Part 21

There was a general shifting along the bench, to make room for possible fray. It was a sore point with Sam Dreed that the ship chandler had that day effected a lien for labor on his ship, and the libel was nailed to the mast.

"Now they'll scandalize each other," murmured Zinie Shadd.

They were turned from that purpose only by the sudden passing at their backs of the woman in question, Caddie Sills.

Quiet reigned. The older men crossed their legs, sat far down on their spines, and narrowed their eyes. The brick wall of the Customs House, held from collapsing by a row of rusty iron stars, seemed to bulge more than its wont for the moment--its upper window, a ship's deadlight, round and expressionless as the eye of a codfish.

Cad Sills ran her eye over them deftly, as if they were the separate strings of an instrument which could afford gratification to her only when swept lightly all at one time by her tingling finger tips, or, more likely, by the intangible plectrum in her black eye.

The man she selected for her nod was Sam Dreed, however.

Peter Loud felt the walls of his heart pinch together with jealousy.

It was all in a second's dreaming. "Gape and swallow," as Zinie Shadd said, from his end of the bench. The woman passed with a supercilious turn of her head away from them.

"That's a foot-loose woman if ever there was one."

With all her gift of badinage, she was a solitary soul. The men feared no less than they admired her. They were shy of that wild courage, fearful to put so dark a mystery to the solution. The women hated her, backbit and would not make friends, because of the fatal instantaneous power she wielded to spin men's blood and pitch their souls derelict on that impassioned current. Who shall put his finger on the source of this power? There were girls upon girls with eyes as black, cheeks as like hers as fruit ripened on the same bough, hair as thick and lustrous--yet at the sound of Caddie Sills's bare footfall eyes shifted and glowed, and in the imaginations of these men the women of their choice grew pale as the ashes that fringe a fallen fire.

"She's a perilous woman," muttered the collector of the port. "Sticks in the slant of a man's eye like the shadow of sin. Ah! there he goes, like the leaves of autumn."

Samuel Dreed trod the dust of the road with a wonderful swaying of his body, denominated the Western Ocean roll. He was a mighty man, all were agreed; not a nose of wax, even for Cad Sills to twist.

"Plump she'll go in his canvas bag, along with his sea boots and his palm and needle, if she's not precious careful, with her shillyshallying," said Zinie Shadd. "I know the character of the man, from long acquaintance, and I know that what he says he'll do he'll do, and no holding off at arm's length, either, for any considerable period of time."

Such was the situation of Cad Sills. A dark, lush, ignorant, entrancing woman, for whose sake decent men stood ready to drop their principles like rags--yes, at a mere secret sign manifested in her eye, where the warmth of her blood was sometimes seen as a crimson spark alighted on black velvet. She went against the good government of souls.

Even Rackby had taken note of her once, deep as his head was in the clouds by preference and custom. It was a day in late November. No snow had fallen, and she floated past him like a cloud shadow as he plodded in the yellow road which turned east at the Preaching Tree. She passed, looked back, slashed a piece of dripping kelp through the air so close that salt drops stung his pale eyes, laughed aloud, and at the top of her laugh, broke into a wild, sweet song unfamiliar to him. It was a voice unlike the flat voices of women thereabouts--strong, sweet, sustained, throbbing with a personal sense of the passion which lurked in the warm notes.

Her foot was bare, and more shapely in consequence than if she had had a habit of wearing shoes. Its shape was the delicate shape of strength native to such a foot, and each toe left its print distinct and even in the dust. With his eye for queer details, he remembered that print and associated with it the yellow-rutted road, the rusty alders in the meadow beyond, and the pale spire of the church thrust into a November sky.

He called this to mind when on the night of the dance information came to his ear that she had sold her pearls to lift the lien on Cap'n Sam Dreed's ship, with her own hands tearing down the libel from the mast and grinding it under her heel.

No man whom she had once passed and silently interrogated could quite forget her, not even Jethro Rackby. The harbor master swayed on his oars, collected himself, and looked forward across the dimpled floor of his harbor, which in its quietude was like a lump of massy silver or rich ore, displaying here and there a spur of light, a surface sparkle. The serenity of his own soul was in part a reflection of this nightly calm, when the spruce on the bank could not be known from its fellow in the water by a man standing on his head. Moreover, to maintain this calm was the plain duty of the harbor master. For five years he had held that office by an annual vote of the town meeting. With his title went authority to say where were the harbor lines, to order the removal of hulks, to provide for keeping open a channel through winter ice--in a word, to keep the peace. This peace was of his own substance.

It was rudely shattered. On the night following the dance Cad Sills put herself in his path for the second time and this time she gave him short shrift. He was pushing forward, near sundown, to take the impulse of an eddy at the edge of Pull-an'-be-Damned when he saw that predatory, songful woman balanced knee-deep in rushing water, her arms tossing.

"She's drowning herself after her quarrel with Sam Dreed," was his first thought. He had just heard a fine tale of that quarrel. The truth was not quite so bold. She had been caught by the tide, which, first peering over the rim of that extended flat, had then shot forth a frothy tongue, and in a twinkling lapped her up.

Jethro presently brought up the webs of his two thumbs hard at her armpits, and took her into his boat, dripping.

"She's not so plump as she was ashore," he said to himself with a vague astonishment. She was as lean as a man at the hips, and finned away like a mermaid, as became a daughter of the Old Roke.

"Steady now, my girl--. Heave and away."

There they stood confronting each other. Enraptured, life given into her hand again, Cad Sills flung her arms about his neck and kissed him--a moist, full-budded, passionate, and salty kiss. Even on the edge of doom, it was plain, she would not be able to modulate, tone, or contain these kisses, each of which launched a fiery barb into the recipient's bosom.

The little fisherman had not known what elemental thing was in a kiss before. He bit his lip and fell back slowly. Then, after a second's vain reflection, he seized the butts of his oars, which had begun to knock together. Caddie Sills sank across a thwart and shivered a little to mark the crowding together of white horses at the very place where she had stood. Contrary currents caused the tide to horse in strongly over Pull-an'-be-Damned.

"What a ninny!" she whispered. "Was I sick with love, I wonder?"

The harbor master answered with the motion of his oars.

She glanced at him shrewdly, then struck her hands together at her breast, which she caused to rise and fall stormily. She was, in fact, a storm petrel in the guise of woman.

"You have saved my life," she cried out, "when not another man in all this world would have lifted so much as his little finger. Do what you will with me after this. Let me be your slave, your dog--. I am a lost woman if you will not take pity on me."

Rackby's heart came into his throat with the slow surge of a sculpin on a hook.

"Nothing--. Nothing at all. Nothing in the world. I happened along--. Just a happen so."

The girl stood up, looked at him long and long, cried, "Thank you for nothing, then, Mr. Happen-so," and from the humility of gratitude she went to the extreme of impudence, and laughed in his face--a ringing, brazen laugh, with the wild sweetness in it which he had noted in the song she sang on that November hillside.

"You're a caution, little man, you're a caution," she said, slanting her lashes. "You certainly are. I've heard of you. Yes, I have, only this morning. I'm a solitary like yourself. See here. You and I could set the world on fire if we joined hands. Do you know that?"

The little man was struck dumb at his oars for very fear of the boldness of her advance. He recognized this for an original and fearsome, not to say delectable, vein of talk. She came on like the sea itself, impetuous and all-embracing. Unfathomed, too. Could fancy itself construct a woman so, pat to his hand?

"Is it true that you despise women as they say?" she whispered. She breathed close, and electrified the tip of his ear with a tendril of hair. He saw that she wore coral now, in place of the pearls. But her lips were redder than the coral. He raised his head.

"Yesterday morning you sold pearls for the benefit of Sam Dreed," he said, in dull tones. "And here you are with your brimstone fairly in my boat."

He looked at her as if the Old Roke himself had clambered into the boat, with his spell of doom.

"I am not afraid of helping honest men in trouble that I know of," said Cad Sills, sucking in her lower lip. "But do you throw that up to me?"

Jethro felt the wickedness of his position like a breath of fire fanning his cheek. Perilously tempted, he sagged back on the oars without a word.

"Soho! you're setting me ashore," said that dark woman, laughing. "I don't wear very well in the eye and that's a plain conclusion."

She laid a finger to her breast, and her eye mocked him. This brazen hardness put him from his half-formed purpose. He addressed himself to the oars, and the dory grated on the shore.

"Good-bye, then, little man," she said, springing past him.

But even now she lingered and looked back, biting the coral and letting it fall, intimating that a word, a whispered syllable, might lay her low.

He sat like a man crushed to earth. When he raised his head she was gone.

Was this the voice from the seaward side of Meteor? True, the sea had yielded this wild being up, but did she speak with the sea's voice? She had at least the sea's inconstancy, the sea's abandonment.

Her words were hot and heavy in little Rackby's heart. Serene harbor master that he was, the unearthly quiet of his harbor was an affront upon him in his present mood. Now that she was lost to him, he could not, by any makeshift of reason, be rid of the impulse that had come upon him to jump fairly out of his own skin in an effort to recapture that tormenting woman--.

He drifted down upon Meteor Island, bowed and self-reproachful, like a spirit approaching the confines of the dead. He stepped ashore and passed the painter of his dory through its ring.

On the crest of the island, at the very spot where, scientists averred, a meteorite had fallen in some prehistoric age, there stood a thick grove, chiefly of hemlock trees. Here on this night he paused. A strange inertness filled all nature. Not a whisper from the branches overhead, not a rustle from the dark mold underfoot. Moonlight in one place flecked the motionless leaves of an alder. Trunk and twigs were quite dissolved in darkness--nothing but the silver pattern of the leaves was shown in random sprays. He felt for an instant disembodied, like these leaves--as if, taking one step too many, he had floated out of his own body and might not return.

"Bear and forbear," he thought. "You wouldn't have stirred, let her say what she would," his heart whispered to the silver leaves.

But he could not forget that wild glance, the wet hand clinging to his wrist, the laugh repeated like an echo from the symphony of that November hillside. He reproached himself withal. What was known of Cad Sills? Little known, and nothing cared to be known. A waif, pursuing him invisibly with a twinkle or flare from her passionate eyes. She was the daughter of a sea captain by his fifth wife. He had escaped the other four. They had died or been deserted in foreign ports, but this one he could not escape. Tradition had it that he lost the figurehead from his ship on the nuptial voyage, attributed this disaster to his bride, and so left her at Rosario, only to find her, after all sail was set, in the forechains, at the very stem of his ship, half drowned, her arms outstretched, a living figurehead. She had swum after him. She outlived him, too, and died in giving birth to Cad Sills, whose blood had thus a trace of sea water--.

He entered his house. In his domestic arrangements he was the very figure of a bachelor. His slimsy silver spoon, dented with toothmarks of an ancestor who had died in a delirium, was laid evenly by his plate. The hand lamps on the shelf wore speckled brown-paper bags inverted over their chimneys. A portrait of a man playing the violin hung out, in massive gilt, over the table, like a ship's figurehead projecting over a wharf's end. His red couch bore northeast and southwest, so that he might not lose good sleep by opposing his body to the flow of magnetic currents.

On this night he drew out from a hole in the upholstery of the couch a bag of stenciled canvas, which chinked. It was full of money, in gold and silver pieces. He counted it, and sat thoughtful. Later he went out of the house and stood looking at the sea as if for a sign. But the sea gave him no sign; and on that night at least had no voice.

It was three days before he came up with Cad Sills again. Then he spied her at nightfall, reclining under the crab-apple tree at Hannan's Landing.

The little man came close enough to tread on her shadow, cleared his throat, and almost shouted:

"Did you mean what you said? Did you mean what you said, girl?"

She laughed and threw the core of an apple in his direction.

"I did when I said it, Mr. Happen-so. I did when I said it."

"I'm ready--. I'm ready now. We'll be married tomorrow, if you don't mind."

"But will I sell my cabbages twice, I wonder? I've had a change of heart since, if I must tell you."

"Surely not in this short space of time," Rackby gasped, dismayed.

A light throbbed in her eye. "Well, perhaps I haven't."

The storm petrel hovered high, swooped close, her lips parted. Her teeth shone with a native luster, as if she had lived on roots and tough things all her life. Again little Rackby felt that glow of health and hardness in her person, as if one of the cynical and beautiful immortals of the Greeks confronted him. He was heartily afraid of her mystifying power of enchantment, which seemed to betray him to greater lengths than he had dreamed. Even now perhaps all was lost.

"I will meet you tonight, then--at the top of the hill. See? By the Preaching Tree."

She nodded her head toward the church corner. "At eight sharp, by the west face of the clock. And, mind you, Mr. Man, not one jot late or early."

Although he heard the quick fall of her feet in the dust grow fainter, it pleased him not to turn. There was a prickling above his heart and at the cords of his throat. The harbor was as blue as a map suddenly unrolled at his feet. Clouds with a purple warp were massing in the east.

The harbor master stared hard at the low ridge of an outlying island where a cow had been put to pasture. The hillocky back of that lone ruminant grew black as ink in the glow of sunset. The creature exhibited a strange fixity of outline, as if it had been a chance configuration of rocks. Rackby in due time felt a flaming impatience shoot upward from his heels. Water soughed and chuckled at the foot of the crab-apple tree, but these eager little voices could no longer soothe or even detain him with their familiar assurances.

He jumped up and stared hard at the west face of the clock, whose gilt hands were still discernible in the fading light. It was five minutes of eight.

When he slipped into the shadow of the Preaching Tree it had grown dark. Fitful lightning flashed. In the meadow fireflies were thick. They made him think of the eager beating of many fiery little hearts, exposed by gloom, lost again in that opalescent glare on the horizon against which the ragged leaves of elm and maple were hung like blobs of ink or swarms of bees.

He breathed fast; he heard mysterious fluted calls. A victim of torturing uncertainty, he strained his ear for that swift footfall. Suddenly he felt her come upon him from behind, buoyant, like a warm wave, and press firm hands over his eyelids. Her hair stung his cheek like wire.

"Guess three times."

Rackby felt the strong beat of that adventurous heart like drums of conquest. He crushed her in his arms until she all but cried out. There was nothing he could say. Her breath carried the keen scent of crushed checkerberry plums. She had been nibbling at tender pippins by the way, like a wild thing.

The harbor master remembered later that he seemed to have twice the number of senses appointed to mortals in that hour. A heavy fragrance fell through the dusk out of the thick of the horse-chestnut tree. A load of hay went by, the rack creaking, the driver sunk well out of sight. He heard the dreaming note of the tree toad; frogs croaked in the lush meadow, water babbled under the crazy wooden sidewalk.--The meadow was one vast pulse of fireflies. He felt this industrious flame enter his own wrists.

Then the birches over the way threshed about in a gust of wind. Almost at once rain fell in heavy drops; blinds banged to and fro, a strong smell of dust was in his nostrils, beat up from the road by driving rain.

The girl first put the palm of her hand hard against his cheek, then yielded, with a pliant and surprising motion of the whole body. Her eyes were full of a strange, bright wickedness. Like torches they seemed to cast a crimson light on the already glowing cheek.

Fascinated by this thought, Rackby bent closer. The tented leaves of the horse-chestnut did not stir. Surely the dusky cheek had actually a touch of crimson in the gloom.

This effect, far from being an illusion was produced by a lantern in the fist of a man swinging toward them with vast strides. And now the clock, obeying its north face, struck eight.

Before the last stroke had sounded the girl was made aware of the betraying light. She whirled out of Rackby's arms and ran toward Sam Dreed. The big viking stood with his feet planted well apart, and a mistrustful finger in his beard.

"Touch and go!" cried Caddie Sills, falling on his neck. "Do we go at the top of the tide, mister?"

"What hellion is that under the trees?" he boomed at her, striking the arm down savagely.

"You will laugh when you see," said Cad Sills, wrung with pain, but returning to him on the instant.

"On the wrong side of my face, maybe."

"Can't you see? It's the little harbor master."

"Ah! and standing in the same piece of dark with you, my girl."

Cad Sills laughed wildly. "Did ever I look for more thanks than this from any mortal man? Then I'm not disappointed. But let me ask you, have you taken your ship inside the island to catch the tide?"

"Yes."

"Oh, you have. And would you have done that with the harbor master looking on? Hauled short across the harbor lines? Maybe you think I have a whole chest of pearls at your beck and call, Sam Dreed. Oh, what vexation! Here I hold the little man blindfolded by my wiles--and this is my thanks!"

The voice was tearful with self-pity.

"Is that so, my puss?" roared the seaman, melted in a flash. He swung the girl by the waist with his free arm. "You _have_ got just enough natural impudence for the tall water and no mistake. Come along."

"Wait!" cried Jethro Rackby. He stepped forward. He felt the first of many wild pangs in thus subjecting himself to last insult. "Where are you going?"

The words had the pitiful vacuity of a detaining question. For what should it matter to Jethro where she went, if she went in company with Sam Dreed?

"How can I tell you that, little man?" Cad Sills flung over her shoulder at him. "The sea is wide and uncertain."

Her full cheek, with its emphatic curve, was almost gaunt in the moment when she fixed her eyes on the wolfish face of that tousle-headed giant who encircled her. Her shoulder blades were pinched back; the line of the marvelous full throat lengthened; she devoured the man with a vehemence of love, brief and fierce as the summer lightning which played below the dark horizon.

She was gone, planting that aerial foot willfully in the dust. Raindrops ticked from one to another of the broad, green leaves over the harbor master's head. Water might be heard frothing in a nearby cistern.

Suddenly the moon glittered on the parson's birch-wood pile, and slanted a beam under the Preaching Tree. Sunk in the thick dust which the rain had slightly stippled in slow droppings, he saw the tender prints of a bare foot and the cruel tracks of the seaman's great, square-toed boots pointing together toward the sea.

He raised his eyes only with a profound effort. They encountered a blackboard affixed to the fat trunk of the Preaching Tree, on which from day to day the parson wrote the text for its preachments in colored chalk. The moon was full upon it, and Rackby saw in crimson lettering the words, "Woman, hath no man damned thee?" The rest of the text he had rubbed out with his own shoulders in turning to take the girl into his arms.