Chapter XII: Introduction (10)

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.

"I damn ye!" he cried, raising his arms wildly. "Yes, by the Lord, I damn ye up and down. May you burn as I burn, where the worm dieth not, and the fires are not quenched."

So saying, he set his foot down deliberately on the first of the light footprints she had made in springing from his side--as if he might as easily as that blot out the memory of his enslavement.

Thereafter the Customs House twitted him, as if it knew the full extent of his shame. Zinie Shadd called after him to know if he had heard that voice from the sea yet, in his comings and goings.

"Peter Loud was not so easy hung by the heels," that aged loiterer affirmed, "shipping as he did along with the lady herself, as bo's'n for Cap'n Sam Dreed."

Jethro Rackby took to drink somewhat, to drown these utterances, or perhaps to quench some stinging thirst within him which he knew not to be of the soul.

When certain of the elders asked him why he did not cut the drink and take a decent wife, he laughed like a demon, and cried out:

"What's that but to swap the devil for a witch?"

Others he met with a counter question:

"Do you think I will tie a knot with my tongue that I can't untie with my teeth?"

So he sat by himself at the back windows of a water-front saloon, and when he caught a glimpse of the water shining there low in its channels he would shut his lips tight.--Who could have thought that it would be the sea itself to throw in his path the woman who had set this blistering agony in his soul? There it lay like rolled glass; the black piles under the footbridge were prolonged to twice their length by their own shadows, so that the bridge seemed lifted enormously high out of water. Beyond the bridge the seine pockets of the mackerel men hung on the shrouds like black cobwebs, and the ships had a blighting look of funeral ships.--

He had mistrusted the sea. It was life; it was death; flow, slack, and ebb--and his pulse followed it.

Officials of the Customs House could testify that for better than a year, if he mentioned women at all, it was in a tone to convey that his fingers had been sorely burned in that flame and smarted still.

The second autumn, from that moment under the Preaching Tree, found him of the same opinion still. He trod the dust a very phantom, while little leaves of cardinal red spun past his nose like the ebbing heart's blood of full-bodied summer. The long leaves of the sumach, too, were like guilty fingers dipped in blood. But the little man paid no heed to the analogies which the seasons presented to his conscience in their dying. Though he thought often of his curse, he had not lifted it. But when he saw a cluster of checkerberry plums in spring gleam withered red against gray moss, on some stony upland, he stood still and pondered.

Then, on a night when the fall wind was at its mightiest, and shook the house on Meteor Island as if clods of turf had been hurled against it, he took down his Bible from its stand. At the first page to which he turned, his eye rested on the words, "Woman, hath no man damned thee?"

He bent close, his hand shook, and his blunt finger traced the remainder of that text which he and Cad Sills together had unwittingly erased from the Preaching Tree.

"No man, Lord."--"Neither do I damn thee: go, and sin no more."

He left the Bible standing open and ran out-of-doors.

The hemlock grove confronted him a mass of solid green. Night was coming on, as if with an ague, in a succession of coppery cold squalls which had not yet overtaken the dying west. In that quarter the sky was like a vast porch of crimson woodbine.

When this had sunk, night gave a forlorn and indistinguishable look to everything. A spark of ruddy light glowed deep in the valley. The rocking outlines of the hills were lost in rushing darkness. At his back sounded the pathetic clatter of a dead spruce against its living neighbor, bespeaking the deviltry of woodland demons.--It was the hour which makes all that man can do seem as nothing in the mournful darkness, causing his works to vanish and be as if they had not been.

At this hour the heart of man may be powerfully stirred, by an anguish, a prayer, or perhaps--a fragrance.

The harbor master, uttering a brief cry, dropped to his knees and remained mute, his arms extended toward the sea in a gesture of reconcilement.

On that night the _Sally Lunn_, Cap'n Sam Dreed, was wrecked on the sands of Pull-an'-be-Damned.

Rackby, who had fallen into a deep sleep, lying northeast and southwest, was awakened by a hand smiting his door in, and a wailing outside of the Old Roke busy with his agonies. In a second his room was full of crowding seamen, at their head Peter Loud, bearing in his arms the dripping form of Caddie Sills. He laid her gently on the couch.

"Where did you break up?" whispered Rackby. He trembled like a leaf.

"Pull-an'-be-Damned," said Deep-water Peter. "The Cap'n's gone. He didn't come away. Men can say what they like of Sam Dreed; he wouldn't come into the boat. I'll tell all the world that."

The crew of the wrecked ship stood heaving and glittering in their oils, plucking their beards with a sense of trespass, hearing the steeple clock tick, and water drum on the worn floor.

"All you men clear out," said Caddie Sills, faintly. "Leave me here with Jethro Rackby."

They set themselves in motion, pushing one against the other with a rasp and shriek of oilskins--and Peter Loud last of all.

The harbor master, not knowing what to say, took a step away from her, came back, and, looking into her pale face, cried out, horror-struck, "I damned ye." He dropped on his knees. "Poor girl! I damned ye out and out."

"Hold your horses, Mr. Happen-so," said Cad Sills. "There's no harm in that. I was damned and basted good and brown before you ever took me across your little checkered apron."

She looked at him almost wistfully, as if she had need of him. With her wet hair uncoiling to the floor, she looked as if she had served, herself, for a fateful living figurehead, like her mother before her. The bit of coral was still slung round her throat. The harbor master recalled with what a world of meaning she had caught it between her teeth on the night of his rescue--the eyes with a half-wistful light as now.

"Come," she said, "Harbor Master. I wasn't good to you, that's true; but still you have done me a wrong in your turn, you say?"

"I hope God will forgive me," said the harbor master.

"No doubt of that, little man. But maybe you would feel none the worse for doing me a favor, feeling as you do."

"Yes, yes."

Her hand sought his. "You see me--how I am. I shall not survive my child, for my mother did not before me. Listen. You are town clerk. You write the names of the new born on a sheet of ruled paper and that is their name?"

Rackby nodded.

"So much I knew--Come. How would it be if you gave my child your name--Rackby? Don't say no to me. Say you will. Just the scratching of a pen, and what a deal of hardship she'll be saved not to be known as Cad Sills over again."

Her hand tightened on his wrist. Recollecting how they had watched the tide horse over Pull-an'-be-Damned thus, he said, eagerly, "Yes, yes, if so be 'tis a she," thinking nothing of the consequences of his promise.

"Now I can go happy," murmured Cad Sills.

"Where will you go?" said the harbor master, timorously, feeling that she was whirled out of his grasp a second time.

"How should I know?" lisped Caddie Sills, with a remembering smile. "The sea is wide and uncertain, little man."

The door opened again. A woman appeared and little Rackby was thrust out among the able seamen.

Three hours later he came and looked down on Cad Sills again. Rain still beat on the black windows. Her lips were parted, as if she were only weary and asleep. But in one glance he saw that she had no need to lie northeast and southwest to make certain of unbroken sleep.

To the child born at the height of the storm the harbor master gave a name, his own--Rackby. He was town clerk, and he gave her this name when he came to register her birth on the broad paper furnished by the government. And for a first name, Day, as coming after that long night of his soul, perhaps.

When this was known, he was fined by the government two hundred dollars. Such is the provision in the statutes, in order that there may be no compromise with the effects of sin.

The harbor master did not regret. He reckoned his life anew from that night when he sat in the dusk with the broad paper before him containing the names of those newly born.

So the years passed, and Day Rackby lived ashore with her adoptive father. When she got big enough they went by themselves and reopened the house on Meteor Island.

The man was still master of the harbor, but he could not pretend that his authority extended to the sea beyond. There he lost himself in speculation, sometimes wondering if Deep-water Peter had found a thing answering his quest. But Peter did not return to satisfy him on this point.

The harbor master was content to believe that he had erred on the side of the flesh, and that the sea, a jealous mistress, had swept him into the hearing of the gods, who were laughing at him.

As for the child of Cad Sills, people who did not know her often said that her eyes were speaking eyes. Well if it were so, since this voice in the eyes was all the voice she had. She could neither speak nor hear from birth. It was as if kind nature had sealed her ears against those seductive whisperings which--so the gossips said--had been the ruination of her mother.

As she grew older, they said behind their hands that blood would tell, in spite of all. Then, when they saw the girl skipping along the shore with kelp in her hands they said, mistrustfully, that she was "marked" for the sea, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

"She hears well enough, when the sea speaks," Zinie Shadd averred. He had caught her listening in a shell with an intent expression.

"She will turn out to be a chip of the old block," said Zinie Shadd's wife, "or I shall never live to see the back of my neck."

Jethro Rackby heard nothing of such prophecy. He lived at home. Here in his estimation was a being without guile, in whose innocence he might rejoice. His forethought was great and pathetic. He took care that she should learn to caress him with her finger tips alone. He remembered the fatal touch of Cad Sills's kiss at Pull-an'-be-Damned, which had as good as drawn the soul out of his body in a silver thread and tied it in a knot.

Once, too, he had dreamed of waking cold in the middle of the night and finding just a spark on the ashes of his hearth. This he nursed to flame; the flame sprang up waist-high, hot and yellow. Fearful, he beat it down to a spark again. But then again he was cold. He puffed at this spark, shivering; the flame grew, and this time, with all he could do, it shot up into the rafters of his house and devoured it.--

So it was that the passion of Cad Sills lived with him still.

He taught the child her letters with blue shells, and later to take the motion of his lips for words. She waylaid him everywhere--on the rocks, on the sands, in the depths of the hemlock grove, on tiny antlers of gray caribou moss, with straggling little messages and admonishings of love. Her apron pocket was never without its quota of these tiny shells of brightest peacock blue. They trailed everywhere. He ground them under heel at the threshold of his house. From long association they came to stand for so many inquisitive little voices in themselves, beseeching, questioning, defying.

But for his part, he grew to have a curious belief, even when her head was well above his shoulder, that the strong arch of her bosom must ring out with wild sweet song one day, like that which he had heard on the November hillside, when Caddie Sills had run past him at the Preaching Tree. This voice of Day's was like the voice sleeping in the great bronze horn hanging in a rack, which his father had used to call the hands to dinner. A little wind meant no sound, but a great effort, summoning all the breath in the body, made the brazen throat ring out like a viking's horn, wild and sweet.

So with Day, if an occasion might be great enough to call it forth.

"He always was a notional little man," the women said, on hearing this. The old bachelor was losing his wits. Such doctrine as he held made him out not one whit better off than Zinie Shadd, who averred that the heart of man was but a pendulum swaying in his bosom--though how it still moved when he stood on his head was more than even Zinie Shadd could fathom, to be sure.

"It's the voice of conscience he's thinking of, to my judgment," said one. "That girl is deafer than a haddock and dumb as the stone."

Untouched by gossip, the harbor master felt with pride that his jewel among women was safe, and that here, within four humble walls, he treasured up a being literally without guile, one who grew straight and white as a birch sapling. "Pavilioned in splendor" were the words descriptive of her which he had heard thunderously hymned in church. The hair heavy on her brow was of the red gold of October.

If they might be said to be shipmates sailing the same waters, they yet differed in the direction of their gaze. The harbor master fixed his eyes upon the harbor; but little Day turned hers oftenest upon the blue sea itself, whose mysterious inquietude he had turned from in dismay.

True, the harbor was not without its fascination for her. Leaning over the side of his dory, the sea girl would shiver with delight to descry those dismal forests over which they sailed, dark and dizzying masses full of wavering black holes, through which sometimes a blunt-nosed bronze fish sank like a bolt, and again where sting ray darted, and jellyfish palpitated with that wavering of fringe which produced the faintest of turmoil at the surface of the water.

This would be at the twilight hour when warm airs alternated with cold, like hopes with despairs. Sparbuoys of silver gray were duplicated in the water, wrinkled like a snout at the least ripple from the oars. Boats at anchor seemed twice their real size by reason of their dark shadows made one with them. One by one the yellow riding lights were hung, far in. They shone like new-minted coins; the harbor was itself a purse of black velvet, to which the harbor master held the strings. The quiet--the immortal quiet--operated to restore his soul. But at such times Day would put the tips of her fingers mysteriously to her incarnadined dumb lips and appear to hearken on the seaward side. If a willful light came sometimes in her eyes he did not see it.

But even on the seaward side there would not be heard, on such nights, the slightest sound to break the quiet, unless that of little fish jumping playfully in the violet light, and sending out great circles to shimmer toward the horizon.

So it drew on toward Day Rackby's eighteenth birthday.

One morning in October they set out from Meteor for the village. A cool wind surged through the sparkling brown oak leaves of the oaks at Hannan's Landing.

"They die as the old die," reflected Jethro Rackby, "gnarled, withered, still hanging on when they are all but sapless."

Despite the melancholy thought, his vision was gladdened by a magic clarity extending over all the heavens, and even to the source of the reviving winds. The sea was blown clear of ships. In the harbor a few still sat like seabirds drying plumage. Against the explosive whiteness of wind clouds, their sails looked like wrinkled parchment, or yellowing Egyptian cloth; the patches were mysterious hieroglyphs.

Day sat sleepily in the stern of the dory, her shoulders pinched back, her heavy braid overside and just failing the water, her eyes on the sway of cockles in the bottom of the boat.

Rackby puckered his face, when the square bell tower of the church, white as chalk, came into view, dazzling against the somber green upland. The red crown of a maple showed as if a great spoke of the rising sun had passed across that field and touched the tree to fire with its brilliant heat.

So he had stood--so he had been touched. His heart beat fast, and now he stood under the Preaching Tree again, and drew a whiff of warm hay, clover-spiced, as it went creaking past, a square-topped load, swishing and dropping fragrant tufts.--This odor haunted him, as if delights forgotten, only dreamed, or enjoyed in other lives, had drifted past him.--Then the vivid touch of Cad Sills's lips.

He glanced up, and at once his oars stumbled, and he nearly dropped them in his fright. For the fraction of a second he had, it seemed, surprised Cad Sills herself looking at him steadily out of those blue, half-shut lazy eyes of his scrupulously guarded foster child. The flesh cringed on his body. Was she lurking there still? Certainly he had felt again, in that flash, the kiss, the warm tumult of her body, the fingers dove-tailed across his eyes; and even seen the scented hay draw past him, toppling and quivering.

He stared more closely at the girl. She looked nothing like the wild mother. There was no hint of Cad Sills in that golden beauty unless, perhaps, in a certain charming bluntness of sculpturing at the very tip of her nose, a deft touch. Nevertheless, some invisible fury had beat him about the head with her wings there in the bright sunshine.

Disquieted, he resumed the oars. They had drifted close to the bank, and a shower of maple leaves, waxen red, all but fell into the boat.

"These die as the young die," thought the harbor master, sadly. "They delight to go, these adventurers, swooping down at a breath. They are not afraid of the mystery of mold."

His glance returned to the wandlike form of his daughter, whose eyes now opened upon his archly.

"So she would adventure death," he reflected. "Almost at as light a whisper from the powers of darkness, too."

They were no sooner ashore than the girl tugged at his hand to stay him. The jeweler's glass front had intrigued her eye, for there, displayed against canary plush, was a string of pearls, like winter moons for size and luster. Her speaking eye flashed on them and her slim fingers twisted and untwisted at her back. She lifted her head and with her forefinger traced a pleading circle round her throat.

A dark cloud came over Rackby's features. These were the pearls, he knew at once, which Caddie Sills had sold in the interest of Cap'n Dreed so long ago. They were a luckless purchase on the part of the jeweler. All the women were agreed that such pearls had bad luck somewhere on the string, and no one had been found to buy.

"Why does he display them at this time of all times, in the face and eyes of everybody?" thought the harbor master.

A laugh sounded behind him. It was Deep-water Peter, holding a gun in one hand, and a dead sheldrake in the other. The red wall of the Customs House bulged over him.

"Ah, there, Jethro!" he said. "Have you married the sea at last and taken a mermaid home to live?"

"This is my daughter, if you please," said Jethro Rackby. An ugly glint was in his usually gentle eye, but he did not refuse the outstretched hand. "You have prospered seemingly."

"Oh, I have enough to carry me through," said Peter. "I picked up a trifle here, and a trifle there, and a leetle pinch from nowhere, just to salt it down. And so all this time you've been harbor master here?"

His tone was between contempt and tolerance, as befitted the character formed in a harder school, and the harbor master was bitterly silent.

Day had turned from the jewels and was coming toward her father. When she saw the strange man beside him she stopped short and averted her face, not before observing that Rackby might have passed for Peter's father.

"Not so shy--not so shy," murmured Deep-water Peter, as if she had been a wild filly coming up to his hand.

"She cannot hear you," Rackby interposed. The gleam of triumph in his eye was plain.

"Can't hear?"

"Neither speak nor hear."

Peter Loud turned toward the girl again--and this time her blue eye met his, and a spark was struck, not dying out instantly, such a spark as might linger on the surface of a flint struck by steel.

Was it a certain trick of movement, or only the quickened current of his blood that made Deep-water Peter know the truth?

"This is strange," he said.

That wind-blown voice of his, with its deepwater melodiousness, had dropped to a whisper.

"Even providential," the harbor master returned, and his eye glittered.

Peter would have said something to that, but Rackby, with a stern hand at his daughter's elbow, passed out of hearing.

Peter Loud was promptly taken in the coils of that voiceless beauty whose speaking eye had met his so squarely. The mother had played him false, as she had Jethro--but with Peter these affairs were easier forgotten.

Within the week, as he was striding over the bare flats of Pull-an'-be-Damned, he saw the flash of something white inside a weir. The sun was low and dazzled him. He came close and saw that this was Rackby's daughter. She had slipped into the weir to tantalize a crab with the sight of her wriggling toes and so had stepped on a sharp shell and cut her foot to the bone.

Peter cried amazedly. The shadow of the weir net on her face and body trembled, but she uttered no slightest sound. It was as if some wild swan had fallen from the azure.

In falling she had hurt her leg and could not walk. Peter tore the sleeves from her arms and bound the foot, then bent eagerly and lifted her out of the weir.

Immediately she hid her cheek in his coat, shivered, set her damp lips with their flavor of sweet salt, full against his.

Deep-water Peter held her tighter yet. How could he know that here, on Pull-an'-be-Damned, within a biscuit's toss of the weirs, Cad Sills had served the same fare to Rackby. He turned and ran, holding her close, and the tide hissed at his heels like a serpent.

The harbor master, lately returned from evening inspection of the harbor, heard the rattle of oars under his wharf, and in no great while he saw Peter advancing with Day limp in his arms.

The sailor brushed past him into the kitchen, and laid the girl down, as he had laid her mother, northeast and southwest. Rackby at his side muttered:

"How come you here like this? How come you?"

A fearful misgiving caused him to drop to his knees. The girl opened her eyes; a new brilliance danced there. With a shiver, the harbor master perceived those signs of a fire got beyond control which had consumed the mother.

"She has cut her foot, friend Rackby," said Peter. "I took the liberty to bring her here--so."

Wrath seized the little man. "Thank you for nothing, Peter Loud!" he cried, and these again were the very words Cad Sills had hurled at him when he had saved her life at Pull-an'-be-Damned.

"That's as you say," said Deep-water Peter.

"You have done your worst now," said Jethro. "If I find you here again I will shoot you down like a dog."

Peter laughed very bitterly. "You have got what is yours, Harbor Master," he said, "and it takes two to make a quarrel."

But as he was going through the door he looked back. The girl unclosed her eyes, and a light played out of them that followed him into the dark and streamed across the heavens like the meteorite that had once fallen on Meteor Island.

Peter had taken a wreath of fire to his heart. The girl attended him like something in the corner of his eye. Times past count, he plied his oars among the cross currents to the westward of that island, hoping to catch a glimpse of his siren on the crags.

Sometimes for long moments he lay on his oars, hearing the blue tide with a ceaseless motion heave and swirl and gutter all round its rocky border, and the serpents' hiss come from some Medusa's head of trailing weed uttered in venomous warning. Under flying moons the shaggy hemlock grove was like a bearskin thrown over the white and leprous nakedness of stony flanks. At the approach of storm the shadows stealing forth from that sullen, bowbacked ridge were blue-filmed, like the languid veil which may be seen to hang before blue, tear-dimmed eyes.

Deep-water Peter felt from the first that he could not dwell for long on the mysteries of that island without meeting little Rackby's mad challenge. Insensibly he drew near--and at last set foot on its shores again. Late on a clear afternoon he landed in the very lee of the island, at a point where the stone rampart was fifty feet in height, white as a bone, and pitted like a mass of grout. This cliff was split from top to bottom, perhaps by frosts, perhaps by the fall of the buried meteor. A little cove lay at the base of this crevasse, and here a bed of whitest sand had sifted in, rimmed by a great heap of well-sanded, bright-blue shells of every size and shape. This was the storehouse from which Day Rackby drew her speaking shells.

He looped the painter of his dory under a stone and ascended the rock. His heart was in his throat. All the world hitherto had not proffered him such choice adventure, if he had read the signs aright. As if directed by the intuition of his heart, he slipped into the shadows of the grove. Fragrance was broadcast there, the clean fragrance of nature at her most alone. Crows whirred overhead; their hoarse plaint, with its hint of desolation, made a kind of emptiness in the wood, and he went on, step by step, as in a dream, wrapt, expectant. Was she here? Could Rackby's will detain her here, a presence so swift, mischievous, and aerial? Such a spirit could not be held in the hollow of a man's hand. He remembered how in his youth a man had tried to keep wild foxes on this same island, for breeding purposes, but they had whisked their brushes in his face and swum ashore.

The green dusk was multiplied many times now by tiny spruces, no thicker than a man's thumb, which grew up in racks and created a dense blackness, its edges pierced by quivering shafts of the sun, some of which, as if by special providence, fell between all the outer saplings, and struck far in. A certain dream sallowness was manifested in that sunlit glimpse. The air was quiet. Minutest things seemed to marshal themselves as if alone and unobserved, so that it was strange to spy them out.

"She is not here," he thought. His footfall was nothing on the soft mold. Portly trunks of the hemlocks began to bar his way. The thick shade entreated secrecy; he stood still, and saw his dryad, a green apparition, kneeling at the foot of a beech tree, and looking down. In the stillness, which absorbed all but the beating of his heart, he heard the dry tick, tick of a beech leaf falling. Those that still clung to the sleek upper boughs were no more than a delicate yellow cloud or glowing autumnal atmosphere suffusing the black bole of the tree with a light of pure enchantment. He was surprised that anything so vaporous and colorful should come from the same sap that circulated through the bark and body of the thick tree itself. But then he reflected that, after all, the crown and flame of Sam Dreed's life was Day Rackby.

Had she, perhaps, descended from that yellow cloud above her? Deep-water Peter had a moment of that speechless joy which comes when all the doors in the house of vision are flung open at one time.

His feet sank unheeded in a patch of mold. He saw now that her eye was on the silent welling of a spring into a sunken barrel. She had one hand curled about the rim. The arm was of touching whiteness against that cold, black round, which faithfully reflected the silver sheen of the flesh on its under parts. Red and yellow leaves, crimped and curled, sat or drifted to her breath in the pool, as if they had been gaudy little swans.

Suddenly the sun sent a pale shaft, tinctured with lustrous green, through the hemlock shades. This shaft of light moved over the forest floor, grew ruddy, spied out a secret sparkle hidden in a fallen leaf, shone on twisting threads of gossamer-like lines of running silver on which the gloom was threaded, and, last of all, blazing in the face of that fascinating dryad, caused her to draw back.

Peter, as mute as she, stretched out his arms. She darted past him in a flash, putting her finger to her lips and looking back. The light through the tiny spruces dappled her body; she stopped as if shot; he came forward, humble and adoring, thinking to crush into this moment, within these arms, all that mortal beauty, the _ignis fatuus_ of romance.

His lips were parted. He seemed now to have her with her back against a solid wall of rock outcropping, green-starred; but next instant she had slipped into a cleft where his big shoulders would not go. Her eyes shone like crystals in that inviting darkness.

"What can I do for you?" said Peter, voicelessly.

Day Rackby pinched her shoulders back, leaned forward, and drew a mischievous finger round her throat.

* * * * *

On that night Jethro stole more than one look at the girl while she was getting supper. Of late, when she came near him, she adopted a beloved-old-fool style of treatment which was new to him.

She was more a woman than formerly, perhaps. He did not understand her whimsies. But still they had talked kindly to each other with their eyes. They communed in mysterious ways--by looks, by slight pressures, by the innumerable intuitions which had grown up, coral-wise, from the depths of silence.

But this intercourse was founded upon sympathy. That once gone, she became unfathomable and lost to him, as much so as if visible bonds had been severed.--

A certain terror possessed him at the waywardness she manifested. Evidently some concession must be made.

"Come," he said, turning her face toward him with a tremulous hand. "I will make you a little gift for your birthday. What shall it be?"

She stood still--then made the very gesture to her bosom and around her neck, which had already sent Peter scurrying landward.

The movement evoked a deadly chill in Rackby's heart. Was the past, then, to rise against him, and stretch out its bloodless hands to link with living ones? That sinister co-tenant he had seen peering at him through the blue eyes would get the better of him yet.

Conscious of his mood, she leaped away from him like a fawn. A guilty light was in her eye, and she ran out of the house.

Rackby followed her in terror, not knowing which way to go in the lonely darkness to come up with her. In his turn he remembered the man who had tried to keep wild foxes on Meteor.

The harbor was calm, wondrous calm, with that blackness in the water which always precedes the _rigor mortis_ of winter itself. All calm, all in order--not a ship of all those ships displaying riding lights to transgress the harbor lines he had decreed. How, then, should his own house not be in order?

But this was just what he had thought when Caddie Sills first darted the affliction of love into his bosom. Somewhere beyond the harbor mouth were the whispers of the tide's unrest, never to be quite shut out. Let him turn his back on that prospect as he would, the Old Roke would scandalize him still.

A man overtaken by deadly sickness, he resolved upon any sacrifice to effect a cure. On the morrow he presented himself at the jeweler's and asked to be shown the necklace.

"It is sold at last," said the jeweler, going through the motions of washing his hands.

"Sold? Who to?"

"To Peter Loud," said the jeweler.

Jethro Rackby pressed the glass case hard with his finger ends. What should Deep-water Peter be doing with a string of pearls? He must go at once. Yet he must not return empty-handed. He bought a small pendant, saw it folded into its case, and dropped the case into his pocket.

When he came to the harbor's edge he found a fleecy fog had stolen in. The horn at the harbor's mouth groaned like a sick horse. As he pulled toward Meteor the fog by degrees stole into his very brain until he could not rightly distinguish the present from the past, and Caddie Sills, lean-hipped and dripping, seemed to hover in the stern.

At one stroke he pulled out of the fog. Then he saw a strong, thick rainbow burning at the edge of the fog, a jewel laid in cotton wool. Its arch just reached the top of the bank, and one brilliant foot was planted on Meteor Island.

"That signifies that I shall soon be out of my trouble," he thought, joyfully.

The fog lifted; the green shore stood out again mistily, then more vividly, like a creation of the brain. He saw the black piles of the herring wharf, and next the west face of the church clock, the hands and numerals glittering like gold.

The harbor was now as calm as a pond, except for the pink and dove color running vaporously on the back of a long swell from the south. A white light played on the threshold of the sea, and the dark bank of seaward-rolling fog presently revealed that trembling silver line in all its length, broken only where the sullen dome of Meteor rose into it.

High above, two wondrous knotty silver clouds floated, whose image perfectly appeared in the water.

"Glory be!" said Jethro Rackby, aloud. He hastened his stroke.

Rackby, returning to the gray house with his purchase, peered past its stone rampart before going in. His eye softened in anticipation of welcome. Surely no angel half so lovely was ever hidden at the heart of night.

The kitchen was empty. So were all the rooms of the house, he soon enough found out. Not a sound but that of the steeple clock on the kitchen shelf, waddling on at its imperfect gait, loud for a few seconds, and then low.

Jethro went outside. The stillness rising through the blue dusk was marvelous, perfect. But an icy misgiving raced through his frame. He began to walk faster, scanning the ground. At first in his search he did not call aloud, perhaps because all his intercourse with her had been silent, as if she were indeed only the voice of conscience in a radiant guise. And when at length he did cry out, it was only as agony may wring from the lips a cry to God.

He called on her in broken phrases to come back. Let her only come, she might be sure of forgiveness. He was an old man now, and asked for nothing but a corner in her house. Then again, he had here a little surprise for her. Ah! Had she thought of that? Come; he would not open the package without a kiss from her finger ends.

He hurried forward, hoarse breathing. A note of terrible joy cracked his voice when the thought came to him that she was hiding mischievously. That was it--she was hiding--just fooling her old father. Come; it wouldn't do to be far from his side on these dark nights. The sea was wide and uncertain--wide and uncertain.

But he remembered that ominous purchase of the pearls by Deep-water Peter, and shivered. His voice passed into a wail. Little by little he stumbled through the hemlock grove, beseeching each tree to yield up out of obdurate shadow that beloved form, to vouchsafe him the lisp of flying feet over dead beech leaves. But the trees stood mournfully apart, unanswering, and rooted deep.

Now he was out upon the pitted crags, calling madly. She should have all his possessions, and the man into the bargain. Yes, his books, his silver spoons, that portrait of a man playing on the violin which she had loved.

With a new hope, he pleaded with her to speak to him, if only once, to cry out. Had he not said she would, one day? Yes, yes, one little cry of love, to show that she was not so voiceless as people said.--

He stood with awful expectation, a thick hand bending the lobe of his ear forward. Then through silver silences a muttering was borne to him, a great lingering roar made and augmented by a million little whispers.--The Old Roke himself, taking toll at the edge of his dominions.

Nothing could approach the lonely terror of that utterance. He ran forward and threw himself on his knees at the very brink of that cracked and mauled sea cliff.

It was true that Peter, in his absence, had disembarked a second time on Meteor--a fit habitation for such a woman as Day Rackby. But did that old madman think that he could coop her up here forever? How far must he be taken seriously in his threat?

Peter advanced gingerly. Blue water heaved eternally all round that craggy island, clucked and jabbered in long corridors of faulted stone, while in its lacy edge winked and sparkled new shells of peacock blue, coming from the infinite treasury of the sea to join those already on deposit here.

What, then, was he about? He loved her. What was love? What, in this case, but an early and late sweetness, a wordless gift, a silent form floating soft by his side--something seeking and not saying, hoping and not proving, burning and as yet scarce daring--and so, perhaps, dying.

Then he saw her.

She lay in an angle of the cover, habited in that swimming suit she had plagued Jethro into buying, for she could swim like a dog. There, for minutes or hours, she had lain prone upon the sands, nostrils wide, legs and arms covered with grains of sand in black and gold glints. Staring at the transfigured flesh, she delighted in this conversion of herself into a beautiful monster.--

Suddenly the sea spoke in her blood, as the gossips had long prophesied, or something very like it. Lying with her golden head in her arms, the splendid shoulders lax, she felt a strong impulse toward the water shoot through her form from head to heel at this wet contact with the naked earth. She felt that she could vanish in the tide and swim forever.

At that moment she heard Peter's step, and sprang to her feet. She could not be mistaken. Marvelous man, in whose arms she had lain; fatal trespasser, whom her father had sworn to kill for some vileness in his nature. What could that be? Surely, there was no other man like Peter. She interpreted his motions no less eagerly than his lips.

The sun sank while they stared at each other. Flakes of purple darkness seemed to scale away from the side of the crag whose crest still glowed faintly red. It would be night here shortly. Deep-water Peter gave a great sigh, fumbled with his package, and next the string of pearls swayed from his finger.

"Yours," he uttered, holding them toward her.

Silence intervened. A slaty cloud raised its head in the east, and against that her siren's face was pale. Her blue eyes burned on the gems with a strange and haunted light. There was wickedness here, she mistrusted, but how could it touch her?

Peter came toward her, bent over her softly as that shadow in whose violet folds they were wrapped deeper moment by moment. His fingers trembled at the back of her neck and could not find the clasp. Her damp body held motionless as stone under his attempt.

"It is done," he cried, hoarsely.