Wilderness of Spring Part 61

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--flas.h.i.+ng, 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 thras.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.ds now, and the G.o.ds 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 cras.h.i.+ng jangle, and the repeated thud of some heavy object striking on the deck. He yelled: "G.o.d d.a.m.n 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d 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?... G.o.d 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 las.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed from the time the squall struck to the time I was unlocking the irons. Then much less than a minute, and I was las.h.i.+ng 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?"

"Not that I know of, under those conditions. Not with the anterior tibial artery spouting and the bone shattered. You were fortunate he lived beyond that day. You did as he ordered?"

"I did, and he lived twenty days. I asked him if I might not bring him rum from the cabin before I cut it, and he thundered at me, No, in G.o.d's name no, and thrust my knife back in my hand, and I cut as quickly and cleanly as I might. Then he thanked me, and bade me help him up the companion ladder to the quarterdeck. There he remained for all of our homeward voyage, by the helm to give me guidance--and the same a fair pa.s.sage with no dirty weather except a little off the Bermudas, nothing bad. He took the tiller himself at times, to relieve me, during the first days. On the fourth day, I think it was, we could see the wound had begun to mortify, and later he was sometimes out of his wits and rambling, but he would alway come clear of that and tell me once more how he would live until we came into harbor--seeing that nothing except his word stood between me and Copp's Hill. He wrote an account of it all and signed it with a great flourish--that was a quiet and a sunny day--but he feared that would not be enough. Determined he was to speak that word for Dummy and me, and he did so. Charity, I had never thought your father a compa.s.sionate man, but--we learn, sometimes."

"He--I don't know. I don't know what to say."

"Perhaps he changed, as it seems we all do.... My clothes were washed overside, by the way. I came into Boston harbor and to Uncle John's house wearing a suit of Shawn's garments too small for me."

"Yes, little brother, they were too small for you, now that's no lie."

"Don't ever laugh at him!"

"I was never farther from laughing. You killed your wolf...."

"Ben, what of Ledyard? He did not come home with you."

"Nay, Charity, he did not. Ledyard, who felt so great a dread of hanging--oh, it happened in the night, Charity, and the quiet, when we'd come clear of that bad weather off the Bermudas and were sailing free under a fair southeasterly and hoping to raise the Cape in a day or two. Your father was sleeping in the fever of his sickness. Dummy came to me in the dark, whimpering and pointing. He took the helm while I went forward, half knowing what I was to find, but I was a long time finding it. Ledyard had climbed out on the bowsprit with a length of rope. The rope slipped backward after he fell, and so his face came close against the face of the white G.o.ddess. I have never seen her look so careless and so proud."

"For the deity of the moon that may be a way of kindness."

"Maybe, Reuben, maybe...."

Ben could remember how some such thought had stirred in his own mind there in the moonless shadow--not altogether moonless, since the white G.o.ddess had taken starlight to her face and was delicately s.h.i.+ning, aloof, indifferent, as Ben leaned out and cut the rope and gave the spent body to the sea, and the sea accepted it with the careless whisper of an enfolding wave. He had gone back then to the quarterdeck, where the Captain had waked in a remission of the fever, and told him of it.

"She's taken better men," said Captain Jenks, and shrugged and groaned.

"All the same I never thought he had it in him." That was all Captain Jenks ever said of Matthew Ledyard. Ben in the undemanding hours of the days that followed could yet inquire: Where is the way where light dwelleth? And where does the self end and the universe begin? But it was plain--more than ever plain in this calm place where land and ocean met and the war between them was only the joyful-tragic music of breakers on firm sand--plain that he must ask those questions again and many times again: of Reuben, of Charity, of others not yet known, most often of himself, and would discover many answers, until the unimaginable time when all questions arrived at silence as they had for John Kenny.

Answers bearing illumination seemed closer in this place than ever before--"My garden," said Charity when they first came here, and held up to him a pebble of many colors, flowerlike, worn smooth and round with the sea's many thousand years.

"Storm never continues, I notice. The sky itself can't maintain it, nor can we. Always the calm afterward--here, Ben, or in the Spice Islands."

"There are storms then in the Spice Islands?"