Chapter XVI: Part THREE: Chapter One (4)

"I can." Ledyard's heavy brows lifted; his brown eyes in the sun squeezed down to little fires. "I can, and since you're a-mind to speak to me at last, I'll say this: the hope was never fair, it was rotten in the beginning, and I told him so. He lets me live because he imagines he can change me into one like himself, no other reason. He cannot. As for me, I swallow the puky food and haul on the ropes and jump to Marsh's orders because I wish to live, no other reason. I'm not Shawn's man."

"Whose then?"

"My own."

"That'd be the hard thing to prove in the sight of God."

"And you shall be your own man, nothing less."

"Shall I so?" Ledyard winced heavily and turned his face away from the beating of the sun at last, but Ben tightened his grip. "How could that be, now? You don't know, boy, you don't know----"

"Why, I say it shall be."

"And who a devil's name are you? A boy--a----"

"Benjamin Cory, son of Joseph Cory of Deerfield, adopted son of Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury, who owns this ketch. Look back at me!"

Ledyard did so, plainly with great effort--changed; certainly without wrath, perhaps even without curiosity. It seemed to Ben that what he must say was only something that Ledyard would surely have been saying to himself, and for a long time. "You will believe it, Matthew Ledyard, so now listen to me. She is not the old bitch. She is the ketch _Artemis_ out of Boston, and the man who's a second father to me, whom you served well for nearly the length of my life--he had a hand in designing her. My brother and I climbed about on her ribs when she was a-building up the Mystic River--you were there. Since those days I have loved her, as Kenny's vessel and mine, sir, _mine_--and you were her carpenter, and Peter Jenks is her captain." Ledyard groaned at the sound of that name and jerked his hand away and pounded it on the rail. Ben reached out quickly and tapped his purple cheek. "Look back at me, I say! Chips--what's the name of this ketch?"

"The ketch is the _Artemis_," he said, harshly and choking on it. "Step away from me, Cory, or they'll notice us from the quarterdeck."

Ben did so, instinct urging him to wait, to look away, to lounge at the bow in the semblance of idleness till Ledyard's whisper came: "What will you do?"

"Who would be with us?"

Dubiously the whisper said: "Joey Mills. But he's old and puny."

"Are you sure of him?"

"Sure enough. We--have spoke of it. But----"

"I've seen him wear a pistol sometimes. I suppose he could use it?" Ledyard grunted. "I suppose he might even bear a message from me to Captain Jenks?"

"Oh, my God!... You mean it, don't you?"

"I will ask you to cease doubting it. Now, how many men would it require, to get _Artemis_ home to Boston?"

"God!... Three or four hands could do it somehow." He sounded calmer. Glancing at him again, Ben found his face no less a battlefield, even more perhaps, but it had grown sharp with intelligence. "On such a thing as that, Mr. Cory, you'd be obliged to play it timid, understand me? Reef in at the first hint of dirty weather, if you'll take an old seaman's word for it. Comes fast, do you see? You remember we rode out a bad one off Grenada last year, and it was all hands hop to it, and even then it near-about caught us. Now imagine two or three men trying to get her snug in the time we did it then! Remember you got to keep one at the helm. All the same--all the same, sir, three or four hands could do it. That--is your intention?"

"It's my intention to try. What about Dummy?"

"Shawn's dog. Jack's another dog, a mad one."

"That's mostly show, I think. It makes others let him alone."

"Maybe, but don't trust him, Mr. Cory. He's not--with us."

"Manuel?"

"Can neither fight nor hold his tongue.... If you--if we can take care of Shawn and the others, you would release the Captain?"

"Certainly."

"Then I ... Mr. Cory, I'll beg you for your word on a--on two things, if I may."

"What?"

"If we can do it, and if Captain Jenks is free, put in a word for me. Let him know that whatever else I did, I tried to change back to what I was. Let him know I went back. Those would be the words, Mr. Cory. Say to him, if so be I can't say it myself, say that Matthew Ledyard went back."

"I will."

"And one other thing. If we can do it, then when we raise the Cape or--my God, better if it might be Rhode Island, but I suppose there's no hope of that--aid me, if you can, to get away in the boat. It's a thing, Mr. Cory--I've got a fear I wouldn't hang decent. Sooner drown. Would it sit fair with your conscience to help me run for it? Would you do that much, if I can help you in this thing?"

Ben said: "It sticks in my conscience that hanging never mended anything, and I will do that if I can. It'll mean deceiving Captain Jenks, helping you steal the boat, but I will do it. Matthew Ledyard, I'm eighteen, with less than a year at sea against the many that you've served. Can you take orders from me?"

Wonderingly, Ledyard said: "Yes, sir, I can."

"Bide the time then. It will be soon. I must speak with Mills and do one or two other things."

Ben spoke quickly--already he heard the commotion of Dummy lurching up from the forecastle with his monkey, and he was dizzy with the first full understanding of what had taken place. _Well, damn it, I was wishing to make things happen!..._ As he moved away from Ledyard the man's whisper followed him: "Don't forget, those are the words, Mr. Cory--Matthew Ledyard went back...."

The monkey had begun to ail when the fruit gave out, after the _Diana_ left the Bahamas, although she had endured other periods of poor eating without harm. This morning she looked half dead in the great hairy cradle of Dummy's arms. Dummy squatted with her at the foot of the mainmast, crooning hopelessly. Sometimes in the last few days she had swallowed a bit of sea biscuit if Dummy chewed the miserable stuff first to soften it. This morning she would not, but only shivered in spite of the sullen heat and twisted her wise black head away from the repulsive mass. Ben on his way aft paused to consider them, aware that of the two sorrowful ape-faces, Dummy's held the greater pain. The little black beast was merely dying.

She had been lively and delighted with her new home after her capture from the _Schouven_, learning every corner of the ketch--including the galley, where she could engage in shrieking encounters with French Jack. Since she returned continually, and never got anything there except missiles and rhetoric unsuited to the tender sex, Ben deduced that because of her streak of hoyden she must relish war for its own sake. Jack never once scored a hit. Best of all she loved soaring in dizzy flights all over the rigging, and hanging by her tail from the crosstrees to contemplate the sky and the ocean and the ways of man. She would come quickly down out of that for Dummy if he smacked his lips, but not for anyone else--except, occasionally and with the air of granting a favor, for Ben.

Now it seemed likely that her airy journeys were ended. Dummy gazed up at Ben with the grieving eyes of an ape-mother, and Ben could find nothing worth saying, but touched his finger to the tiny black bullet head that paid him no heed. Dummy smiled in his loose bewildered way, and Ben moved on.

Joey Mills was scuttling down the short companion ladder. Ben wished to detain him, but Shawn had noticed Ben and called to him. Ben whispered hastily: "I've spoke with Ledyard--he'll inform you what passed between us. Tell him I said he was to do so--and wipe that surprise off your face, quick!" Ben climbed to the quarterdeck, not glancing back to see how much Joey had understood. Shawn in this reeking glare of morning light looked old. No wrinkle, no scar of smallpox was spared, and none of the white dust at his temples. His hand had a fine tremor and he needed shaving.

"Mr. Ball," he said in a voice of weariness, "go below and get your breakfast."

"Yea, sir--but it be'n't yet eight bells, and you'm not eat a bite since yesterday noontime."

Shawn spoke with ugly patience: "I said go, and will I be explaining? I wish to speak with Cory alone."

"Yea, sir." Ball made a vague motion at his forelock, and waddled past Ben with a glance of remote dislike, muttering under his breath.

Shawn watched Ball's back out of sight. "Even he would desert me, had he anywhere to go. He was not so fat and sullen when he sailed with John Quelch--and escaped Quelch when I did--and listened when I told him of the western sea, and seemed, like you, to be understanding it. I suppose time's gone over all of us, and I alone faithful to the vision. Did I not say they were all phantoms, all but you and me?"

"You wished to speak with me?"

"Cold, cold. It's the cold good morning I get from you."

"Did Judah Marsh have visions, Mr. Shawn?"

"Oh, Ben, Ben! Marsh is a tool to be used, a thing with a cutting edge in the shape of a man. And Manuel is a lump of muscle, a sort of poor engine for pulling ropes, in the shape of a man, and Dummy another, with hardly even the shape. They're all phantoms, all but you and me."

"At this moment, your thing with hardly the shape of a man is grieving like a mother over his pet that's like to die in a day or so."

"So? Well, what should that be to you?"

"Much, I find, Mr. Shawn. And I suppose no one ever found it comfortable to cease being a boy."

"Hm? Your mind's running in strange courses. Maybe it's true you've come to be something like a man. Wisha!" said Shawn, and tried to smile--"nearly as tall as me, now that's no lie." His hand came out in an abortive gesture of friendship, and fell to his side. "Dummy, Ben, is what I made him. I found him on your foul Boston water front, sweeping and carrying garbage in a warehouse. I sat down by him with a length of rope and showed him sailor's knots, and he grinned and took the rope and showed me he knew them too. Then, seeing he knows well what you say for all he can't speak, I told him of the new countries in the western sea, and the vision did strike fire in him--Mother of God, I saw it! Plainer, more honest than I've seen it in many a man who hath all his wits and the power of speech. And I said to him: 'Will you sail with me then?' And he knelt in the filth of the warehouse and patted my boots. Poor lump, have I not given him vision and purpose? Could I heal his dirty monkey for him I would do it, now that's no lie. But I am not God, Ben--only God's instrument. Now take this glass. It's there, Ben, but when I try to bring the glass on it I lose it--it must be my eyes or this damned blaze of light--yet without the glass I see it. Why, even Ball saw it, but would have it a floating tree. A floating tree!" said Shawn with thin bitterness, and smiled, and held out the spyglass.

Very far away it was, a dark smudged line at the angle of a rakish sail, miles away over a flat sea where nothing stirred--no, something did stir out there as Ben took the glass, a black triangle of fin cruising in calm perhaps a quarter-mile to starboard, but Shawn was not concerned with that, and Ben paid it no heed as he sought to bring the distant shape under the power of the lens.

Ball was right. In the glass it was quite plainly a floating tree-trunk, felled or uprooted by storm maybe a long time ago and swept here by the whims of wind and current from God knew where. A single branch stood upright at that deceiving angle; a heavier one submerged must have been overbalancing it.

Ben was remembering an April afternoon when _Artemis_ came into Boston harbor, and Faith stood beside him, and Daniel Shawn also was someone new, both admirable and good. He was remembering certain acts of kindness, of almost incredible forbearance, chess games, lessons with the sextant, jests and tall stories told in moments of relaxation during the long armed truce, and told without any overtones of madness or evil. He was remembering above all the magic of a voice, and how the vision it generated had stirred his own spirit with all the rocketing enthusiasm of a boy and the more sober acceptance of a man--for surely, no matter what madness and evil there were in Shawn, it was still as true as sunrise that there must be new lands in the western sea, and some day those would be discovered, and one could fairly trust (as Shawn said) that all men's life on earth would be the richer for it. Remembering all this, it seemed wholly impossible to Ben that he could actually do what he now intended. He prayed for at least a little time of delay, and hesitantly said: "Mr. Shawn, it seems we've swung full about during the calm this morning. By the sun, I make it that our stem here is pointed near due south, and so----"

"And the sail is southwest by west, and when I saw it last night it was northwest, but Mother of God, Ben, I make nothing much of that. They could have made a better run in the night than we did before the wind fell away. Even if they be common men aboard her, that's possible. The great thing--ah, have you sometimes thought me mad, Ben, until now?--the great thing is, you see it too, and so you know I am not deluded. Now give me back the glass. I'll try once more if I can't find her in it."

Ben knew he must no longer delay, or he could not do the thing at all. He said: "The marks on her side will be the letters of her name--must be mighty large to show at such a distance, I cannot quite make them out, except there are three, and then a space, and then a D. The next after the D may be a Y."

"Give me the glass!" Shawn snatched it and held it to his eye, but with such wildly shaking hands that surely he would find nothing in it. The sight of such weakness sickened Ben, yet at the same time gave him a sense of his own power overwhelming as a wave, and of amazement that he could ever have feared this man Shawn, or believed Shawn to be stronger than himself.

Shawn's struggle with the spyglass was not prolonged. Something--possibly sweat on his hands--caused the glass to slip and fall to the deck with a sharp tinkle of breakage. Ben thought: _Something broke in me then, and when he dies something in me will die and no help for it._ He would have retrieved the glass for Shawn, but Shawn stooped quickly, blood suffusing his face, and leaned at the rail fumbling at it aimlessly, though he must have known when a shard of broken glass fell from his fingers that the thing was smashed beyond saving. "And didn't I know last night that I must meet them in a calm? And alone. I was not told I would be blind also."

"Mr. Shawn----"

"Blind!" Shawn said, and hurled the spyglass far out over the flat water, toward the black blade that calmly cruised in its wide circuit of the motionless _Diana_.

"Mr. Shawn, Peter Jenks would speak for me, if I may enter the cabin. Merely the sight of me would make him speak. Does he know I am aboard?"

"What? He knows it. I told him long ago you were one of us."

"Then you told him a lie, for I have never been one of your crew and well you know it."

"But you will be," said Shawn, not commandingly but in pleading, almost in pathos, and took hold of Ben's arm. "You will be."

Ben met the blue stare, knowing how in many ways it was truly blind, and shook his head. "I can make Jenks speak, Mr. Shawn. You wish him to speak, do you not?"

"What? Why, he must, if only to confess the sin. It's a very great sin to steal a man's dream. I'd compel no man to die in it."

"What if he never did so, Mr. Shawn?"

Shawn let go his arm. "You question the voice that guides me?"

"Did your voice tell you of the coming of that sloop?"

"I am not God. I am not told everything."

"A sloop bearing Jan Dyckman's name, a sloop that seems now to be moving, Mr. Shawn, in a flat calm where we find no breath of wind at all? But we might be moving presently. Will you look over there--sir?"

Shawn swung about to gaze where Ben pointed, to the northeast. There--no illusion--a faint blackish smudge was visible on the horizon, with a slight hazing in a small area of the burning sky. Shawn turned back to Ben a face transfigured. "Why, there's the answer! Let it come down on us, and we'll outrun them to the ends of the earth. Can you doubt me now? What's that you were asking? Oh, Jenks, Jenks. You may not go in the cabin, Ben, not yet. But sure he'll speak now, and I seeing to it. A word of that sloop and he'll speak, the Devil willing, if I must cut out his damned tongue and let it wag alone." Shawn strode down the quarterdeck laughing--not in music but with shrillness, high and thin, almost an old man's laugh. "Let it come down! D'you hear, Ben? D'you hear?--I say, if that squall comes down on us, Mother of God, we'll not reef one inch of sail, I'll hang the man that tries it. Let it come down, we'll go about and run south for Hell or Heaven, or the western sea, or the dark!"

When Ben reached the companion ladder Shawn had already entered the cabin. Ben heard the door crash, the rattle of the key.

Ben hurried forward, where a voice was crackling and spitting in the lifeless air. Ben had glimpsed Manuel climbing to the masthead; Marsh must have sent him up, not knowing the standing order had been revoked. Tom Ball would be still below, and French Jack serving him what passed for breakfast. Joey Mills and Ledyard had not gone below to eat but stood together near the bow, tightly watching the black scarecrow Judah Marsh, and Dummy with his sick monkey.

Dummy had backed away from Marsh to the rail, shaking his head and moaning. "So throw it over, d'you hear, or will I do it? You've had the dirty Jonah long enough. Wish us to stay beca'med forever? Don't make out you can't understand me, you pig's get, you know every word I say. Throw it over!" But Dummy, who could squeeze no further away from him, began a desperate sidling down the deck, his twisted back pressed against the rail, the monkey whimpering at his shaggy breast.

Coming up behind, Ben said: "Stop that, Marsh!"

The man swung fast, a glare of total amazement above his smile as though he did not know the voice, and doubtless he did not, since Ben had never before in his life spoken in such a tone. "_You?_ I'll take care of you presently." A long arm snaked out, snatching the monkey from Dummy's embrace by a miniature wrist.

Marsh flung her over the side. She made no outcry; only the lightest splash. She surfaced in the mildly rippled water, feebly beating at it, her black button of head scarcely clear of it, already near to death, unable to swim, an atom of life useless and helpless. Dummy had turned automatically, stunned, to watch the arc of her falling. "Now then!" said Marsh, and grabbed at the mute's arm.

The arm surged upward at the touch, a motion like brushing at a fly--Dummy did not look at the man, only at the struggle in the water, too hypnotized by it even to moan or shake his bulging head. But the brushing motion was enough to send Marsh reeling across the deck. He fetched up squealing in the scuppers, his left leg bent under him. His knife was out. Ben saw his leg give way once; then he was upright, advancing slowly and with great care, the blade flat in his hand, swinging from side to side. The monkey sank out of sight. Dummy turned then, and saw Marsh. Head lowered, arms dangling to his ankles, he saw Marsh, and understood, and charged him in a shambling rush.

Joey Mills and Ledyard had not moved.

The monkey broke the surface once more in some last spurt of strength and stubborn hunger for life. Ben slipped out of his trousers and tossed them to Ledyard. "Chips, mind my knife!" He was free of his shoes and climbing naked over the rail.

He gave himself time for a glance out over the still water. The black fin was there, yes, but not too perilously near, he thought--maybe a hundred yards off, and moving away, cutting the water slowly astern of the _Diana_. The small commotion of the monkey's fall must have gone unnoticed, or the shark would have had her in an instant.

Ben gave himself time for one other glance, backward. Marsh had no knife. Dummy's chest was dripping blood, but the knife lay several feet away. Dummy was over Marsh, a knee on his chest, one fearsome hand closed around his throat, and Marsh was not struggling. His neck was probably broken already; the black eye-patch dangled over his ear; neither eye would see anything more, and the smile was gone.

Joey Mills inside the rail was chattering. "Don't dive, Ben, for God's sake don't! Leave me throw the brute a rope." He had one in his quick little hands, had made it fast to the rail.

"Don't heave it, Joey--let it down." Ben could make out the shoe-button dots of eye. They were fixed and possibly blind. "She could never find it," Ben said. The motion of her arms had almost ceased; she could make no progress through the water. Ben caught the rope and let himself down without a splash, gauged his distance from her, and struck out under water, eyes open.

He found the black shadow of her body and emerged beside her, about to reach for her, but she had life enough yet to grab at him. He turned his head to save his eyes. He felt the clutch of midget fingers in his hair, the scrabble of her legs at his shoulders, and he swam for his life.

Ledyard's wild yell aided him. Until he caught the noise of it he had been concerned only with his need to complete the act, having no time at all to be afraid. The yell brought him sharp knowledge of death, and the one more ounce of speed required to defeat it. He found and seized the rope, and swung with a final burst of violence into safety. Up here in his own element, clutching the rail with Dummy's monkey secure in his other arm, he could look down in time to see not only the black fin lancing toward him from astern but another shape of the same breed, a vast gray hunger shimmering upward from the abyss, shifting to dull silver, cutting water harmlessly at the _Diana's_ side and surging unappeased away.

Dummy stumbled over the deck bleeding from the long gash across his ribs. He blinked in love and fear at the naked god and fell to his knees, then forward to clasp Ben's foot and roll his forehead over it.

"Don't! I pray you, don't!--here, take her! But I fear she'll die, Dummy--I could only bring her back." Dummy reached up for her. Ledyard at Ben's elbow was muttering something about his britches. "In a moment," said Ben. "Mind the hatch, you and Joey. I don't want Jack and Ball coming up yet if we can stop them." He knew somehow without a glance that they would do as he directed. He crossed the deck to the black heap of strangely inoffensive carrion. It seemed to him--outside and apart from this incredibly violent new self of Ben Cory--that his only impulse was to discover whether he could lift that gangling weight. He could, and with astonishing ease. A limp stick, nothing more, a stick with hanging legs and spiritless head and a bad smell. Needlessly he crossed with it back to the starboard side. "The fish will be hungry," he said, and heaved it over. He gripped the rail with both hands, and watched.

They were hungry. Ben watched, thinking not of Jan Dyckman nor of justice nor of the long year ending; thinking only that quiet must presently arrive when this was over, and that in his home country it would be spring. The young apple tree by the kitchen garden--might that be in bloom this morning, and Reuben there to see it? The water briefly boiled in muddy red, and sent its diminishing ripples to infinity, and was still.

Ledyard was tugging at his hand, which could now release its grip on the rail, and urgently shoving something into it--the handle of Ben's knife. "Look to yourself--he's coming!"

Daniel Shawn was framed in the cabin doorway, blankly staring. He could certainly see them all--Joey and Ledyard now by the open forward hatch, Dummy squatting in the shadow of the mainmast cherishing his dying companion, Ben naked at the rail, the knife his father gave him unsheathed and brilliant in the sun. Shawn closed the cabin door and came a step away from it. He remembered; drew out the key from under his shirt and turned his back on all of them, carefully locking the cabin. Then he was advancing, astonishment giving way to some partial understanding, savage and cold. He glanced aloft.

Ben did so too, having almost forgotten Manuel. Manuel was frozen at the masthead, gazing down. Manuel must have seen it all. Ben guessed that not even a roar from Shawn would bring him down at this moment, and Ben was aware of having laughed.

"Well?" Shawn came forward another step or two. "Well? What's this disorder, and thou naked and shameless?"

"Why," said Ben, "this is the garment and shield I wore when I came into the world, as they say, and one day I'll die wearing it, maybe not today. It's my intention to live a long while, after this ketch is returned to Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury."

"Mutiny," said Shawn quietly. His head canted to one side, a danger sign. He had stood so, without a word, when the body of Cornelius Barentsz was cut in quarters and tossed to the sharks. Then as now, the copper farthing had appeared in his left hand, twisting and sparkling. It caught the sun this morning, sending lances of sharp light at Ben's eyes, and Ben turned his knife until it shot the same small cruel messages to Shawn, who winced and briefly turned his face away. "_Judah!_"

"He can't run any more of your errands. He's sharks' meat, five minutes past. Don't be calling the others and disturbing their breakfast."

"This from you.... Ben, you shall have part of your wish. You shall go in the cabin, immediate. I order you to go there, and here is the key." He took it from under his shirt and tossed it across the deck.

Ben made no motion for it, watching its fall with the corner of his eye. "Joey," he said, "take that key and open the cabin. Tell Captain Jenks that if fortune favors me I'll come to him presently with the key to his leg irons. Tell him, Joey, I am hoping to redeem a year of my life that in folly and weakness I threw away. Tell him that, and return here at once to me."

The key had fallen near to Ben. Joey Mills did not need to pass close to Shawn in order to retrieve it. Small, old and terrified, he was sidling for it when Shawn bellowed: "Joey Mills, do you take orders from a bare-naked child and not from your captain?"

Mills leaped and fluttered like a hurt sparrow. But he had the key, and scuttled to larboard, intending a quick rush aft along by the larboard rail as far from Shawn as he could get. Shawn was wearing no pistols, only his short knife. Ben said: "He won't harm you, Joey. His business is with me, not with you. If he tries to stop you, Ledyard and I will both help you."

"Dummy!" Shawn called that name not in command but in pleading. But even as he spoke, Dummy sobbed once, wetly and loudly, and shambled away up to the bow. Ben glimpsed the monkey's head flopping limp, and the spidery arms. She must have died, and Dummy must have known the moment--yet up there at the bow Dummy was still trying to support her head and make it live.

"Shawn, you spoke of these men as phantoms. Only some of them are that. I think your Judah Marsh was a phantom, and so likely he made a thin meal for the fish. Mills there is a man, and Matthew Ledyard, and Dummy. Men are creatures you've never understood, never. I can see that now. Myself, I begin, just a little, to understand them.... Joey has opened the cabin. Needn't trouble to look behind you. Take my word for it, and now give me that other key."

Shawn did not look behind him. He drew his own knife, slowly, without threat, and leaned his back against the mainmast. "Compassed about.... Ben--why, why? Why must it be so?... And if I do not give you that other key?"

"Then I must take it."

"With that knife. You'll use that knife against the man who would have given you the key to a whole new world."

"Yes."

"Were we not to go there together, Ben?"

"Certainly I dreamed that once myself, before Jan Dyckman was found dying in a dirty alley. And afterwards too, until I learned why he had to lie there."

"Did I not give you the vision?"

"Yes."

"And see it strike fire in you?"

"Yes."

"As I never saw it in any other.... Have I not been kind?"

"Yes."

"Forbearing too? Forgiving a thousand things I'd never take from any other man?"

"Yes."

"But you will use the knife. Have we not spoke together a thousand times like friends? Haven't I made you laugh?"

"Yes."

"But you will use it.... Why?"

"Shawn, do you think I could walk into Heaven across the flesh of Jan Dyckman? Dyckman and others--how many? The men of the _Schouven_--how many, Shawn? And how many more, before we ever saw the new lands?"

"Does it matter? The vision is greater than the man."

"Nay, I think not, but even let that be so if you wish. But if you follow the vision through blood and deceit, in mad denial of what your senses tell you, then you lose it. Maybe the vision is there yet, but you're mired down in your own folly. You're lost.... Shawn, you're truly compassed about, as you say." Ben raised his voice, knowing that in this windless air it must reach into the open cabin, if Jenks was in any condition to hear it. "Mills and Ledyard and Dummy are with me. Manuel won't fight for you. If Jack or Tom Ball would come on deck, they must pass my friends there at the hatch. I don't wish to fight you, Shawn, nor to harm you. We were friends. I know what you gave me and I value it. But you're lost. You're mired, and I will not go down with you. Now hear the alternatives. If you----"

"I see," said Shawn, perhaps to himself. "I see you will not go with me, the way I should have known it all the while."

"Shawn"--Ben understood that he himself was pleading--"Shawn, there are those who love me, or there were. My life is more to them than ever it was to you. You never knew me. You never saw me. You saw the image of a follower, and that you may have loved, but me you never saw. Now then--my life is all I own. I'm naked in every way. And if you'd take that from me I'll fight you to the last breath, and I'll win. Now hear the alternatives. Throw your knife away and give me that other key. Then, sir, I will not release Captain Jenks until he gives me his word that he will take you unharmed to Boston."

"To man's justice!" said Shawn, and laughed. "No hearing. The short gasp on the tricing line and all vision dead!"

"Men know little enough about justice, that's true. And so I'll give you another alternative. If you will yield, I'll even set you free in a boat when we raise the Cape--as you could have done for me a year ago when I told you plain I'd have no part of your venture."

In dark astonishment, Shawn appeared to be considering that a while. His gaze wandered over the deck. Certainly he would be understanding the open cabin behind him, and whatever Mills and Ledyard were doing at the hatch--Ben could not turn his head to look--and Dummy up there at the bow, shut away in a private world of grief. "Your friend Peter Jenks would never be consenting to such a thing at all."

"He would. His first duty is to Mr. Kenny and to the _Artemis_. To carry out that duty he must be free of the leg irons. If I say he cannot be free until he gives me his word to let you go, he will give it, and he will keep his word."

"He will not. I know his kind."

"You know nothing of him. You see all men, including me, through your fog of ambition and vanity--and visions.... Well, a third alternative--nay, I can't put that in words."

"To turn this knife against myself?" Shawn's eyes were all black. The copper farthing had been put away. He was shifting lightly from one foot to the other. Ben caught some blurred noise from the forward companionway, but could not turn to look. "I might even do it, Beneen, now that's no lie--if so be the voyage is ended, and wouldn't it be the lightest demand your tender heart has made of me? But Mother of God, I wonder a little what you can do with the pretty ketch, and I not here. Will you look to the northeast?"

Ben did so, a glance not so long as a heartbeat, taking in all that part of the horizon. The faint smudge had grown to a rolling wall of black, far away, maybe not so far. No least breath stirred here aboard or over the near waters still ardent under the sun, but the pressure of storm ached in Ben's eardrums, and over yonder, where the advancing shadow fell, the water, no longer beaten gold, wavered in a troubled darkness. So much Ben discovered in less than a heartbeat, and Shawn chose that moment to leap for him.

The knife was up and aiming for Ben's heart--flashing, perilous enough, intending death, but not shrewdly held as Judah Marsh would have held it, in the flat of the hand, circling and slicing.

To Ben the man's action seemed almost slow; clumsy, weary. He was able with amazing ease to catch the wrist of Shawn's right hand and force it away. His own was seized in the same moment, the blade only inches from Shawn's corded throat. Then indeed a slowness settled over them, a long straining, a silent tension like that of the nearing squall--it must break sometime, maybe not for a long while. Ben became a fighting machine, the power in his left arm sufficient to hold destruction away, the power in his right sufficient to maintain the ultimate threat, but--because of the quivering effort in Shawn's bent arm and because of a tortured reluctance in himself--he was not quite able to fulfill the threat, not quite able to drive the point the two or three inches more down into the soft pulsing spot in Shawn's neck where the life could drain away.

Locked so and waiting, Ben heard commotion break loose behind him. A yell, a shot, a tramp of loud struggling feet, a shrill hollow squeal that could only be French Jack's war cry, and then a different kind of yell from him--higher and thinner, maybe a scream of pain. Ben thought he heard some strangled cursing in Ledyard's voice. No way to learn about it. Nothing to do but hold the fighting machine to its cold purpose until it should win through or take a knife in the back.

It seemed to Ben that he knew, before it happened, everything that Shawn would try to do. Shawn shifted his feet, seeking to bring his boot down on Ben's bare foot. The foot was not there, and Shawn nearly lost his balance, regaining it with a groan of stormy breath--but Ben could still breathe deeply, evenly. After that, he knew, Shawn would not dare to try raising a knee to foul him. _I am a little taller after all...._

In chill calculation, the fighting machine forced Shawn aft by gradual steps. Behind Ben the noise went on, a thrashing and a snarling. Two men must be rolling about all over the forward deck--which two? Not Joey Mills--surely Mills could do nothing with bare hands against Jack or Tom Ball. It ought to be possible to turn about in this hideous embrace, at least long enough to see----

Ben jerked his right arm backward, hoping to throw Shawn off balance or at least to turn him.

It turned him, but in the swirling and writhing readjustment Shawn's knife found Ben's forehead and drew a hot line downward. Ben heaved at it long enough to save his eye. It returned, for that instant inexorable, gouging Ben's cheek in a lingering kiss of fury to the edge of the jaw. Then Ben's left hand could drive it away, and Shawn was down on his knees and his face was turning brilliant red. _But that's my blood on him._ Shawn was staring upward. "The color," he said. He was staring directly into Ben's eyes. "The color of the western sea." And his knife clattered on the deck.

Yet he was up on his feet once more, still pressing Ben's knife away, even forcing it downward a little, and the motionless deadlock continued. Weaponless and gasping, knowing defeat, Shawn would not yield. "It's over," Ben said. "Can't you understand?" He would not yield.

Ben's left eye clouded with blood from his forehead. The right eye could discover all things in brilliant detail. A small gray heap by the open hatch--Joey Mills, shot in the forehead. Up near the bow, Ledyard and Tom Ball in a tangle of tom clothes and flailing arms; Ledyard had him by the ears, beating his round head against the planks, and Ledyard's marred face was a great gash of grin. Nearer, a redheaded thing crawled aft inch by inch, holding a pistol, trailing a leg broken between knee and ankle. This thing should have been creeping and suffering in sunlight, but in the sky beyond it a blackness had done away with the sun, while over Ben's head had begun a dubious mutter of troubled canvas.

And only three or four feet away--Dummy, his head swaying from side to side on the blunt neck, moaning, unable to advance, or understand, or take part. Ben could understand that somehow. Dummy had two gods now, and the gods were destroying one another, and the world had fallen to bits while he clutched dead love in his tremendous arms.

Ben could not understand how there should again be huge noise behind him, now that he was facing forward and could see them all with his one unclouded eye, the living and the dead. Manuel? Never. The noise was metallic, a crashing jangle, and the repeated thud of some heavy object striking on the deck. He yelled: "God damn you, Shawn, give over!" Shawn might not have heard that. Shawn was staring fixedly over Ben's shoulder. Except for the grip on Ben's right wrist he was certainly relaxing, weakening fast. It was possible to swing him around again, and look aft, and understand.

With shackled ankles the giant could move in a horrible and careful hopping, the chain jerking behind him. He carried in his hand the three-foot plank that he had torn loose from the floor nails and all. His broad face was one whitened granite calm. Clear of the cabin doorway, he swayed for a time without support, observing--the wrathful sky, the full spread of sail fitfully trembling and stammering under the first warning gusts, the human deeds completed and not completed. His little blue eyes brilliant with all the pure cold of northern ice, he raised the plank, and balanced it, and hurled it.

But French Jack rolled his crawling body just clear of it, and leveled his pistol with some care. It crashed in the same moment that Jenks flung himself forward, and Jenks struck the deck still a yard or two from his enemy, blood seeping from his leg above the iron band. Jenks could crawl too. They would meet in a moment. The thunder of the shot had galvanized Shawn into a last effort, and Ben could watch no more, but he knew that the other thunder following was not from any human source.

That was in the sails, a roar of stricken canvas above a deck gone mad. Out of the torn sky the northeast wind with a booming outrage of rain fell upon _Artemis_, slapping her over on her beam ends. The twisted knots of human warfare rolled tight against the larboard rail, inches away from a suddenly boiling sea.

Pressed down in that inferno, his face cold, and still, and streaming with the flood of rain, Shawn forced Ben upward away from him, until his right hand could join his left in grasping Ben's right hand. Shawn was trying to speak above the uproar; Ben could not hear him. Ben felt the agonized living shudder of _Artemis_ as a thing within himself, and then he saw, not believing it, that his knife had gone down, its blade hidden in the green cloth, buried to the hilt. Ben could not know, then or in all his life, whether Shawn's own hands had drawn the blade in upon himself, or whether this had been done by the wrenching struggle of _Artemis_ in her extremity, or whether Ben's own right hand had sent it down and so blotted out in one motion all the hope and the madness, the cruelty, the blindness and the radiant visions, and the pain.

_Chapter Four_

"In such a gale, and my father shot down, and no one at the helm?"

"Ay, but she did rise, Charity. I felt her bear up against it slow and brave, and I trusted her. Call it a fancy or a vain thought, but surely any vessel will carry under her ribs some part of the spirit of the men who made her, a spirit of her own. Yes, she answered that blow, and no one at the helm. It had caught her flat-aback, but some-way, rising against it, she brought herself clear into the eye of the wind. There she hung in irons a moment, only a moment, found herself, paid off, heeled over to starboard and scudded away to the southwest before it, steady as an arrow. No one at the helm."

"Do you notice, Charity?--he speaks louder, and plain, my little brother. That will be from answering back to the winds, and I think they will never be so big my little brother can't shout 'em down."

"They've shouted me down many a time and will again. Well, when she found her way like that, of course we were all flung to starboard too. I cannot remember taking that key from Shawn's body. I must have done it during that moment while she hung in the wind's eye, for I had it in my teeth when I reached your father, and he helped me drag him to the mainmast where he could brace himself. He knew me and spoke to me. He held my knife for me while I unlocked the irons--I remember seeing it in his hand, and the rain was washing it clean."

_And will again._ She thought: How else could it be, after all? Certainly he would go again, and many times again. And it might be that God would bring him safe through tempest and calm and war, but no daughter of Peter Jenks would dare to predict safe harbor, least of all perhaps for anyone so loved, since the Lord is a jealous God. There could be that final time when even Ben would not come home; his place would be empty, and so then--and so--as if one of those fleecy tranquil clouds over in the blue clean east were advancing on her for her dubious entertainment, Charity observed the beginning of a daydream. It was nothing in her mind, as yet; it could become the familiar indulgence, if she wished: herself receiving the news of her widowhood and bearing it as best she might, maybe accepting the Romish faith so to join a nunnery, or--much better!--going out among the Indians--(why not? Did not John Eliot do so?)--to heal their sick and bind up their wounds and teach them, becoming gray and old in this dispensation of decent mercies until such time as God was willing to--_Hey! Misty dreams for silly maids. I don't want you--go away!..._ Well, it was partly Ben's fault for falling silent so long, when there was so much more to tell; Reuben's too--Reuben sitting there radiantly quiet, and skimming a pebble out beyond the line of foam whenever a wave spent itself whispering at the open side of their sanctuary. Why dream now, when the one dream (so unlike all the others!) had amazed and somewhat frightened her by coming true? It might have been well enough in the long year past to dream. Not now. Anyway not of widowhood--_when he ha'n't even asked me!--but his eyes inquire of many things this afternoon_--and other such matters far-off and cold and surely unwelcome. It might have been well enough, once, to dwell in that labyrinthine refuge of fantasy; and certain treasures brought back from the labyrinth might be saved--as for instance the created moment when his face would turn to her gravely astonished in discovery, and he would say: 'Why, Mistress Charity, you're no longer an awkward child at all'--or something like that--something.... But why flee from the present even for an instant? Was he not close in the here-and-now? A very tall stranger who was not a stranger; vastly older, a whole year older, the mobile miracle of his face transformed by the bitter dissonance of the great scar still livid and not quite healed, that angled across his high forehead and then ran from his cheekbone to the edge of his jaw. Mouth and eyes were spared. He could look far and curiously, as he always had, and deep. His smile was--almost the same. Surely it would be altogether the same when the scar was fully healed: probably now the torn muscles pained him when his mouth widened; and maybe he felt less often in a mood for smiling since his homecoming and the death of John Kenny. While a part of her irresolutely wondered whether that mouth had ever kissed a woman--it must have--her eyes searched and pondered the multiple planes and shadows of his quiet face, beholding it in many ways. It was the face of Ben Cory, with much in it of the Ben Cory who was, but even more for a while it was a challenge and a problem. _What if I undertake what I could never do before? Why could I never draw his face when he was gone?... God knows I remembered it. Or did I truly? Did it not float before me in the dark and come between me and the sunlight of winter?_ The shadow in the hollow of his cheek was deeper than she remembered it--well, he was thinner; bad food and not much of it, she supposed; still he grew on it and found strength in it. The hairline above his ear was a simpler curve than she recalled. And why, why had she never noticed that the tops of his ears were slightly pointed?--very slightly, not like Reuben's, but still he did have that comical faunlike point. Her fingers itched for a pencil but lay still, and she looked away to the ever-moving green, and white, and unfathomable blue, the lashing hurry of spent water up along the sand, the unceasing rise and fall. _I must have been blind._ She closed her eyes, seeing much. _Well, it ought to be three-quarter face, the chin up a little, intentness without a smile-like so...._

"'O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days?...

"Reuben, you know too much. Won't you tell the rest, Ben? So many things--tell me more about my father, and--all the rest. Will you not?"

"I will try.... She was far over to starboard, running from the squall, until we got the tops'l furled. Dummy and Ledyard saw to that--or better say your father did, for it was his voice, not mine, that made them jump to it, and I to the helm, so to lash it and then go back to your father for what little I could do. So much happened, and all in a moment. All that I spent minutes in telling--why, I don't suppose more than one minute passed from the time the squall struck to the time I was unlocking the irons. Then much less than a minute, and I was lashing the helm, Dummy and Ledyard aloft--in that bit of time Manuel died. Ledyard had broken French Jack's leg with a capstan bar when Jack came up through the hatch. Tom Ball shot poor Joey Mills, and Ledyard grappled with Ball, beat the wind out of him I guess--a man's work. When the squall hit us, only an instant after Jack shot your father, Jack was washed overboard, and Ledyard--helped Ball to follow him, I believe. All that I didn't see; Ledyard told me later. I saw Manuel die. It was while I was at the helm, and she settling steady as you please on that starboard tack. Poor soul, he'd stayed at the masthead through it all, and clung to it through the first stroke of the storm, and now was trying to come down, and it wasn't wind or rain that made him fall, but his own sudden shaking--or maybe he thought Dummy was coming to get him, but I don't believe that. He fell clear of the side, sank and never rose, and _Artemis_ swept on by the empty waters where I could see nothing of him.... Shawn was not washed over. His dead hand had gripped the rail. Later I had much trouble freeing it so to give him a decent sea-burial; and maybe that was when I truly said him a farewell, and his hand so unwilling to let her go."

"Don't alway be turning me the right side of your face. I tell you it does not trouble me."

"The scar would trouble most girls, Charity. Well, so I lashed the helm and went back to the Captain, who was losing blood at a fearful rate, and then I was a frantic time scrabbling in the locker for a cord to bind the leg and stop the flow. I was obliged to pull the cord with all my power before it would stop. The bullet had completely shattered the bone. I don't think a surgeon could have set it. He said so himself, and commanded me to cut the leg away below the break."

"The blood was not flowing but spurting?"

"Ay, Ru. Could anything have been done?"