes, near and defenseless, wholly quiet. She said: "I will not yet open my eyes." And she did not, even when--timidly this time and bewildered at his own impulse--Ben curved his hand over the golden round of her breast where fading sunlight lay across it.

"Clarissa, forgive me."

She looked at him then, pools of darkness opening, filling with amazement, then sorrow, then showing him such a remote and ruminative blankness that Ben was frightened as a child, for it seemed to him that what his own voice had said was monstrous, and nothing said now or later could redeem it. She stood, unconcerned at her nakedness, looking down at him he knew, the abyss between self and self widening. At length she asked with much coolness: "What does that mean?"

"Clarissa, I did never intend"----_Oh, close my mouth, anything I say makes it worse, and I go on spilling words_--"We were swept away--I never intended--I've--sinned--betrayed----"

He managed to stop the noise. She was silent; he could not even hear her breathing. Forced by the silence to look up at last, he found as he had known he would the high blaze of contempt. "Sin? Betrayal?..." Then--he had known this too and feared it more than anything else--contempt and anger were gone, closed away altogether by a mask impenetrable and cruelly polite. The mask said gently: "Shall I help you with your clothes, Mr. Cory?"

He thought with a resentment that could accomplish nothing: Nay, I didn't deserve that.

The mask softened a little; a brittle thing quivering, but because it was so greatly needed it would not break. She caught her breath and said: "Oh, I am sorry! Forgive me too--if you can." She caught up her clothes in a clumsy armful and ran barefoot out of the room.

She had forgotten her slippers. Ben knew--this was the worst knowledge of all--that he could not search for her in the empty house. If he found her somewhere, a hurt and shrinking brown slave, he would not be finding her at all. The slippers were very small, soft, gray, a little run over at the edges. Ben dressed clumsily. He took up one of the slippers and tucked it under his shirt, but then it seemed to him that he could not even do that. He put back the mute and harmless thing beside its companion, and left the house. As he unhitched Molly and set his foot in the stirrup it occurred to him, in a misery now grown dull and almost impersonal, that perhaps it takes more than a successful act of intercourse at seventeen, to make a man.

* * * * *

"I say overside is the only place. A devil's name, what do you want of a pisstail boy on such an errand?"

"Watch that tongue, Judah. Watch it, man, against the day the rations'll run short and I'll be a-mind to cut it off and ram it down your gullet for amusement and nourishment, now that's no lie."

"I said nothing, only spoke m' futtering mind."

"Good. You may do it again. You may speak up plain and tell me who's captain of this bloody sloop."

"You are, Mister Shawn. I'm only saying, a God-damn boy is no use here. Are you soft on the pup?"

"You could say one thing too much one day."

"Dead in hell or alive in hell with one eye, what's the difference? Comes to that, though, betwix' you and me, maybe I won't be the one that dies. Be you going below--sir?"

"I am in a moment. You too."

"Leaving only Joey and Manuel on deck, and Joey scared of a tiller he don't know yet, and the God-damn night blacker 'n a witch's box?"

"What's to be scared of, you fool?"

"I a'n't scared of nothing, never was. Piss on 'em all. What've I got left any man could take from me? You want Joey to pile up the tub on Noddle's Island it's no beshitten difference to me and you know it."

"Noddle's is it? You're daft. We're miles south of it, and clear of Dorchester Neck too, and nothing to watch but a sweet wide-open sea. Steady as she goes, Joey Mills! Why, Judah, man, I can feel and smell the sea and the land in the dark, the way they lie."

"I'll ever recall how Quelch give you a rope's end once for that same mad Irish brag. Nobody can feel land in the dark."

"Mother of God, what I put up with from you! Peace on it, Judah.... Keep your eye sharp for riding lights, Manuel--any lights. You won't see 'em, and yet you might. Close 'em just once, any more 'n you need to blink, and you'll hear old Shawn speak in a manner unkind. That's my boy, Manuel--steady as she goes! O the fair night, and we better off without a moon!... Well, Judah, well--say I brought the boy on impulse, though it's not that entirely. I never planned it, that I did not, but didn't I find him, the poor puzzled thing, hiding in the doorway where I was a-mind to hide me own self for a last look at _Artemis_ going down the bay? And didn't I learn the way he'd set his own heart on going with her, and Kenny played him false too, with promises and then a chopping and a changing? God damn the old fart, I could puke to think of the way I all but licked the boots of him for a berth on her, and then to be shoved aside, shoved aside! We'll learn how far they'll be shoving old Shawn aside! Why, Ben's heart was set on her, so it was, he was that full of it you wouldn't know the thing he'd do, to be sailing on her--wisha, he shall!"

"If he was that hot for it why'd you bother to drug him?"

"This fishy tub will not have been his notion of going to sea."

"What are you laughing at now?"

"You wouldn't know. There's a sailor in that boy, Judah. There's an explorer in that boy."

"Ah! Still beating that dead horse."

"Steady as she goes, Judah! You know how much you can say to me--don't exceed! Ah, at that I might've persuaded him, seeing how sweet he come aboard of us here for a gossip with old Shawn, and was telling some of his boy's troubles but not all, not all, and believing everything old Shawn was a-mind to tell him over the little drinks, and the fish stink, why, he wasn't minding it, and the lantern light winking on the pretty face of him----"

"Shit, you're drunk."

"Drunk on sea water, Judah, you with your leather heart, you wouldn't know. He might'a' come along of his own will, now that's no lie. He was halfway so minded. He did believe I'd been given command, for a quick fishing trip to the Banks and so home--I think he did. But there'd have been much to explain later, and the devil with all explaining, the drop of opium didn't go amiss and will do him no hurt.... Judah, you fool, don't you know he saw you there at the Lion--and you that clumsy, and giving him your dead-window look, the way you might as well have written a letter to their Select Watch, that you might."

"What if he did? The others is bought and paid for."

"You'll run me no such errand again, Judah--nor wouldn't've then, had not my voice told me there was need. Mother of God, to think I may have misheard, and a man died for nothing! But it can't be so."

"Voice?"

"You wouldn't know. How many times did you strike?"

"I don't know."

"I do. Thirteen. And he didn't die till morning. He lived to speak."

"He's dead enough now, and never spoke of me. He never saw me nor Tom. Tom got the rag on his eyes and I came at him from behind. Thirteen, was it?"

"It was. Judah, I think you've never been as close to your Maker as you be this moment. You bungled that thing. He suffered, and no need, and now it seems there was no profit in the thing at all."

"Easy, Shawn! We'll take _Artemis_ the easier and him not there."

"True enough. All the same I'm trying--while you're here so near the rail and a weak puky thing too--I'm trying to recall if you had any part in persuading me to it."

"You're mad, Shawn. You know I never...."

"I think you hadn't. God help you if ever I'm receiving different instruction!... Come below, Judah. I'll show you something. I'll discover if there's any juice in that leather heart at all. Mind the hatch, you clumsy son of a bitch! And go in front--I'm not so green you'll ever find yourself behind me with a rag over me eyes.... Hath he been quiet, Dummy? Shake your head for ay or no. Dummy's a good man, Dummy is. Mind if I'm touching your hump for luck, Dummy? And that headshake is ay?--good enough. Look here, Judas----"

"Judah."

"Touchy, man? Look here, and look well. Nay, drink first, there's something left here, and don't cut your stupid eye at me! I'm drinking first from the same bottle, am I not? I say, drink it!... Now look here: this is the mortal image and presentment of a man, Judah. O the quiet sleep! Look on this chin, rounded like a woman's and firm with all the fair power of a god! But you can't see, you haven't the eye to see or the mind to know. Look on this hand, how firm already, and will it not be all the nobler when its wondrous jointure is acquainted with the rope, and the leap of a tiller and the burning of salt and wind? This is a man. This is the man who'll go with me, and be my friend, and stand by me in the new world when the rest of you are stinking carrion. And yet it hurts me a little, that I should be taking him away from his brother who loved him.... Go back on deck, Judah. Your one eye sees nothing. Go back on deck. Well, lively, man! I'm following.... Come for'd. We must have a feather under the bow."

"You're drunk and raving. I've no mind to go for'd unless you make it an order, Shawn, and take care how you do it."

"Then bide here aft, seeing I care nothing what you think or do, and your one eye blinder than the one that's gone.... Any lights, Manuel?"

"No, sir."

"That's well enough. She'll be far ahead. Belike we sha'n't see her till a certain day when we're standing on and off outside Sherburne. We'll see her then, Manuel, boy, but she won't see us until the time I choose. And Tom Ball and French Jack aboard her, they'll know the time I choose, they'll see us come out of the north long before the others do, I don't care who's aloft. Good men, those, Manuel. Can you hear the water, Manuel? What does it say, Manuel?"

"I don't know, Mr. Shawn."

"But I know. It saith, there be many islands."