Henry Milner Rideout

“ Still Marden could not pull himself away from what at once quieted and angered him.
"A man like me?" he stupidly faltered. "Why—what"—
"That's you all over!" cried the woman proudly. "Why, how many of 'em do you s'pose there is nowadays would do what you done for the sake of a woman?"
Once more, as in that meeting on the beach, a light began to grow slowly in his mind. Just so a man underground might see, far ahead, the day glimmering in the mouth of some burrow.
He drew himself free, without violence or scorn. The blood running in his veins was his own again, under control. ”

“ As Archer slipped his money into his shirt, and threw his coat on the beach, he wondered at the touch of respect.
They trooped down together. Under the heavy boots, glow-worm drops of phosphorus filled the wet seaweed with spreading blots of brightness. To the "chock-chock" of oars on thole-pins, some half-dozen boats were already crowding out through the gap in the sea-wall, every keel a running line of blue-gold fire. Among the half-dozen more which now put out, Archer found himself in the bow of Peter's roomy skiff. "Let me row," Hippolyte had begged. ”

“ It was a happy time in the little house: the cloud descended sometimes on the captain, but more rarely and briefly. There were long evenings when Zwinglius rolled out to gather news at Laurel's; when age and youth sat together trading confidences, slowly, with many intervals; when the clock ticked, the Northern Spies roasted sputtering between the andirons, the wood fire purred for snow, or a frosty nail started like a pistol shot in the night.
"And now why," Joyce questioned, as if their talk had not faltered, "why do they seem to think young people are always happy, and all that? ”

“ More than once he reads the written decree, or in echoing memory hears the spoken; and while coming to believe and deeply understand that a strange hour has struck, that his life has swung into a new cycle whose grief lies onward and whose joy behind, he must—alone, with the thing in his pocket or the words in his head—work at a desk, or navigate a ship, or chat with strangers, or walk floors, or sit in theatres, or paint steps. Slowly, therefore, but with fixed heart and equal mind, the captain had accepted his message in its finality. ”

“ It opened to show the light of a shaking candle, the little man's peering face, smooth-shaven but lined with years, and over his narrow shoulders the face of the girl, alert, clear, large-eyed, in a dusky radiance of brown hair that glimmered in the uncertain light. Their shadows leaped and swung on the walls behind them. Dim eyes and bright, sharpened brows and serene, both fixed their sight on the burly young sailor-man before them.
"Who is it?" said the man, in a gentle voice.
Archer, who had easily met the hostile looks of the revelers in Black Harbor, was abashed before this girl. ”

“ Angelo and the other Italians became mad creatures, and jabbered with gestures as of life and death among the stevedores who bundled the shooks up from the dark hole. And Marden loafed on deck with the Yankees, happy to watch these swarthy people work so fast in the heat that quivered on the quay, to admire the foreign city with its strangely fashioned houses all of stone, to follow with his eyes the long line of the quay and breakwater, the dark blue platoons of soldiers drilling in a distant field, and the Conca d' Oro sheltering all in a semicircle of mountains. ”

“ On a clear September evening the Amirald put out to sea, before a dying wind that veered among the black fir islands. Bunty and Zwinglius stood amidships, watching the infant endeavors of the new foresail. By the taffrail sat Joyce, bareheaded, her hair darkly ruddy in the level glow of sunset waves, against which the captain, a giant silhouette, revolved a quick pattern of radiating spokes. Down the vastness of the sky astern thin arcs of cloud, white overhead, pearl, rose, and saffron toward the west, curved from the zenith like frail ribs of an infinite vaulted aisle spanning sea and land. ”

“ All at once his heart gave a jump, and began to flutter in his ribs, little as a kitten's. There were footsteps scrambling among the pebbles at the top of the hill. He grasped the gun, and craned his neck to see above a clump of snapdragon. He could have cried out aloud in the long suspense. But no, it was not his brother: the man was little and thin. As he came down into the gully, Marden knew him for Heber Griswold. He came very close, stopping once nearly opposite Marden to pluck a joint of timothy, which he did with difficulty, it was so dry and tough with overripeness. ”

“ Through the open door came the faint whinnying of the horses on the point; the clock on the shelf ticked heavily; and Lee breathed as if he had been running. The two brothers stood ominously close, looking each other in the eye. Though one was a stripling beside the other's gigantic width, they were both strong men, both physically brave, both at white heat. Yet the power of victory shone like a light through Marden's eyes, and the older brother saw it. He stood undecided for an instant, then struck his colors and unclinched his fists. ”

“ Outside, stumping hoofs passed slowly down the pier, a clatter of loose planks, and the doleful mooing of cattle. Shouts rose: "Gangway there! Hurrup!" Footsteps pounded the deck, and past the window broad shadows flitted, swiftly intersecting. But Captain Christy sat oblivious; not until the door flew open with a resounding jar, and in the haze above stood a pair of short, heavy-booted legs, did he slowly rise from his dream.
"Sour and thick!" shouted a hoarse voice. A burly little man began to clamber down, driving before him into the lamplight a thin aureole of fog. "Sour and thick!" ”

“ There were long, comforting walks in the warm air; now that he felt the settled calm of knowing himself irretrievably alone, the return of spring seemed no longer a cruel mechanism of nature. Summer found him at work again on the beach, pausing now and then to look shoreward, with a kind of sad beatitude, at the house that he guarded.
Once when he was at the wharf to help in shipping some of the Yankee's barrels, he saw among the bystanders, city and country loungers, the woman of that memorable noon. He recognized her with an odd emotion that he could not name. She had seen him, he was sure ”

“ The boatman screwed his lean brown face like a monkey, as he blinked at the sunlight following them, and caught the high waves deftly with his short, tough oars. Beyond him and the pitching bow. Archer saw the tremendous cliffs of the island, a gunshot ahead, towering all pink and ruddy in the sunlight. A few gulls wheeled with forlorn cries along the face of the crags. Above, on the verge against the sky, a clump of tiny trees leaned inland as if tossed by a gale. ”

“ And meantime, as a young man often will, he could feel himself growing old.
One hot, bright noon, while he was retreating up the beach with his muddy basketful of clams, before the rising tide that slowly drove him shoreward, his eye caught the flutter of something pink at the edge of the land near the house. Looking closer, he saw—with a touch of surprise, for the place was almost never frequented—that it was a woman who stood there at the foot of the bank. She was looking out toward him, but as he straightened up she stooped and began plucking busily among the beach-grass. ”

“ An old brass lamp against a bulkhead, stirring in the gimbals at the petty shock of harbor waves, cast a tremulous evening glow on the Mongol face of Zwinglius Turner, who sat on the lower stairs; but the venerable, rough head of the captain, who stood upright, caught a dull gleam—slanting down from tiny barred windows frost-white with fog—as from some wintry, dungeon-like dawn. The captain's air was of business and reflection; the mate's that heavy, embarrassed gloom, half melancholy decorum and half fidgets, seen in figures who line the walls at a rustic funeral. ”

“ Archer went on, through the stink of fish among the gray huts, down to the beach; and here he came upon small groups, some twenty men in all, smoking, talking, and looking down over the long slope of wet pebbles and seaweed to where a few boats waited at the water's edge.
One of the groups he joined, with an odd reluctance. They peered at him through the dusk, with perhaps a little surprise, then smoked and spat in unconcern. They were sober to-night. By their faces—all dark and thin, some vicious, some dull—they were simple men enough, quiet, ordinary, and poor. ”

“ But there was a long silence.
"You must be awful lonesome," she said slowly, "livin' there all alone sence—for so long."
A light broke in upon Marden somehow, like the sun burning through a fog. In a flash his mind sped over the consequences. By his simple logic, if he should love this woman, he would marry her, and she would come to live— His whole nature suffered a revulsion, an upheaval. ”

“ He watched the girl as with light-footed swing she passed down the grass-grown street. "Clears the ground like—like a filly," he grumbled, his eyes twinkling affection.
"It makes me want to cry!" Joyce told herself, while she hurried along, her cheeks glowing and her fists clenched. "Taken to her bed! That old Dragon! Ugh!"
When she had turned a corner, the captain moved heavily back to the steps and bent again to his task of spattering.
Once he straightened up, to look dreamily toward the harbor, where aslant a sunken ridgepole and tumbled chimney rose a well-beloved topmast. ”

“ THE SINGING IN THE HOUSE After this, a year went by without further incident,—a summer of hard work, a winter of desperate sitting about and staring out of the window at snowfields and white-caps, of reading again the few books that had been his mother's, of pacing up and down like a wolf before the closed door of the other room. After the adventure on the shore, Marden knew himself for a man apart from other men. ”

“ High in the air, a firefly was blown down the wind, so that at the first glance he mistook it for a falling star. And in the sudden coolness Marden found himself thinking clearly and sweetly of his mother, whom he saw again, as in the blue December dawn, with the firelight shining upward on the gentle face and the sad gray eyes. It was all very distant, and belonged not to him; but at all events the vision was there.
"She'd understand even this," he thought. "Whether she ever forgave it or not, she knows what's been fighting in my veins. That's as much as a man deserves." ”

“ Northward the boat labored, sometimes making a long circuit where a weir straggled into the sea, sometimes tossing an oar's length from the giant columns and boulders, and always without a sign of human beings, and always preceded by the ominous, echoing cries of startled sea gulls.
"Black Harbor's round this p'int," said the boatman at last.
At the point the cliffs were split asunder into a mighty cove, across the mouth of which ran a bleak sea wall higher than a man's head,—all of gray stones as round as cannon-balls,—wave-built, impregnable, Cyclopean masonry. ”

“ The voyage home was longer, and to Marden, whose thoughts were now homeward bound so fast, was tedious. Ten days out from Gibraltar they ran into a dead tropical calm, with the sun blazing down from overhead in intolerable heat, the deck like the top of a great stove, and the ocean dead and blank to the high, taut line of the horizon. All day long the tar dripped from the rigging like raindrops on the deck, and the crew lay about as dead men. ”

“ V On calm April days,—when the buff fields, restored to sunlight, began to be furred with a faint green; when the last forgotten snow-drifts were sparsely inlaid in the dark north banks of nook-shotten isles, mountains, or headlands, and over the black bay cakes of river-ice floated seaward; when the lee of every gray house sheltered a patch of reviving turf spangled with the broad goldpieces of dandelions, and every flaw of wind brought smells of wet earth and brushwood smoke,—a visitor might have thought that the past also had been reborn. ”

“ Alone and aloft, they walked slowly, their shadows already spindling before them over the ledge and the yellow grass. Sometimes they crossed a bare scar of rattling pebbles, that in the shelving places rolled from under their feet, and, unless stopped in some green slant of matted ground-pine, fell silently over the cliff, down to the black seaweed at the foot of that dizzy height.
"I come here often," said Helen, after the long silence of outdoor companions. ”

“ Angelo the Maltese was never given a bigger part to play in this world than that of an incapable sea-cook and a distorter of the simplest messages; but now for one instant it fell to him to speak important lines in the obscure tragedy of the Sebrights. To them his faltering knock at the door had sounded like the thunder of the Commander's statue; his mumbling, broken English, the words of a Fate large, inexorable, and as cold as the wind that blew into the room from over the bay and the dazzling snowfields. ”