The shadows of westward-rolling cloud obscured the calm of Polaris and the other stars, and the May moon. Reuben Cory had looked out not long ago from John Kenny's window, noticing a ground-mist over the lawn, ghosts of it rising toward his eyes; a feeble thing like the random smoke of a fire dying out, but later it might increase, filling all the still air above the village, above the city in the north, above the harbor and that house in Dorchester where Charity at this moment might be watching the sea through her own window of loneliness. John Kenny's voice had drawn Reuben back to the island of lamplight by the bed, and Reuben had resumed his watch there, trying to interpret the sound. It was vast labor for John Kenny to speak at all; the effort flushed his sunken cheeks, twisted his lips loosely downward to the side; after such toil it was necessary to wipe his mouth, and Mr. Welland had recommended cooling his face with a damp cloth. Reuben had done this, skilled with months of practise; now he sought to analyze in memory the blurred fragment of speech. It had carried the inflection of a question. The word, most probably, was "long." Certainly within the stricken flesh a mind and a self were poignantly awake, needing an answer. The brown eyes retained much alertness. Sometimes, when the old man was asleep—as he was the greater part of the time—one could imagine that he would wake naturally, frown, say something half-kind and half-sharp, clearly, looking down the nose.

Trusting to insight—since thought must move in the atmosphere of doubt, and is often free to claim that this guess is truly a little better than that one—Reuben spoke slowly and plainly: "It is a year, Uncle John, since Ben went away." A thought of the ground-mist touched Reuben again as he settled in his chair and reached for the book on the bedside table. Doubtless it would increase; men would grope in it cursing; the tower of South Church would dissolve away, shadowing forth some remote day of demolition, and in the harbor no ships would move.

Uncle John could still make some motions of his head within a narrow range, enough to indicate yes or no, agreement or denial, satisfaction or protest. Reuben saw it stir, the waxen chin lowering a fraction of an inch, the gray owl tufts rising the same tiny distance from the dent in the pillow—a nod. The guess must have been fair. Reuben saw the flush fading, the deep wrinkles around the eyes relaxing after travail. Uncle John could also move his right leg and arm, and until about a month ago had used the right hand to feed himself. Kate fed him now, or Reuben: the paralysis of his stroke had not advanced, but that right arm seemed too weary, too skeletal, and the old man had finally appeared willing to be delivered from that exertion.

"Uncle John, I've thought all winter long that Ben might come back this spring. It is May. The wild flags are out in the marshes. I know we cannot put any trust in a mere hope, but I keep the thought in my mind. I feel certain he is alive, and will come home when he can."

The eyes watched, with intelligence; as Reuben was aware, nothing in response to what he had said was worth the effort of speech; acceptance of the message was enough. Reuben held a volume of Montaigne near Uncle John's right hand, so that if it wished the hand could rise and turn the pages, indicating a part to be read. When sleep would not arrive, Uncle John seemed to enjoy such reading, and Montaigne was his usual choice. At times Erasmus, Locke, Sir Thomas Browne, Virgil—more often Montaigne. The blurred eyes lowered, the hand groped among the pages for a while, and tapped the beginning of the essay "Use Makes Perfect," as Reuben had almost known it would, and fell away.

Familiar with the text, Reuben could read without much thought for anything but slowness and clarity in his voice, remembering to keep his face turned toward the old man. Reuben and Mr. Welland were convinced that since the stroke of last July, Mr. Kenny's deafness had thickened; he could hear plain speech and hear it well, but it was apparent how closely his eyes followed the motion of a speaker's lips.

"'... A man may by custom fortify himself against pain, shame, necessity and such like accidents, but, as to death, we can experiment it but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it.'" Natural enough, Reuben thought, and perhaps good, that Uncle John should so often wish to hear this essay, in which Montaigne would have it that one must train for death as for a voluntary act. Not unnatural anyway, for one whose task of dying had begun months ago and might continue yet a long time. "'... with how great facility do we pass from waking to sleeping, and with how little concern do we lose the knowledge of light and of ourselves....'"

Kate would have been distressed by it. She clung, at least outwardly, to the thought that John Kenny would recover. Reuben supposed that when she was alone with herself, not sustained by those who loved her enough to reinforce the fantasy, she knew better.

"'Of this I have daily experience: if I am under the shelter of a warm room, in a stormy and tempestuous night, I wonder how people can live abroad, and am afflicted for those who are out in the fields: if I am there myself, I do not wish to be anywhere else....'"

The eyes watched. It was possible, Reuben felt, that the hidden self was listening to his voice as much as to the voice of Montaigne: this would remain in the region of doubt, a thing not to be known. He read on without weariness to the end: "'Whosoever shall so know himself, let him boldly speak it out.'" But Reuben thought: Who under the North Star hath ever known himself to the depth? May one not most nearly approach it by gaining a glimpse of the self in the thought of one other?—but this will happen only in the rarest moments of the journey.

John Kenny could sometimes speak with considerable clearness—clearness at any rate to one who had spent much time in learning to translate the thwarted sounds. He did so now. Kate might have been confused; Reuben found no difficulty in receiving the message: "If you will, Reuben—at the proper time—let it be known—with what peace—an infidel can die."

Reuben knew that the light convulsion of the distracted lips thereafter was a smile, in itself a major achievement. He smiled in response and set Montaigne aside. "I'll read from Religio Medici—shall I, sir?" The eyes pondered; the right hand moved gently back and forth, which meant: "Yes, read at random or as you wish."

Reuben read, seeking out words he desired because he had known them at other hours and in another voice, but not unmindful of his listener's preoccupations so far as a boy of sixteen could hope to guess at them: "'Further, no man can judge another, because no man knows himself: for we censure others but as they disagree from that humor which we fancy laudable in ourselves, and commend others but for that wherein they seem to quadrate and consent with us....

"'... It is an act within the power of charity, to translate a passion out of one breast into another, and to divide a sorrow almost out of it self; for an affliction, like a dimension, may be so divided as, if not indivisible, at least to become insensible. Now with my friend I desire not to share or participate, but to engross, his sorrows; that, by making them mine own, I may more easily discuss them; for in mine own reason, and within myself, I can command that which I cannot intreat without myself, and within the circle of another....

"'... I love my friend before myself, and yet methinks I do not love him enough: some few months hence my multiplied affection will make me believe I have not loved him at all....'

"Elsewhere in the essay," said Reuben, and closed the book, "I think Sir Thomas was somewhat entranced by his own music at the cost of reason." The eyes watched, probably with kindness; Reuben searched for the motion of another smile and decided, but doubtfully, that he had seen it. The eyes grew less alert; soon the old man might fall asleep. "I once asked Mr. Welland how good a doctor Sir Thomas Browne is thought to have been. He didn't know. But he hath told me, sir, how in the time since Sir Thomas wrote, less than a hundred years, the art is much advanced. I can't but think it must go further in another hundred, as more of the unknown yields to inquiry." The eyes were patient, interested, kind; and drowsier. At length they closed, Mr. Kenny's face settling into the tranquil imitation of death, his breathing shallow, not uncomfortable. Reuben returned to the window. The mist had grown to a veil over all things.

Light from this window penetrated the whiteness as far as a budded maple on the lawn. Whorls of thicker vapor passed through the light, small disturbances in the ocean of mist that would now be over all the village, perhaps over all the coast as far as the Cape and out beyond. As in the larger ocean, life groped about on the bottom in a purposeful blindness.

On a May night a year ago, when Reuben and Gideon Hibbs and Mr. Kenny had searched the water front, such a mist had hung low on the sullen water of the harbor. That mist too had grown after a while, a white tide rising over the warehouses and idle docks, blotting vision, smothering and diffusing the nervous beams of lanterns and the sounds of frightened voices wiry in the throat. Every plank bore a slime of dampness; the cordage of sleeping ships was dripping with a whisper of slow tears. Night transformed the water front to a labyrinth dreary, foul and perilous. Seldom any freshly illuminated face looked back at you bravely there at night, unless it might be that of a drunken man too sodden to be afraid. The smooth fogbound water of the bay had possessed no voice that night except at the piling of the wharfs where, fumbling and muttering secretly, it encountered the transitory obstruction of the works of man.

Where are you? Where are you?...

Constable Derry had lent the searchers a sturdy man from the Select Watch. It was that man who discovered the floating corpse, its arm caught in a tangle of rope that had most unreasonably been knocked or thrown off a dock not far from Mr. Kenny's, and he identified the broken old man as a watchman hired by that wharf's owner Mr. Harkness. Waked and summoned in the saddest hours of the night, little Mr. Harkness danced up and down on the dock in rage. "She was here!" he fumed. "I paid forty-six pounds for her, and that only last week." "This man, sir——" "Yes yes, my watchman, poor devil. I tell you she was here! Went aboard of her myself." Tactfully Mr. Derry's man extracted the information that Mr. Harkness was referring to a sloop, a swift rangy craft of twenty tons—gone, but by Mr. Harkness not forgotten.

Reuben had taken no part in this inquisition. Until that hour it had been possible to imagine that Ben had ridden away somewhere—say into the countryside, to think, cool off his disappointment; he could even be waiting for them at Roxbury. Hibbs and Uncle John seemed still able to cling to something like that, to suppose that the poor dripping ruin on the dock, its head crushed in the back, had nothing to do with Ben and that devil Shawn. Reuben could do so no longer. Where are you? The question could be directed nowhere except into the rolling fog and the dark.

The following day, after dragging out the remainder of a crazed sleepless night, Reuben felt it merely as the confirmation of something known, when he learned that a stevedore had brought Mr. Derry the decisive scrap of truth. This man had been near Harkness' wharf a little after sunset when a well-dressed youth and an older man in a green coat had come by, the boy leading a brown mare. The man was talking a spate, and cheerfully, about some good luck. "No great thing, a fishing venture, but I'm content, I say it's the smile of fortune on me, now that's no lie, so come aboard a few minutes anyway and drink to it." He chattered much more the roustabout could not remember, and the boy said very little, but presently offered him a shilling to mind the horse, saying he would be gone not more than half an hour. Then the two had gone out on Harkness' wharf or maybe the one beyond it. The stevedore had been puzzled by that boy, who seemed downcast and confused; might have been weeping not long before; drunk, the stevedore thought at first, but he smelled no liquor when the shilling changed hands. It had grown quite dark by then, the lamps of Ship Street lighted but not sufficient to make the strangers' faces plain; the stevedore would know the man in the green coat again, he thought, but maybe not the boy—handsome though, his lip a bit in need of a shave, and very young. "When they was going the man in the green coat winked at me, Constable—you know, meaning-like, like as if he meant to say it was a boy's troubles and we was all young once and took things hard...." More than the half-hour had passed; the stevedore found a hitching post for the mare and went in search, finding nothing at Harkness' wharf except a lumber-barge, although he thought he remembered noticing a small sloop moored there during the day. He took the mare to a public stable and returned to search further, but learned nothing and gave it up in disgust until the morning brought him the news of the watchman's murder.

That, for nearly three months, had been the sum of knowledge....

Soft-voiced in the room behind him, not moving now with the bounce and ease of a year ago, Kate Dobson was saying: "Do you go and sleep now, Master Reuben. I'll bide with him the rest of the night."

"Did you sleep enough yourself?"

"Well enough. Ah, the doctor!" she said, and smiled at his finger tips pressed on her fat wrist. The message from her elderly heart was slow and sound. Once or twice Reuben had detected a fluttering in it; tonight he found nothing out of the way except that variability of pace which Mr. Welland described as not unnatural. Kate accepted this sort of thing as a game to be played with the tenderness of maternal indulgence. Yet again it might be that when she was alone with herself, thinking perhaps of Reuben Cory in the here-and-now and not so much of the twelve-year-old boy who once collapsed in her arms at the end of a long journey, she knew better.

Reuben's hand sought the sampler that hung by the door in line with Mr. Kenny's vision, touching the truth of the dark leaves, the fine-stitched perfection of the slanting letters: Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori. Kate had not been able to finish it until after the old man was struck down. Mr. Kenny could see it there, had held it, groped at it with the right hand, smiled in his distorted fashion, mumbling blurred sounds of pleasure and thanks. It seemed to Reuben that for this labor of years she ought to have received his elaborate courtly declamation mingled with airy nonsense and a pat on the rump; she never would. She was not wholly satisfied with the sampler even now: she said some of the ivy leaves were too big in contrast to the letters. Omnia vincit amor—but love is a wider region than was spoken of in the Eclogues. Reuben wandered downstairs with no desire to sleep, and closed the front door behind him and walked out alone into the mist....

Remembering Deerfield. Mist lay there sometimes in the early mornings of the end of winter or the beginning of spring, over the low ground by the river, or within the palisade, until a strengthening sun dissolved it away from the brave small houses, the training field, the little dooryard gardens; and Mother liked gray mornings, but Jesse Plum said they worsened the Pain in his Back, and Father looked on them mildly as no worse, no better than others-because, said Joseph Cory, every day was a new-minted shilling to be spent as reasonably as one might....

Remembering—one sometimes winces at the scar of a minor wound—a house where the judgments of the Lord were true and righteous altogether.

Remembering a narrow gray face advancing in the snow:—If I had died then, who would walk in this fog in this year's May? Mm-yas—a might-have-been universe for each event that might have been. Should I reach out to that maple, the cosmos will wag one way; another if I do not. Notice, gentlemen, the astonishing power of Reuben Cory! Philosophy, I vow Mr. Hibbs would enjoy it in all solemnity, bless the man, but likely it'll slip my mind before I see him again. A boy ties a string to a pulled milk-tooth and keeps it a while in his pocket, then somehow loses it....

Remembering a midsummer evening—July, the windless heat a burden of fever; lightning, too distant to be heard, startling the black sky over Cambridge or some farther place in the northwest—and the coming of a messenger on a lathered horse to Mr. Kenny's house. Good news comes often quietly, arriving like dawn; bad news like a rabid beast leaping for the throat. That horseman was merely gentle Sam Tench, the clerk who had labored so long and dustily in Mr. Kenny's countinghouse that he seemed like an outgrowth of his three-legged stool, but scrambling down from a sweaty horse and panting his news on the doorstep, he was Fate, if you like, since the word he bore came direct from Her Majesty's frigate Dread, newly arrived at Boston for provisions and sundry errands of state and war.

On a morning in early July, in open waters west of the Bermudas, the Dread had picked up one Pieter Van Anda, single survivor of the sloop Schouven out of Amsterdam, who had clung all night to the smashed fragment of a mast. The Schouven had been attacked by a fast ketch flying no flag, boarded, plundered, her captain and most of her crew butchered in a rapid engagement where no quarter was given—but later, before the sloop was set afire, the mad captain of the ketch had harangued, even pleaded with the three who still lived, to throw in their lot with him, for he was bound to the other side of the world as soon as he could acquire two or three other vessels as good as his own, and was in need of good men. The sloop was worthless except for her provisions and so must be burned, but would they not go with him? One consented; the other and Van Anda, then expecting nothing worse than being set adrift, would not; they were thrown into the sea. This, the tall, sweet-voiced, black-haired captain told them—they being crushed against the rail of the sloop by four men who seemed not mad but merely rabble of the baser sort, pirates—this was an evil thing he did and he knew it, but the end he served was beyond their understanding, and could he allow them to bear witness to his acts before the time was ripe? Perhaps the sea would be kind, at any rate he must do as his inner voice commanded and could do no other. As he told them this, he rubbed a copper coin, and his blue eyes spread into black, burning into them. "And since I cannot be trusting you now, Mother of God, the time's past for any change of heart, and so God keep you, gentlemen"—and the sea (said Van Anda) in its most furious mood was surely kinder than such a man.

The ketch carried two small guns—six-pounder falconets, Van Anda thought—handled with great skill or great luck, for the first shot, delivered with no warning as the ketch glided to windward of her, sliced off the Schouven's mast and left her in a welter of confusion while the ketch's boat shot across the gap and the pirates boarded her like starved rats. The Schouven carried only seven hands; it was soon over. An infernal vessel, Van Anda said—the airs had been light that evening, the Schouven making not much more than steerage way, yet the ketch ran down on her out of the eye of the late sun as if the Devil himself had lent her a capful of wind. Clinging to that fragment of the mast, Van Anda had seen her for a while, speeding southward, in the light of sunset and of the burning sloop. A beautiful, wild, unnatural thing, her bowsprit low-slung, her figurehead a white maiden, her name Diana.

The Dread's lookout had seen the fire, too, from several leagues' distance, and the frigate hurried off her course to inquire about it. The blazing sloop filled and sank during the night; it was dawn, the breeze still fitful and contrary, when Van Anda was found. His story told, the frigate beat to southward a while in the wrath of vengeance. In the evening a fore-and-aft mizzen was sighted, far south, and found again in the morning. At that sunrise the Diana—if it was she—cracked on all sail and by evening was hull down, though the Dread was bearing all canvas, a mastiff groaning in pursuit of a greyhound. The Dread found empty sea next morning and was obliged to put about for Boston.

John Kenny asked: "Did this Dutchman speak of others?"

"He spoke of a big red-haired man jabbering to himself in French, and a fat, short man they called Tom, and—and a gray-haired man with a broken nose and a great purple patch covering all the left side of his face. Sir, I asked myself, could that be anyone but Matthew Ledyard that was carpenter of the Artemis? No one of theSchouvenwent aboard the ketch except that one man who agreed to join them. Some must have remained aboard the—Diana. My God, sir, I had thought Ledyard loyal as any man could be——"

"The devil with Ledyard. He described no others?"

"No others."

"Did he say if any of them was young?"

"Sir, sir, I asked him that, and he said—he said no." Then neither Sam Tench nor Reuben was quick enough to catch the old man, who fell like a broken spar and struck his head against the doorframe, and for more than a month thereafter could not speak at all.

Reuben walked in the mist, remembering. No stars; the May moon, not visible, lent a faint pallor to the enfolding vapor, or he imagined it, so that he walked in a darkness not complete. He could have followed this path through the back fields, he supposed, if he were wholly blind. He moved slowly, pausing many times, though not in need to assure himself of direction, remembering.

The war went on of course, in its far-off way; it always had. It seems we snatched ourselves a helping of glory at some place called Ramillies; but that was very long ago, two years ago, 1706. Throughout the fighting weather of last year, one heard, my lord Marlborough had put in the time in the Low Countries doing nothing in particular....

A certain order had been established at the house in Roxbury by the end of the summer months of confusion. Four friends—Reuben was well aware of it—had built a sort of wall of defense around a youth who was legally not yet a man and an old man who could scarcely move or speak: Amadeus Welland, William Heath the captain of the sloop Hebe, Sam Tench, and Gideon Hibbs. Reuben was formally apprenticed to the doctor; Harvard, by Reuben's wish, vetoed. On a morning when, according to his own tortured speech, his mind was very clear, John Kenny wrote out in a wild but readable scrawl his desire that Welland, Heath, Tench and Hibbs be appointed trustees for his affairs while he remained disabled; the court allowed it, giving Tench a limited power of attorney. The warehouse and wharf were mortgaged, and rented to Mr. Riggs of Salem, the most merciful of Kenny's creditors.

Reuben discovered with no surprise that it was quite simple to get along without five pairs of shoes; also to tend the garden and scythe the lawn at odd moments without the aid of Rob Grimes. Hibbs too had been obliged to find employment with another family at Roxbury whose son and heir required cramming, but he continued to live at Kenny's house, insisting on paying for his room and board, nagging Reuben to continue his Greek—was not Hippocrates a Greek?—and trying to drive a little more general learning into the boy, but underhandedly as it were, under the pretense that he was merely keeping up with his own studies at the borders of philosophy. The sloop Hebe, unmortgaged, ran her small profitable errands between Boston and Newport like a dog who will go on herding sheep or guarding the house into the shadows of old age, not even asking for a pat on the head. Even Rob Grimes strolled over occasionally, pecking peevishly at odd jobs and refusing pay for it; he ceased perhaps only because Kate was singularly short and cold with him.

It seemed to Reuben that by spending a lifetime in contemplation of human love and loyalty, you might learn one or two things about people, but not their limits. One could simply note: under certain conditions, certain members of the human race—most, maybe—are capable of supreme goodness. The Preacher Ecclesiastes was old, weary, holding some unreal scale of value; disappointed, like enough, because these bewildered passion-ridden beings fell so far short of his private image of the godlike. You could not watch Amadeus Welland making grave monkey faces under his wig for the hilarious comfort of a sick child, and say that all is vanity. That was no fair example, because Amadeus was not as other men; so consider—well, Kate Dobson, who called herself common and stupid, and would be spending uncalculated kindness to the day she died.

The Preacher's namesake was loyal too. Through all vicissitudes he remained a beat-up yellow tomcat, charging not a farthing for the privilege of scratching him under his evil chin....

The same human race included that devil Shawn, the bronze butchers who fell upon Deerfield, a smiling murderer with one eye. Of course.

Sometimes also Reuben speculated: If they—Heath, or Hibbs, or Tench, or even dear Kate—if ever they knew that I am a monster, a lusus naturae, a two-headed calf, a moral leper so outlandish and beyond hope of forgiveness that, were my nature known, even the children in the street would be a bit afraid to throw dead cats and dung—what then? Would there then be any part of this earth where Amadeus and I might go, and not be hated, driven, feared, utterly condemned?... The thought came only in the darkest hours; seldom if ever when he was with Mr. Welland, the world excluded, the ugly pockmarked face an unfathomable essay in the beautiful, the moment blazing or peaceful as sun on summer grass. Here in the mist, the fear touched him as an almost trivial thing, an arrow missing the mark, a fire burning somewhere else, a lesson glimpsed further on in the book. Blessed be the mask—and yet I hate it, will ever hate it, wearing it only because I wish to live, remembering it was not worn in the time that some have named the Golden Age.

If I am a monster—who seem to myself a young man not incapable of the earthly virtues, who love the sun and rain as well as any man and would never willingly do a dishonest thing or hurt anyone, who need and rejoice like any man in all the harmless glory of the senses—then who made me a monster? If I am evil, who set the standard whereby men and women are to be judged? Let Mr. Cotton Mather tell me God did so and will punish the transgressor: I am not interested, nor is Amadeus, who doth believe in God after his own fashion.

Reuben knew he was near the beech tree. He put out his hand to find the amiable tower of it and leaned against it in the mist, remembering. I stood here last year, having made certain discoveries. A good day—April, I think. Ben rode home smiling. A long time ago.

It was never possible to hold away for any long stretch of minutes the knowledge that Ben was gone. One schooled the mind to repeat that lesson, though it might whimper and snarl miserably in repeating it: He is probably lost. Then, the lesson driven home once more, he turned usually to Vesalius, or Micrographia, or Neurologia Universalis (Ben's gift!), or the collected works of Ambroise ParÉ, or the Severall Surgical Treatises of Richard Wiseman, because Mr. Welland said it was time for him to acquire a small preliminary hint of the enigmas of knife and suture.

"But why do so many die after trifling minor surgery? Don't we all suffer small cuts and bruises repeatedly and take no harm by it?"

"We don't know. Doctors despise surgery; send 'em to the filthy barber surgeons, and they die. I no longer send anyone to the barbers, Reuben. If surgery can't be avoided I stumble through it myself, trying to follow the methods you'll read in that book of ParÉ's, with these grim little tools—that's splendid steel, by the way, I care for 'em like an old housewife—and I've lost very few under the knife, but I can't tell you why. Why, maybe they're so bemused by the wig that they stay alive so to have another look at it...."

At other times it was scarcely possible to drive the lesson home at all. Then in partial retreat from the unbearable he permitted the dream of Ben's return—telling over this complex year as it might be told to him, polishing those whimsical or naughty inventions that used to be rewarded by the startled stare of his gray eyes and his rocketing laughter. Reuben knew such fantasy to be a drug, but yielded in times of need. "You see, Ben, not to put too sharp a point on it when likely it was dull——" No no! Not that way, seeing he may have truly loved her. "You see, Ben, doubtless because their fortunes went down with ours, Captain Jenks being lost or presumed lost—why, she married. Some ancient December blossom"—revise!—"some man named Hoskison, a merchant of Salem where she now liveth, but her mother and Charity dwell with the mother's brother at Dorchester, the said Charity being a most sweet maid, little Benjamin, and greatly changed, who hath not forgotten thee."

And so she is, he thought, strolling sure-footed away from the beech in the deep quiet of the mist—so she is; and he wondered in passing whether any self ever lived that was not divided by contrary hungers. Occasionally with Charity—when she sat close by him, or pushed at his chest with friendly impatience, or rubbed her cheek on his shoulder in her impulsive way that was half child, half woman—occasionally Reuben could be reminded of those needs the world allows. Never enough, he thought; never complete; never the sure and hearty answer that Ben, for example, would have known.

And never, in fact, quite free from a sense of the pressure of the world, of the command to conform and be like all others; and since to yield to that nagging, to conform and be like others at whatever sacrifice, is to lose oneself in the meanest of all vanities begotten of fear, it is not acceptable to the lonely.

Charity came often to Roxbury, lending Kate a hand in the kitchen as well as the sickroom. She did so even more often after the move to Dorchester, for her uncle allowed her to ride about a good deal—much more, some said, than was at all fitting, safe or decent for a young girl. She was calmer at fourteen, not so much given to fits of temper, at least not at Roxbury. Reuben seldom saw her in her mother's company, since Madam Jenks at Dorchester had submerged in a stately retirement, letting it be known that she was not long for this world, the which was merely a place of trial for the life to come, and blessed reunion with One Who Was Gone and, though the best of men, had never quite understood the palpitations of her heart, and was even given at times to profane thoughts and actions, for the which he doubtless repented in the end, and was taken to the Lord, a good provider with all his faults, and sometimes fluttered in her chest so that she could scarcely breathe at all, but were in no sense connected with her overweight, which was slight and for that matter incomprehensible since she ate like a very sparrow, and suffered also from insomnia and risings from the stomach.

Some day, Reuben thought—oh, some day perhaps that other world ought to be explored, if only for the sake of the slow, strange enterprise of trying to learn a little about the human race. Amadeus would probably say that it ought.

Never with Charity of course. Reuben was aware that Charity, very much a woman this last year, did not regard him as a potentially aggressive male, but as a friend who could be trusted to listen with kindness, share a moment of mirth, speak with intelligence about the fantastic pictures she still liked to draw, and even take her part against those restrictions of a woman's world that chafed her to rage. Besides, there was that day in November, soon after the move to Dorchester, when Charity Jenks threw her snarled-up sewing all the way across Kenny's library and flung herself crying into Reuben's arms, to speak of a sorrow until then unknown to him. A servant of theirs, a French-born slave Clarissa, had been sold to New York when the household was broken up, seeing there was no place for her at Dorchester—and that girl, said Charity, had been her real mother for years and years, and was the only friend she would ever have. "You have me," said Reuben, and was startled to watch her considering that, sniffling, accepting it and seeming remarkably comforted. A few minutes later she was speaking, for the first time freely and shamelessly—about Ben. And then of the house at Dorchester, which was near the shore. She had found a place where tumbled rocks made three walls excluding the land, the fourth side open to the sea—you could look out for miles on a clear day, and could hardly fail to see any of the ships that came into Boston out of the south; she'd draw him a picture. She did so; and then this spring, about a month ago, Reuben had seen that lookout for himself, making a harmless conspiracy of the secret approach to it, since otherwise tongues would have wagged and clattered. It had seemed to him, in the fair sun of that spring afternoon, beyond reach of a thunderous high tide but not beyond the reach of the spray, that Charity was almost happy, though not in the same way or to the same degree that he had been happy himself for some moments, even hours, in the past year....

Well, it would be no simple or pleasant thing, to tell Ben about Faith's marriage. Do it quickly, lightly, ready to go along with whatever mood took Ben at the news. Then later, maybe, the wedding could be described in—in harrumphitatis Reubencoribus. "I did endeavor, little Benjamin, to place my spirit in such posture as to snap up any unconsidered morsels of hymeneal sanctity that might be flipped my way when the good and just Eliphalet Hoskison re-entered that holy state in manly pride and a gingery-yallery weskit"—Revise! Leave out most of Hoskison; to Hell with Eliphalet Hoskison and the ivory buttons on that hemi-spherical weskit!—"but my chaste resolution, sir, was overruled, and barely indeed could I repress the cachinnations of a lewd nature and subsume the concupiscent, when my perspiring attention was led astray by observation of a touching yet not wholly tragical prodigy—prodigal tragedy—of nature. Nay rather, in these latter years I have come to regard it as a pastoral or even, mm-yas, a comical-historical-pastoral interlude, the which I will elucidate if you perpend. The dominie who wedded those twain was not, little Benjamin, a tall man, and on the top he was bald as a baby's bottom—for this I can summon witnesses if need arise. Now as he stood before us in the ultimate or perhaps the penultimate prayer, it was required of him to lower that benevolent denuded skull, and I did behold, advancing unto the pinkish radiance thereof, a small fly. A fly, sir, buffeted by the gathering winds of October and, I think, lonely. He circled the dull glow thrice, I saw it, and thrice flew away, and yet once more returned—drawn, do you see, to the services in spite of original and later sin—and circled a last time resisting the call, unrepentant, naughty in mortal pride and unredeemed, but in the end lit softly upon the holy ground. There did he scrub his forelegs, Benjamin, and listen, taking thereafter a few sprightly steps toward a certain silvery fringe, the which must have indicated to him: 'Thus far and no farther!' Strait is the gate and few that enter, mm-yas. Frustrated and remote indeed from a state of grace, he did flirt his saucy wings, and listen, and scrub his middle legs, and bravely attempt another region of the fringe where he was again baffled and cast down. Fiat justitia, ruat caelum! I watched him returning to the center, broken (as I thought) in spirit, not one of the elect yet loathing his sins and mourning after the pardon of them, but there most delicately—O Ben, Ben, as a fellow sinner I foresaw this and my bowels yearned for him—there most delicately did he lay down a mild brown memento of his presence as a representative of the secular arm. Thereat he shuddered but the act was done, ad majorem lignocapitis humani gloriam. He listened then as it were with an absent mind. He cocked his red head at me as we listened, and I knew then, Benjamin, I knew from the shameless manner of his conversation that mercy and salvation had passed him by. He sampled the pink surface with an heretical tongue and thought little of it. Lost even to the sense of decorum, he r'ared up behind and scrubbed his ultimate legs—furtively, however, you understand, like any other boy in church. And then at last (in fact at very long last) he rose up and buzzed away—relieved but not saved, not saved at all, by the resonance of an Amen."

Later. Mm-yas—much later, if at all....

He walked in the mist, no longer remembering but in the here-and-now, coming at length to the cottage, where he would have tapped on the window, but Amadeus Welland came to him across the lawn out of the mist. "I slept a while but was restless. A turn around the garden—sends me off sometimes. Is it one of his bad nights, Reuben?"

"Nay, not bad, in fact I thought him rather cheerful, as far as one can guess. I read to him, his usual Montaigne, and then a little from the Religio because he seemed to be listening and enjoying it. When Kate relieved me I think he was not far from sleep. Ah, how long, Amadeus?"

"No one could possibly say. I once knew the apoplexy to leave a woman quite motionless and yet alive for six years. Others go in a few moments, a few weeks. And there are remissions, don't forget. It's no mere word of comfort to say that he might recover his speech, even the use of his left side, or partial use. I've seen that happen. Or it might be that when he falls asleep tonight, or some night, he won't wake."

"He said once—if I rightly understood the words, but he was excited, trying too hard to speak, and so they were difficult—he said he could not die until Ben comes home."

"Well.... The mere thought of it might do much to keep him in this world a while. Nobody understands the power of the mind over the flesh—or ought I to say, over the rest of the flesh? Or the power of flesh over the mind. We don't know, we don't know."

"I know it is May, and a misty night."

"Yes, and thou art here."

"And I think I enjoy the misty nights, Amadeus, mm, even the nights when the moon's down as much as the others, and I've wondered why, and I think I know the reason. I enjoy them because I know that, while others are sometimes afraid of the dark, I am not. I can tell you, I can tell you surely, I'm not afraid of anything in nature. Am I speaking nonsense, I wonder? Why, before a lion my flesh would cringe and squeak, I don't doubt it, but somewhere, Amadeus, somewhere in here there's a part of me would hold calm and yield nothing even to the thought of mine own death."

"Have I not alway known that, in thee?"

"You have?"

"Yes."

"So again I learn something.... I'm tired."

"Come in then and rest."

"Yes, that's my wish," said Reuben, but he knelt and took Welland's hands and rested his forehead in the warmth of them.

"Art thou in need of me?"

"You've taught me how tomorrow is another region, so let it be—I'm not part of it tonight. I shall be forever in need of you."

"But there will be years...."

"When you die before me, a thing I do accept because I must, I shall be in need of you still, and will bear the need, and laugh sometimes, and work as you've taught me, and grow old—I swear I'm not afraid. I told my brother once I would sail with him to the Spice Islands. Where do children go, Amadeus?"

"Matthew, you may call me an old fart, you that's no bloody lamb yourself, but I can remember when I was a boy in Gloucester. More and more I remember it, the decent way of living there and the little houses—no easterly ever shook them houses, Matthew, tight to the ground the way they was, they a'n't got the wit to build no such way in Boston. Good, that it was. Eh, I remember that low-tide smell in my mother's kitchen, year 'round, call it a stink if you like, not me, you might say I was born to it. That was a good life—if a man could live Godfearing, not go whoring after strange inventions, listening at the Devil in his left ear."

"Oh, 'vast preaching, Joey, I got no heart for it."

"I a'n't preaching. Oons, I was only crowding thirteen when I first went on my father's sloop. We was to the Banks, good luck all the way, home with cod to the gun'ls. Weight of one more fish scale would've sunk her, my father said, and said it was me brung him the good luck. Me! That's a futtering laugh, that is, all the same he said it. I'll trouble you for that bottle.... Dried-up scarecrow, five good teeth in my head, you got to remember I was young one time.... I can't think how I ever come to listen at that man, and me a watchman, all done with the sea or should've been. Now don't betray me, Matthew Ledyard. Don't never let it out I said such a thing. I got no wish to die at his hand, and far from home."

"You look young now—being it's that dark a man can't see his fingers."

"Now that's not comical, Matthew, that's not kind.... Matthew."

"Yah?"

"Moon'll be up in an hour.... What if we don't go back to the ketch?"

"You fool, he means to clear out of here on the morning ebb."

"I know that."

"Well? Orders was to row back no later 'n moonrise. It was a favor, to leave us stay on the beach this long so to stretch our legs and catch a nap off shipboard—knows we got a bottle too. He wants them water kegs no later 'n moonrise and the fruit too, though I can't say that's good for nothing but to make a great slosh into a man's belly, let 'em say it keeps off scurvy if they like, I won't eat the bloody muck and never had no scurvy.... Joey Mills, don't be more of a damn fool than you can avoid."

"A man could hide on this island. He'd maroon us—willingly."

"And him breaking his heart for a year because he's short-handed?"

"But Matthew, he's jumpy here as the Devil in a gale of wind. He's got no love for the Bahamas. Call him mad, but he means all he says. Could he get him another vessel good as Artemis—ha! Diana—and enough hands for safety, he'd be off and away after his daft dreams to the other side of the world. He'd hunt for us here, yah, but not long."

"Long enough to find your gandy-shank back'ard end sticking out of a bush and sink a hook in it. And we'd live on what? Fruit and clams?"

"I seen goat tracks back there a piece this afternoon."

"Luff, you bloody beggar! You're stern-heavy. Got your old arse spread to a following wind, let 'er freshen and down you go by the head. Tell you what he'd do. He'd say to that fat swine Tom Ball: 'Down!' he'd say, and down would Ball go on all fours and come rooting up the whole island for you like the hog he is."

"You sure to God hate that man, don't you?"

"Two gods he has, his belly and his other purse. Why wouldn't I? Wasn't it Ball mostly that set me against the Old Man? Begun it the day after we come into Boston last year, and now I know that him and Shawn was old friends reunited and Shawn had set him up to it, but then I thought Ball was an honest cod. Sought me out, he did—come to my house, drank up with me, praised the wife's cooking, things like that. And begun dropping little things in my ear to turn me against the Old Man. One evening he told me Cap'n Jenks laughed behind my back about my—my face, my mark. Lies, all lies, but it wasn't till it was far too late that I knowed it must be all lies, and Shawn set him up to it so to win me over to his God-damned venture. I could run a knife in Shawn, but that Tom Ball, he ought to be tried out in one of French Jack's kettles—slow, for the lard.... Suppose we don't go back to the ketch. Suppose we stayed alive, and sometime an honest ship took us off. You think there's any place in the world for us now? Boston? Gloucester? Can we go anywhere and not be hanged? Gi' me that bottle back."

"I was thinking of Virginia."

"Virginia, he says. Her Majesty's law don't reach there, ha? Why, word of Artemis will have gone all up and down the coast for a year."

"Maybe. Suppose.... If we got to go back to the ketch, suppose we might—do something?... Matthew, it come to me, that man Shawn made one big mistake in his bloody life."

"Keeping the Old Man alive?"

"Ay, that, but that a'n't what I meant. Sure, only a madman would have let Jenks live. Tell you something about that too, something I seen the other day when I was into the cabin to carry out slops. But the big mistake Shawn made was when he stole that boy. I'm old. I watch, I see things. They say you can't kill a witch but with a silver bullet. I tell you plain, if anyone ever does for Shawn, it won't be one of us."

"Why, that boy couldn't harm——"

"I know. Gentle as a May morning, and that's all you see. I see more. A'n't Shawn tried to break him for a year now? Make him over into something the Devil himself wouldn't own? Has he done it?—tell me that. A'n't I heard 'em talk together, devil and angel? I say, Matthew, some time, maybe soon, it'll come to life and death between them two, and I'm prophesying: it won't be Ben Cory that dies."

"It could be."

"I want you should take that back. Ben a'n't for dying."

"He a'n't even full-growed.... Ah, Christ, count him in then, and what could he and the two of us do, three against French Jack, and Ball, and Marsh, and Shawn himself?—not to say nothing of poor Dummy, that don't know nothing except the devil is kind to him? I'm a stout man. Break me in half with one hand, Dummy could, grinning like a dog the while he done it."

"Ben is kind to him."

"Ah? You think——?"

"I—don't know. But hark 'ee to this, Matthew: could somebody steal the key to that leg-chain and turn the Old Man loose——"

"God Almighty, who'll bell the cat? Don't the key hang on a cord at the devil's neck, and is it ever off him?... What was it you seen in the cabin, Joey?"

"Ah.... Only him, the Old Man, that ha'n't touched a drop the whole year long, and that devil keeping it ever at his hand—only him, not paying me no heed at all, I could've been a breath of wind in the cabin—only him, Matthew, lowering himself to his heels, slow, and then grabbing the table and pushing himself up, clean off the boards, chain and all, and down again, slow. Against the day, Matthew, against the day. Did he ever go within four foot of the end of that chain? Could three men, four men, ever hold the Old Man, if somebody was to steal the key?"

"He'd be match for three or four, grant you that. When it was over, you he'd only see hanged with time to pray, but he'd snap my neck with his own hands. I fit out them irons myself, Joey. I wouldn't wonder but I'll wear the like in Hell, if there be justice. Forty years honest, that's me. Nay, Lord, ha'n't I been in irons myself, my life long, with this purple face? Forty years honest, and Chips for seventeen of 'em—nine and more on the old Hera, seven on the Iris, eight months on the Artemis. I'm not counting this last year, she's the Diana, he'll break her heart like mine. Forty years honest—oh, I was in anger already at the Old Man for slights and curses a good sailor would've ignored, so I listened to Tom Ball, Shawn's pet hog, and then to Shawn himself, his singing tongue—listened in my anger and said I'd do it, and I did it. You think God forgives such a thing? I killed Hanson, shot him dead, never harmed me. You God might forgive, not me. I wish I was dead."

"Nay, Matthew, you old sod——"

"I mean it. I don't see why God didn't strike me down a year ago. I a'n't sunk yet, but the tiller's gone. Wa'n't Shawn broke it, it was me. I should've thought—why, should've hove to, but Christ, I let her broach, and the sea come over me, the tiller's gone, it's clean broke off. Anything in that bottle?... Sometimes it's on me to march into that cabin, say: 'Here, sir—that neck, you been wanting it.' He'd take it. With him loose, we might win back the ketch, grant you that. Then you for Copp's Hill and my neck cracked a mite sooner. Don't forget it."

"All the same, Matthew, it won't be the Old Man that does for Shawn. Nay, it won't be the Old Man."