Part 25

You may believe that the house would not hold the party after that. Whispering, giggling, shivering, the young people trooped down Heman Street to the shore. And there, under the phantom light of a moon hidden by the drift of storm-clouds, they found Andrew gone and all they saw of Joshua was a shadow--a shadow in black frock-clothes--wading away from them over the half-covered flats, deeper and deeper, to where the Adams sloop rode at her moorings, a shade tailing in the wind. They called, but he did not answer, and before they could do anything he had the sail up, and he, too, was gone, into the black heart of the night.

It is lonesome in the dark for a boy of six when the floor heaves and the bed shivers and over his head the shingles make a sound in the wind like the souls of all the lost men in the world. The hours from two till dawn that night I spent under the table in the kitchen, where Miah White and his brother Lem had come to talk with Duncan. And among the three of them, all they could say was "My heavens! My heavens!" I say till dawn; but our kitchen might have given on a city air-shaft for all the dawn we got.

It is hard to give any one who has lived always in the shelter of the land an idea of the day that followed, hour by waiting hour--how folks walked the beaches and did not look at each other in passing, and how others, climbing the bluff to have a better sight of the waters beyond the Head, found themselves blinded by the smother at fifty yards and yet still continued to stare.

Of them all, that day, Mary Matheson was the only one who kept still. And she was as still as an image. Standing half-hidden in the untidy nook behind the grocery, she remained staring out through the harbor mists from dawn till another heavy night came down, and no one can say whether she would have gone home then had not the appalled widow, her mother, slipped down between the houses to take her.

She was at home, at any rate, when Joshua Blake came back.

After all that waiting and watching, no one saw him land on the battered, black beach, for it was in the dead hour of the morning; of the three persons who are said to have met him on his way to Mary's, two were so tardy with their claims that a doubt has been cast on them. I do believe, tho, that Mother Polly Freeman, the west-end midwife, saw him and spoke with him in the light thrown from the drug-store window (where, had I only known enough to be awake, I might have looked down on them from my bed-room and got some fame of my own).

She says she thought at first he was a ghost come up from the bottom of the sea, with his clothes plastered thin to his body, weed in his hair, and his face drawn and creased like fish-flesh taken too soon out of the pickle. Afterward, when he spoke, she thought he was crazy.

"I've got it!" he said, taking hold of her arm. Opening a blue hand he held it out in the light for her to see the ring that had bitten his palm with the grip. "See, I've got it, Mother Poll!" She says it was hardly more than a whisper, like a secret, and that there was a look in his eyes as if he had seen the Devil face to face.

She meant to run when he let her go, but when she saw him striding off toward Mary Matheson's her better wisdom prevailed; following along the lane and taking shelter behind Gramma Pilot's fence, she waited, watched, and listened, to the enduring gain of Urkey's sisterhood.

She used to tell it well, Mother Poll. Remembering her tale now, I think I can see the earth misting under the trees in the calm dawn, and hear Joshua's fist pounding, pounding, on the panels of the door.

It must have been queer for Mother Poll. For while she heard that hollow pounding under the portico, like the pounding of a heart in some deep bosom of horror--all the while she could see Mary herself in an upper window--just her face resting on one cold, still forearm on the sill. And her eyes, Mother Poll says, were enough to make one pity her.

It was strange that she was so lazy, not to move or to speak in answer while the summons of the triumphant lover went on booming through the lower house. _He_ must have wondered. Perhaps it was then that the first shadow of the ghost of doubt crept over him, or perhaps it was when, stepping out on the turf, he raised his eyes and discovered Mary's face in the open window.

He said nothing. But with a wide, uncontrolled gesture he held up the ring for her to see. After a moment she opened her lips.

"Where's Andrew?"

That seemed to be the last straw: a feverish anger laid hold of him. "Here's the ring! You see it! Damnation, Mary! You gave your word and I took it, and God knows what I've been through. Now come! Get your things on and bring your mother if you like--but to Minister Malden's you go with me _now_! You hear Mary? I'll not wait!"

"Where's Andrew?"

"Andrew? Andrew? Why the devil do you keep on asking for Andrew? What's _Andrew_ to you--now?"

"Where is he?"

"Mary, you're a fool!"

Her voice grew if anything more monotonous; his, higher and wilder.

"You're a fool," he cried again, "if you don't know where Andrew is."

"He's gone."

"Gone, yes! And how you can say it like that, so calm--God!"

"I knew he was going," she said. "He told Rolldown he was going to other parts. But I knew it before that--when he turned at the door and looked at me, Joshua. He said it as plain: 'If _that's_ love,' he said, 'then I'm going off somewhere and forget it, and never come back to Urkey any more.'"

The deadness went out of her voice, and it lifted to another note. "Joshua, he's got to come back, for I can't bear it. I gave you my word, and I'll marry you--when Andrew comes back to stand at the wedding. He's got to--_got_ to!"

Mother Poll said that Joshua stared at her--simply stood there and stared up at her in the queer, cold dawn, his mouth hanging open as if with a kind of horror. Sweat shone on his face. Turning away without a word by and by he laid an uncertain course for the gate, and leaving it open behind him went off through the vapors of the cow street to the east.

As they carried him along step by step, I think, the feet of the cheated gambler grew heavier and heavier, his shoulders collapsed, the head, with the memory in it he could never lose, hung down, and hell received his soul.

It is impossible in so short a space to tell what the next ten years did to those two. It would have been easier for Mary Matheson in a city, for in a city there is always the blankness of the crowd. In a village there is no such blessed thing as a stranger, the membership committee of the only club is the doctor and the midwife, and all the houses are made of glass.

In a city public opinion is mighty, but devious. In a village, especially in an island village, it is as direct and violent as any "act of God" written down in a ship's insurance papers. A word carries far over the fences, and where it drops, like a swelling seed, a dozen words spring up.

"It's a shame, Milly, a living shame, as sure's you're alive."

"You never said truer, Belle. As if 'twa'n't enough she should send Andy to his death o' drownding----"

"Well, I hope she's satisfied, what she's done for Joshua. I saw him to the post-office last evening, and the hang-dog look of him----"

"Yes, I saw him, too. A man can't stand being made a fool of...."

So, in the blue of a wash-day morning the words went winging back and forth between the blossoming lines. Or, in a Winter dusk up to the westward, where old Mrs. Paine scuttled about under the mackerel-twine of her chicken-pen:

"Land alive, it's all very well to talk Temp'rance, and I'm not denying it'd be a mercy for some folks--I ain't mentioning no names--not even Miah White's. But, land sakes how you going to talk Temp'rance to a man bereft and be-fooled like Joshua Blake? Where's your rime-nor-reason? Where's your argument?"

Or there came Miah White himself up our outside stair on the darkest evening of our Spring weather, and one glance at his crimson face was enough to tell what all the Temperance they had preached to _him_ had come to. Miah turned to the bottle as another man might to prayer.

"By the Lord!" he protested thickly. "Something's got to be done!"

"Done? About what?" I remember my cousin peering curiously at him through the smoke and spatter of the sausage he was frying.

"About Josh, of course, and _her_. I tell you, Dunc, 'tain't right, and I'll not bear it. I'll not see Josh, same as I seen him this night, standing there in the dark of the outside beach and staring at the water like a sleep-walker, staring and staring as if he'd stare right through it and down to the bottom of the sea where his brother lay, and saying to himself, _Who's to pay the bill? Who's to pay the bill?_ No, siree! You and I are young fellows, Dunc, but we ain't so young we can't remember them boys' father, and I guess he done a thing or two for us, eh?"

"Yes," Duncan agreed calmly. "But what's to be done?"

"God knows! But look here, Dunc, you're constable, ain't you?"

Duncan smiled pityingly, as if to say, "Don't be an idiot, Miah."

"And if you're constable, and a man owns a bill he won't pay, why then you've something to say in it, ain't I right? Well, here's a bill to pay, fair and square. All this wool she'd pull over our eyes about Andrew and the India ship--as if _that_ made a mite of difference one way or the other! No, siree, Dunc, she give her word to take the man that fetched the ring--that man's Joshua--the bargain's filled on his side--and there you are. Now, you're constable. I take it right, Duncan, you should give that girl a piece of your mind; give her to understand that, India ship yes, India ship no, she's got a bill to pay and a man's soul to save from damnation everlasting."

All Duncan could do with him that night was to smile and shake his head, as much as to say, "You're a wild one, Miah, sure enough."

About Mary's sullen, stubborn belief in the "India ship," pretended or real as it may have been with her, but already growing legendary, I know only in the largest and mistiest way.

It is true there had been a ship that looked like an east-going clipper in our waters on that fateful night. Every one had seen it before dark came on, standing down from the north and laying a course to weather the Head if possible before the weather broke. It was Mary's claim that Andrew had pointed it out to her and spoken of it--in a strange way, a kind of a wistful way, she said. And later that night, what better for a man on the way to exile than a heaven-sent, outbound India ship, hove to under the lee of the Head.

Yes, yes, it was so--it _must_ be so. And when they laughed at her in Urkey Village and winked sagely at her assumption of faith, then she asked them to tell her one thing: had any one's eyes seen Andrew's boat go down--actually.

"If Joshua will answer me, and say that he _knows_ Andrew went down! Or if any of you will tell me that Andrew's body ever came ashore on any of the islands or the main!"

It was quite absurd, of course, but none of them could answer that, none but Miah White, and he only when he had had a drop out of the bottle and perceived that it weighed not an ounce in either scale.

Picked out so and written down, you would think this drama overshadowed all my little world. Naturally it didn't. You must remember I was a boy, with a thousand other things to do and a million other things to think of, meals to eat, lessons to hate, stones to throw, apples to steal, fights to fight. I take my word that by the time I was nine or ten the whole tragic episode had gone out of my head. Meeting Mary Matheson on the street, where she came but rarely, she was precisely as mysterious and precisely as uninteresting as any other grown-up. And if I saw Joshua Blake (who, pulling himself by the bootstraps out of drink and despair, had gone into Mr. Dow's law-office and grown as hard as nails)--if I saw him, I say, my only romantic thought of him was the fact that I had broken his wood-shed window, and that, with an air of sinister sagacity, he had told several boys he knew who the culprit was. (A statement, by the way, which I believed horribly for upward of eighteen months.)

I believe that we knew, in a dim sort of way, that the two were "engaged," just as we knew, vaguely, that they never got married. And that was the end of speculation. Having always been so, the phenomenon needed no more to be dwelt on than the fact that when the wind was in the east John Dyer thought he was Oliver Cromwell, or that Minister Malden did not live with his family.

John Dyer had been taken beyond the power of any planetary wind; Minister Malden (as I have told in another place) had gone back to live with his family: and I had been away to Highmarket Academy for two years, before I had sudden and moving reason to take stock of that long-buried drama.

It was three days after I had come home for the long vacation, and, being pretty well tired out with sniffing about the island like a cat returned to the old house, I sprawled at rest on the "Wreck of the Lillian" stone in the graveyard on Rigg's Dome.

It was then, as the dusk crept up from the shadow under the bluff, that I became aware of another presence among the gravestones and turned my head to peer through the barberries that hedged the stone, thinking it might be one of the girls. It was only Mary Matheson. Vaguely disappointed, I should have returned my gaze to the sea and forgotten her had it not been for two things.

One of them was her attitude. That made me keep on looking at her, and so looking at her, and having come unwittingly to a most obscurely unsettled age, I made a discovery. This was that Mary Matheson, at the remote age of thirty, had a deeper and fuller beauty than had any of the girls for whose glances I brushed my hair wet and went to midweek prayer-meeting.

I find it hard to convey the profound, revolutionary violence of this discovery. It is enough to say that, along with a sensation of pinkness, there came a feeling of obscure and unreasoning bitterness against the world.

My eyes had her there, a figure faintly rose-colored against the deepening background of the sea. She stood erect and curiously still beside a grave, her hands clenched, her eyes narrowed. In Urkey they always put up a stone for a man lost at sea; very often they went further for the comfort of their souls and mounded the outward likeness of an inward grave. Well, that was Andrew's stone and Andrew's grave. Some one in the Memorial Day procession last week had laid a wreath of lilacs under the stone. And now, wandering alone, Mary Matheson had come upon it.

I saw her bend and with a fierce gesture catch up the symbol of death and fling it behind her on the grass. Afterward, as she stood there with her breast heaving and her lips moving as if with pain, I knew I should not be where I was, watching; I knew that no casual ears of mine should hear the cry that came out of her heart:

"No, No, No! They're still trying to kill him--still trying to kill him--all of them! But they sha'n't! They sha'n't!"

I tell you it shook me and it shamed me. I thought I ought to cough or scuff my feet or something, but it seemed too late for that. Moreover the play had taken another turn that made me forget the moralities, quite, and another actor had come quietly upon the scene.

I can't say whether Joshua, seeing Mary on her way to the Dome, had followed her, or whether he had been strolling that way on his own account. He was there, at all events, watching her from beyond the grave, his head slightly inclined, his hands clasped behind him, and his feet apart on the turf. The color of dusk lent a greenish cast to his bloodless face, and the night wind, coming up free over the naked curve of the Dome and flapping the long black tails of his coat, seemed but to accentuate the dead weight of his attitude.

When a minute had gone by I heard his dry voice.

"So, Mary, you're at it again?"

"But they sha-n-t!" She seemed to take flame. "It's not right to Andrew nor me. They do it just to mock me, and I know it, and oh! I don't care, but they sha'n't, they sha'n't!"

"Mary," said Joshua, all the smoldering anger of the years coming in his voice, "Mary, I think it's time you stopped being a fool. We've all had enough of it, Mary. Andrew is dead."

She turned on him with a swift, ironical challenge.

"You say it _now_? You _know_ now? Perhaps you've just made sure; perhaps you've seen his body washed up on one of the beaches--just to-day? Or then why so tardy, Joshua? If you _knew_, why couldn't you say it in so many words ten years ago--five years ago? _Why_?"

"Because----"

"Yes, because? Because?" There was something incredibly ruthless, tiger-like, about this shadow-dwelling woman. "Say it now, Joshua; that you know of a certainty Andrew went down. I dare you again!"

Joshua said it.

"I know of a certainty Andrew went down that night."

"_How_ do you know? Did you _see him go down_? Tell me that!"

For a moment, for more than a long moment, her question hung unanswered in the air. And as, straining forward, poised, vibrant, she watched him, she saw the hard, dry mask he had made for himself through those years grow flabby and white as dough; she saw the eyes widening and the lips going loose with the memory he had never uttered.

"Yes," he cried in a loud voice. "You bring me to it, do you?" The man was actually shaking. "Yes, then, I saw Andrew go down that night. I heard him call in the dark. I saw his face on the water. I saw his hand reaching up as the wave brought him by--reaching up to me. I could almost touch it--but not quite. If you knew what the sea was that night, and the wind; how lonely, how dark! God! And here I stand and say it out loud! I couldn't reach his hand--not quite.... I've told you now, Mary, what I swore I'd never tell.... _Damn you_!"

With that curse he turned unsteadily on his heel and left her. The shadows among the gravestones down hill laid hands on his broken, shambling figure, and he became a shadow. Once the shadow stumbled. And as if that distant, awkward act had aroused Mary from a kind of lethargy, she broke forward a step, reaching out her arms.

"Joshua!" she called to him, "Joshua, Joshua, come back!"

In the last faint light from the sky where stars began to come, her face was wet with tears of pity and repentance; pity for the man who had walled himself in with that memory; repentance for the sin of her blindness.

"Joshua!" she called again, but he did not seem to hear.

It was too much for me. Feeling more shame than I can tell, and with it a new gnawing bitterness of jealousy, I sneaked out of hiding by the "Lillian" stone and down the Dome toward the moors.

"Good Grandmother!" I know I grew redder and redder as I walked. "I hope I don't have to see _her_ again--the old thing!"

But I did, and that before many minutes had elapsed. For fetching back into the village by the ice-house and the back-side track, I was almost in collision with a hurrying shade in the dark under Dow's willows. It was Mary. I shall not forget the queer moment of suspense as she peered into my face, nor the touch of her fingers on my arm, nor the sigh.

"Oh--you're--you're the Means boy."

An embarrassment, pathetic only now in memory, came upon her.

"I--I wonder----" Her confusion grew more painful and her eyes went everywhere in the dark. "You don't happen to have seen any one--any--you haven't seen Mr. Blake, have you?"

"No!" I shook off the hand that still lay, as if forgotten, on my outraged arm. "What you want of _him_? _He's_ no good!"

With that shot for parting I turned and stalked away. Behind me after a moment, I heard her cry of protest, dismal beyond words.

"Why do you say that, boy? What do you mean by that?"

Having meant nothing at all, except that I would have slain him gladly, I kept my bitter peace and held my way to the westward, leaving her to find her way and her soul in the blind, black shadows under the willow-trees.

No one who lived in Urkey Village then will forget the day it was known that Mary Matheson was going to marry Joshua Blake, at last. An isolated village is like an isolated person, placid-looking to dullness, but in reality almost idiotically emotional. More than anything else, when the news had run, it was like the camp-meeting conversion of a simple soul. First, for the "conviction of sin," there was the calling-up of all the dark, forgotten history, the whispered refurbishing of departed gossip, the ghosts of old angers. Then like the flood of Mercy, the assurance that all was well, having ended well. Everything was forgiven and forgotten, every one was to live happily ever after, and there must be a wedding.

Surely a wedding! The idea that Minister Malden should come quietly to the house and so have it done without pomp or pageantry--it is laughable to think how that notion fared at the hands of an aroused village. Flowers there were to be, processions, veils, cakes, rice, boots, all the properties dear to the heart of the Roman mob. In the meantime there was to be a vast business of runnings and stitchings, of old women beating eggs and sifting flour, of schoolgirls writing "MARY BLAKE" on forbidden walls with stolen chalk. Dear me!