Wilderness of Spring Part 46

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

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

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

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

"I did so."

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

It never occurred to Ben that there might be something strange in his lack of interest as to what else Faith Jenks had said about him. "Yes, I wished to sail, and it seems to me--I don't know why I never saw it before--it seems to me the best reason I could have for learning my great-uncle's trade and making myself of some account in it, would be that then I could aid my brother. It must be difficult to be a doctor.

No one seems to grant them much respect. Mr. Welland of Roxbury is a very learned man, Reuben tells me, and yet I never heard of anyone deferring to him. He lives more or less in poverty."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her hand sought for his wrist and clutched it hard. She spoke in a breathless tone like anger: "Come to my room!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Clarissa, forgive me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Good. You may do it again. You may speak up plain and tell me who's captain of this b.l.o.o.d.y sloop."

"You are, Mister Shawn. I'm only saying, a G.o.d-d.a.m.n boy is no use here.

Are you soft on the pup?"

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

"Dead in h.e.l.l or alive in h.e.l.l with one eye, what's the difference?

Comes to that, though, betwix' you and me, maybe I won't be the one that dies. Be you going below--sir?"

"I am in a moment. You too."

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

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

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

"Noddle's is it? You're daft. We're miles south of it, and clear of Dorchester Neck too, and nothing to watch but a sweet wide-open sea.

Steady as she goes, Joey Mills! Why, Judah, man, I can feel and smell the sea and the land in the dark, the way they lie."

"I'll ever recall how Quelch give you a rope's end once for that same mad Irish brag. n.o.body can feel land in the dark."

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

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

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

"What are you laughing at now?"

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

"Ah! Still beating that dead horse."

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