Driven by a southwest wind of the upper air that stirred as yet no breath here at the island, a cloud moved toward Polaris, and would conceal the star a while, and pass on. Ben heard no voice except of the sea, and that unconcerned with him, a hiss and groan of breakers on the beach, and somewhere, beyond the southern arm of the cove, a larger mourning as incoming waves lashed an outlying part of the island's body and fell away sighing.

The ketch now named Diana had been careened for scraping, a labor completed yesterday, wearisome in the sun. Comfortable again in the deep water of the cove, she rode at anchor, waiting on sunrise that should summon a breeze, and rouse the man who ruled her (if he ever slept) and send her out wherever his desire commanded. The tide would be running fair an hour after dawn.

Her shadow begotten of the May moon stretched long across the still surface, in nearness sharply edged, then vague, then melting in the blackness of open water far out. The May moon, approaching the full, would be illuminating the letters on the starboard side. If Ben leaned over the rail he could glimpse the black sprawl of them: DIANA. But Ben Cory still thought of her as Artemis.

This was one private way to keep alive the integrity of a self. Another was to inquire: Where does the self end and the universe begin?...

Manuel was aloft. Manuel loved sleep, and could sleep anywhere, he shyly told Ben once—even at the masthead. But his fawn eyes would likely be open at present, searching the harmless night. If he drowsed up there, or if Captain Shawn or the second mate Marsh merely imagined he had, Manuel would be whipped, and then obliged to swab away any red drops that might have spattered on the sacred deck. A year ago Shawn had been quite kind to stupid Manuel. That ended after Cornelius Barentsz of the sloop Schouven had been hanged, and Manuel had furtively tried to cut the body down from the yardarm.

However balmy the weather, however empty and flat the sea, a twenty-four-hour lookout must be kept on the Diana: Shawn's law. Even in harbor the men stood watch and watch, having learned not to grumble in the presence of Captain Shawn, who might seem not to hear the words at the time spoken, but would nurse them in his bosom a week or so, and bring them forth and quote them gravely while Ball or Marsh corrected them with a rope's end. The deck must shine spotless as a duchess's drawing room; the brass must be dazzling, the ropes coiled exactly so, and the powder dry.

Judah Marsh and the hunchback mute who possessed no name but Dummy were somewhere aft, idle as Ben. Marsh never invented work when nothing needed to be done. This was not from laziness, certainly not from any charity: human beings were simply not so important to Judah Marsh that he could derive much joy from dominating them. He executed Shawn's orders for punishment with satisfaction; the sight of Manuel bleeding deepened his fixed smile; but he seemed to find no pleasure in ordering big soft Manuel about and watching him fumble at meaningless tasks.

It was not in nature, Ben thought, that a creature could be devoid of all common impulses to mirth, compassion, generosity, recognizable lust, interest in his fellow men, and still walk about on two legs; but there Marsh was, unquestionably spewed up by the human race. Some man must have begotten the thing, some woman borne it in pain and maybe loved it a while. Marsh would not even eat like a man, but like a peevish dog, gulping the tedious food and returning to his one-eyed vacancy. For Daniel Shawn Ben had been obliged to learn hatred, a waiting, despairing hatred that even now might hold some tormenting elements of love or at least of searching. Before the stalking dead man Marsh, Ben could only recoil, watchful, glad that, except for the necessary rule of the starboard watch, Marsh let him alone.

Ben expected nothing to be required of him till after sunrise when the tide turned. Then it would be up anchor and away, if Shawn's intention held. It often changed. Shawn was in no triumph these days, after a year of frustration and trivial actions with nothing gained.

The tide should turn at about seven bells. The mate's watch would tumble up early to lend a hand at breaking out the anchor and making sail—unavoidable since, after a year, the ketch was still woefully undermanned. As always at such times, the mate Tom Ball would remind the men that better times were coming with the next prize—more hands, better food, another vessel maybe, riches to burn, and best of all probably a bit of amusement at the expense of the Spaniards and their women, say at Campeachy or Merida. They paid scant attention to that noise now when it came from Mr. Ball, though the mere word "money" gave Ball's thick Devon voice a special fruitiness as if the taste of it comforted him all the way down to the gut. ("Money is the thing, Ben boy," he said once with damp and genuine friendliness, pawing amiably at Ben's shirt. "Got gold, you got everything, take an older man's word for it—good food, good smocks, safe old age. Gi' me the money, other cods can have the glory." Then finding Ben's stare to be an incomprehensible cold lance, he grunted with the pained astonishment of a man who wants to be liked, and spat overside, and pushed his hands against the sides of his paunch to settle it better on the burdened pelvis, and waddled away.) Manuel might giggle at Ball's belching oratory, but French Jack would only shrug without chattering, and Matthew Ledyard's purple-stained face would freeze into a peculiar quiet. When Captain Shawn said nearly the same thing (without the women and Spaniards), standing tall in his green breeches and green sash, in that favorite spot of his where his left hand could stroke the larboard falconet while his other rubbed the copper farthing, they still listened. Or they seemed to. While pronouncing such words as "our company," "our enterprise," Shawn's splendid voice could briefly make it seem that the men gathered to hear him were indeed a company of some consequence, and not a tatterdemalion handful of sharkbait committed to the guidance of a lunatic dreamer.

Ben tried to lose himself in the tranquillity of black water out yonder, to make some temporary truce in the private struggle. A battle with arithmetic, in a way: how does one youth steal a vessel from seven grown men—not counting Manuel, who was rather less than a man?

Ledyard was a man; little Joey Mills had at least a memory of manhood. One or even both might be allies, if there were any way to reach Ledyard. But all year long, Ledyard had seldom acknowledged Ben with more than a grunt, a stare and a turning of the back. He offered no other unkindness; he merely made it plain that Ben's existence distressed him somehow, while chattering Joey Mills tried to explain to Ben that Matthew was a grieving man who meant no harm by it. Ledyard, Ben knew, was deeply involved in Shawn's declaration of war against the world. Ledyard had shot the mate Hanson and one of the seamen in the taking of Artemis. Ben could imagine how Matthew Ledyard might still cling to the thought of the new lands in the western sea, and might forget (sometimes) that if ever he arrived there his own conscience would arrive there with him, to speak with him in the night and burn down on him in the noonday sun.

Ben had grown acquainted with a saving reasonableness in the very monotony of shipboard, in the endless daily things that must be done for the vessel's survival and one's own, without much thought, certainly without argument. Not too unlike the labors of a frontier farm—but the earth can be kind, with many shelters for one in extremity. In the open sea you've only to glance over the rail, and understand.

There is another sort of reasonableness in the status of a slave. Maybe, Ben thought, most men accept a little of that status because they must: but when you begin to accept it willingly, you begin to die.

("Benjamin Cory, I would wait for you a thousand years....")

After eight bells, breakfast. Hardtack, and stew built on a wild slimy formula unknown to any mortal but French Jack, and a dark tragic fluid that Jack called cafÉ arabique. The stew originated in Bahaman goat and wild pig, shot by Ledyard and Ball not long ago but too long for comfort. Nothing remained of the good provisions taken in a midnight raid two months ago on a coastal settlement at Martinique. Shawn might try another such raid before long; if not, back to the salt cod.

Shawn had not even considered trying to dispose of that honest cargo of Mr. Kenny's at one of the Caribbean ports where he could have sneaked in to bargain with no questions asked. Tom Ball had urged him to do so, waving his stumpy arms, his voice climbing to a reckless howl of despair. Shawn merely grinned at his copper farthing, and let Tom sputter out like a fat candle, and then remarked that one day soon they might be most happy to own such a handy supply of dem'd wonderful fish. Ben Cory had never regarded himself as a poet, but he thought sometimes that if he ever saw home again, there was one original composition that he could recite to Reuben in a decent glow of authorship. It went like this:

As for the cafÉ arabique, Captain Shawn had been heard to say that he supposed Jack made it from a secret crock of hog manure hidden in the hold. Ben more charitably suspected an infusion from scraps of old leather salvaged maybe on the field of Blenheim.

Red-haired Jack claimed to have fought gloriously there under the banners of Marshal Tallard until the surrender, when a great light burst around him, and God told Jack that Louis the Fourteenth was no mortal king but an incarnation of the fiend Asmodeus who cut up little girls and ate them. Well—Jack could have been at Blenheim; far more likely he wasn't. Peter Jenks, captain in 1705 of the ship Iris, had happened on French Jack in Barbados, and being in sore need of a cook, had signed him on, with Jenks' usual massive disregard of authorities and formalities—Jack doubtless had the status of a prisoner of war, but he was somehow at large on the island, he seemed to be declaring that he knew how to cook, and that was good enough for Jenks. ("I say to dat captain, I am so big man, so good man, me, I am coq du village, coq de la paroisse, me. He say strong, 'You coq?' I say coq, he not know nut'n, nor me not more. I fool, I crazy, me—he big fool, strong crazy, go to hell.")

Somewhere, before then, Daniel Shawn might have known the man. At any rate French Jack, as well as Ball and the carpenter Ledyard, had been a part of Shawn's conspiracy. When Shawn took Artemis by deceit in broad daylight, it was French Jack who loomed up behind Peter Jenks with a capstan bar and struck him down.

Ben could still see that—Jenks reeling, clutching at the mizzenmast, missing it and going down—as almost a year ago he had seen it in reality across a gap of shining water, the sunlight of that May sparing Ben nothing of it as he writhed at the rope that held him and gnawed the gag in his mouth. Everything had been well planned that day, in the clear Atlantic, the island of Nantucket just over the rim of the world. If Ben had been able to struggle free, a scream of warning would likely have done no good: Jenks was down. The strangely methodical skirmish came to an end with the prim grace of a minuet—but that was no dance, that shifting and interweaving of pigmy man-figures over there in the sunlight. That was plain murder, like the death of Dyckman.... Then Manuel lashed the tiller of the sloop and came to Ben, removing gag and rope, patting his hands, troubled in his soft way by Ben's unhidden loathing, but grinning with a dazzle of white teeth and explaining: "Iss good, got ship now. All be ver' rich, much gold, much women. You like women, boy, so pretty? You like gold?..."

Very shrewdly planned, even to the tarpaulin spread over Ben and covering him up to the eyes.

The sloop from Harkness' wharf had stolen a long time without lights through the depth of a May night until fog closed in around her. Then she crept on most gently, slowly, under mainsail and jib, head on to a leisured march of smooth rollers, her captain aware that Artemis would be fogbound too. Ben had known nothing of that. Ben was asleep.

He woke late that morning, his head throbbing wildly, in the stench of a dark hole in a universe which was swaying impossibly back and forth, and from side to side too, with a grand inexorable calm. In this pocket of dimness he found he was alone with a human-like thing that could bob its misshapen head, and grin, but not speak. He dimly remembered this creature from some faraway evening: it was harmless. Steps led out of the cavity to a grayness of daylight. The cavity—oh, it was harmless too, it was the tiny cabin of a sloop, one that Mr. Shawn had been hired to sail to the Banks for somebody named Harkness, all fair enough. But why, Ben wanted to know, why was she at sea now, and why was his head one great blind snarl of pain? Toward the daylight he reeled, asking questions. Up in wet salt air, he learned that everything was gray—under him a gray sliver of deck, above him muttering and sobbing canvas gray with damp, before him a shaft of gray wood—that was a solid mast, harmless, and he grabbed it frantically to save himself as gravity dropped away from his feet, and he could see all around him one heaving gray of ocean to the end of the world. Behind him a cackling voice inquired: "Mr. Shawn, sir, Mr. Shawn—be that there thing a sailor?"

"Why, steady as she goes, Joey Mills! I shall make it one, Mother of God, and you kissing his boots one day."

Ben forced himself around. In the act he lost the mast somehow, the sloop gravely but mirthfully tossing his feet elsewhere. He fetched up against the larboard rail and grasped it with all his power, retching. The cackler was another mass of gray, small, hunched at the tiller, an old man and shriveled, who observed Ben's situation with an uncommunicating, not unfriendly eye, and cackled again and spat astern.

Shawn—the same Shawn and somehow not the same—was coming forward, the green coat flapping about him as he swayed with perfect casual ease to the sloop's leaning and rise and fall. "Your head'll be paining you, Beneen, I know it and sorry I am for it, but without a bit of persuasion you'd never have consented to come with old Shawn at all, I could see that, the way I was forced to it entirely. O the poor landside dreams that do hold a man, the pull of a hearthstone and the clutch of women! You're free, Beneen—old Shawn hath set you free. Never you mind all that now. Back below, man dear, and tell Dummy I said to give you a jolt of rum. You'll not be standing watch the day. Tomorrow you shall, beginning with the forenoon watch, that'll be eight o'clock of the morning the way you measured time in the old days, man dear, the old days you was a landsman, but now you go with Shawn, now you go with old Shawn that knows the brave heart of you, and that better than you'll be knowing it yourself, now that's no lie."

The Irishman was virtually singing. It penetrated the whirling agony of Ben's head—a little. He mumbled uncomprehendingly, not understanding with his brain, but understanding the event in his marrow maybe as clearly as he had ever done in the year since then. Shawn watched him, smiling, firm on the crazy deck like a weighted doll: let the world swing upside down, that'll stay upright, no fear. "It was the drinks. You drugged me," said Ben, not believing it, praying for denial.

"Ben, go below!" Shawn said that firmly but softly, not unkindly, and moved away forward in rolling ease, the green back vanishing beyond the mainsail, the dark riddle of him immediately replaced by the black riddle of someone else. This also Ben would not believe, this gaunt thing striding aft, its black eye-patch and its frozen smile. With no effort, the one-eyed man of the Lion Tavern detached Ben's hands from the rail. "Captain said go below," said Judah Marsh, and struck him in the face.

Ben tumbled sprawling into the cabin. There Dummy supported him kindly and fed him rum. There, presently, Ben understood how Jan Dyckman had died. He began, a little, to understand why.

The gray haze of that day wore itself out to evening with no questions answered except in the privacy of Ben's mind, and those without finality. Rain was falling when he went on deck again. The headache was receding, his body learning balance. He could not find the sun that would have told him what way the sloop was bound. Now and then Shawn passed him on the deck as if totally unaware of him. No one indeed acknowledged his existence at all except a bulky black-haired man, smooth-faced and young, who grinned at him in vacuous amiability. The others called that man Manuel. But when Ben dared to ask him: "Where are we bound?" Manuel shrugged and grinned and spread his hands, and shook his head until Ben feared he might be another mute, and then said at last: "Rain stop soon."

Manuel was right. Toward evening the drizzle ended, the overhanging clouds receded, and a white ball appeared—low in the sky and standing, as Ben faced the bow, on Ben's right hand. Manuel at that time was at the helm, and Shawn stood near him, arms folded, disdaining any support. He had been gazing off to the southwest, but now, since the blue-eyed stare had swung around to Ben, Ben asked: "Mr. Shawn, are we tacking?"

Shawn cocked his head at Manuel in some understanding, and Manuel grinned. "Now why would we be tacking, Beneen?"

Ben's nerves crackled and snapped. "Don't call me that!"

"I may not then?" Shawn displayed no anger, though Ben had almost hoped for it. The blue eyes dilated a little, perhaps in hurt, but he did not cease smiling. "Well—well, Cory, why would we be tacking, and a good little westerly breeze on the sta'board quarter that do be sending us where we wish to go?"

"And where is that?"

"Why, tomorrow, Cory, I fear you'll see little except water—a great deal of it—but you'll see tacking enough if that's your wish, and you'll be learning something about the handling of sail on small craft in the forenoon watch, I'm hoping, and later. And now and then, man dear, away far off up in the northwest or sometimes due north, you'll find me a wee blue lump on the horizon—why, so faint and small that sometimes your eyes will say it's not there at all, but it'll be there. And it'll be there the following day, and maybe the day after that, for we'll be standing off and on. Now that's a way of waiting, Cory, that's the way a vessel must wait if she's in the open waters and biding her time for a certain thing to happen—it's the way of a hawk in the air, if you like, the way he must move about continually up there in the great sky, biding his time for a certain thing to happen." He was coming to Ben, and his broad hands fell heavy on Ben's shoulders. The blue stare dilated to black; Ben met it, refusing to shrink away. "That blue lump will be an island, Cory, a sprawling island where it happens I've never gone ashore, but I know how it lies. I'm of no mind to go there on my errand, do you see, because on land—why, on land I'm compassed about, I have enemies, Mother of God, and some of them are agents of—puh!—Her Majesty Queen Anne."

"What's that you say?"

"Easy, Cory, easy! You have a new allegiance. That I will explain later, not now."

"I have no new allegiance."

"Later, friend, I said. The name of the island is Nantucket. Now sooner or later—on the second, the third day, it doesn't matter—a lovely small vessel will put out from Sherburne. We shall speak her, the island then being over the horizon."

"I think I understand your meaning," Ben said. "I think I understood it when that murderer struck me in the face."

"I'm hoping he did not harm you," said Shawn mildly. The eyes were altogether black; the smile remained. "No murderer, Ben. He acted at command of a certain voice—more of that later too, you wouldn't be understanding it now. As for striking you—mere shipboard discipline, Cory. You might be thanking him for that one day, when you've come around to learning how to obey a captain's orders."

"If I understand your meaning, I will have no part of it."

"Can you walk on water? Swim among the fishes?"

"That's not worth an answer," said Ben, and he heard Manuel suck in his breath as if in pain, but would not look his way. "I met you last night in friendship. I came aboard here, and drank with you as a friend because I supposed you to be one. Oh, my brother...."

"Your brother?"

Terror stabbed at Ben, and caution gave him wisdom. He had almost said: "My brother was right, and you no friend." It was possible that some day Shawn would be ashore again, where Reuben was. "Nothing about my brother," said Ben—"merely that he told me I ought not to set my heart on sailing, as I did. I told you how I had hoped for it, and you knew last night, you know this moment that I meant it honest—not this, not this—I say I'll never have no part of it."

"But," said Shawn peacefully, "I must have an answer to what I asked. Do you wish to live?"

"Yes, like any man. Not at cost of betraying my own people or doing what my heart refuses."

"Why, that's very bravely spoken."

"You thought I'd help you take Artemis?"

"Oh," said Shawn, and took out the copper coin and frowned at it. "Who's to know all the whims of a green boy?"

"Whims, Mr. Shawn? Well, not that or any other dirty piracy."

"Oh!" said Shawn again, and held up the coin, turning it about in the gray light. His forehead was damp, perhaps from the spray. "A St. Patrick farthing, Beneen. From Dromore. Sometimes I'm wondering why I keep it. Not much there, ha, to make a man think of the green land?... Well, you'll forget you said that—in time, time. Your heart, is it? And so, do you see, it's your heart I must teach. I must change it, the way you'll be breaking the old bonds and will sail with me to the new lands. Time—that's all. The old gray mother'll give you the truth of it, and I'll change your heart."

"That no one can do."

"But I can," said Shawn, and strode away smiling....

Artemis was overtaken on the third day.

The weather shone fair, the winds themselves giving Shawn their favor, mild westerlies holding, shifting on the third day a little toward the northwest. The island, as Shawn had said, was a faraway thing, at times not visible, reappearing as the blue fragment of a dream. It was early morning, and Shawn, fortunate in this too, had tacked well away to the southeast of the island when the clean white of new sail first appeared. Shawn needed only a moment's study through his glass. His face, that had been smiling, changed to an ivory stillness, and he took the helm.

Artemis, gliding out of Sherburne, had clapped on all sail—jib and topsail and mainsail bellying taut, her fore-and-aft mizzen a great wing of purpose and of splendor. For her the northwesterly was a following wind, not her best wind but good enough; her low-slung bowsprit leaned joyfully to the sparkle of harmless whitecaps, outward bound.

Shawn's little sloop danced about, settling into the long starboard tack; it would intercept the course of Artemis—but not until the island was well below the horizon, and none to observe but the gulls that still dipped and wheeled above and around Artemis, careless angels in the sun. Shawn gave one order in one roared word: "Judah!"

It must have all been arranged long beforehand. Ben at that moment was trying to understand a snapped order from Judah Marsh. Trim something or other—he hadn't quite heard or understood, and was undecided whether to obey as he had tried to do yesterday or to choose this time for hopeless rebellion. Startled by that thunder from the helm, he turned his head to glance at Shawn—and was face down on the deck, his hands wrenched behind him and bound fast at the wrists. His threshing legs were secured at knees and ankles. The creature Dummy was doing most of this, as Ben knew from the moaning slobber at his ear.

He was tied then at the foot of the mast, by back and ankles, legs bent under him so that he could not lift his knees, a rag jammed in his mouth, a tarpaulin flung over him up to the eyes. He struggled a while, not in hope, merely in refusal to surrender, and dislodged the tarp. Judah Marsh noticed this, and fastened two corners of the canvas behind the mast. Ben could do nothing then but go limp, trying to lessen the torture of bent legs and keep the edge of the tarpaulin from slipping against his eyelids. He faced the starboard rail. He could glimpse Artemis from time to time as the sloop rolled. She grew larger through the morning.

He saw the sloop's dory readied to go overside, long before Artemis was in hailing distance, the life aboard her only a motion of midgets. Dummy, swift and excited as an ape, tossed into the dory a broad sheet of canvas. Judah Marsh and dry little Joey Mills climbed into the dory and disappeared. They would be a bundle under a rag; Ben ceased to wonder....

"Ahoy the Artemis!"

"Hoy!" The answer came back large and brazen over the mild water, Jenks with his megaphone no midget now but recognizable, massive at the rail and calm.

"I'm bearing a message from Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury."

Ben tried to yell. Nothing penetrated the gag—a strangled gurgling that would not be audible ten feet away. He gave it up, hearing a part of Jenks' answer: "—'bliged to you. Let me have it."

"A sealed message, sir—must be delivered to you safe hand, says he, no other way. Will you heave to, sir? I'll send me boat and delay you as little as I may."

The heavy clang of Captain Peter Jenks' voice cursed once or twice amiably for the record, and consented.

Shawn was right. He delayed Artemis very little indeed.

Her shortened sail holding her to a crawl, the sloop was rolling more. Her rising starboard side would close away Ben's view, and then it seemed to him, not that his own bound body was being moved, his eyes turned in spite of him to the sun and empty sky, but that the sharp bright field of agony across the water had been thrust down, rejected and overwhelmed: sea and sky would not own it nor allow it. He supposed he was not quite sane. Then with each contrary roll the vision would return, plainer than ever, and he was sane enough.

Printed on his memory was a moment when Shawn and Jenks stood together on the deck of Artemis in what seemed to be innocent palaver, the megaphone dangling idly from Jenks' hand, while the dory with Dummy at the oars was sliding astern—and then a roll of the sloop to larboard. Another moment—why, Jenks and Shawn had hardly moved, and Ben could recognize fat Tom Ball, and the carpenter Matthew Ledyard—but the dory had been made fast. Three rats like men were climbing. Surely the helmsman could see them! Or the red-haired man—yes, but what the devil was the cook doing on deck at a conference of captains, and with something black hanging from his right hand? Another roll to larboard—the sloop in her whimsy hung there, tormenting him through a time of sunny blindness and no breathing.

Then Ben discovered why the red-haired cook was present. The same glance embraced the helmsman—anyway a human creature wearing a green kerchief around his head such as the helmsman had been wearing—tumbling strangely from the stem of the beautiful slow-gliding vessel, striking the water with no great splash, floating briefly with no struggle as of life, and disappearing. The sloop rolled to larboard.

Ben in the sunlight could remember Reuben in the red gleam of burning houses, stricken and condemning himself because he had not prayed. And I have not prayed. But—but....

From the pain in his legs or the beating sun, Ben might have fainted for a while. Later he could recall no more of the dance of death; nothing until he was aware of the dory skimming back toward him, no one in it but Judah Marsh. Manuel came to release him.

Marsh troubled himself with nothing aboard the sloop, not even the sails; his only errand was to bring the dory for Ben and Manuel, and herd them into it with the lash of a word or two. Manuel was obliged to drop Ben into it, his legs being still numb and useless.

An hour later, as Artemis sped southward, the sloop was still visible, yawing this way and that, making poor silly rushes downwind, dropping in a trough and swinging until caught aback. When Ben last glimpsed her, he and Manuel and Dummy were employed in holystoning the deck of Artemis, and Manuel laughed to see her, and nudged Dummy so that he might enjoy it too, even though Judah Marsh was standing by with a belt. Very comical was Mr. Harkness' sloop stumbling about back there, a puzzled pup ordered to go home. Ben could see that. To protest this present labor was to receive the buckle end of the belt; Ben could see that such a cause was not worth a protest—any deck should be made decent, one granted that. The stains were already browning in the sun, difficult to remove, but Captain Shawn would not gather his crew to hear, approve and sign the articles until that deck was clean....

"We here gathered, who have hereunder set our names, do declare ourselves prepared to undertake all such enterprises of discovery as our Captain shall design, and all acts of seizure, search, requisition, defense and warfare that may be needful thereto.

"We here and now and forever forswear all allegiance to any crown, republic, dominion, principality on the face of the earth.

"We here and now and forever swear loyalty unto one another, and to our Captain obedience in all things, and unto the following laws we do agree:

"1. That man that shall refuse any order of our Captain, or of those to whom he may assign command, shall for a first offending receive Moses' Law, that is forty stripes less one on the bare back; for second offending his punishment shall be as the Captain may direct; but for a third offending he shall suffer present death.

"2. Of prizes taken, the Captain shall have one share and a quarter; the mates, the gunner, the carpenter and the boatswain shall have each one share and one eighth; and every man one share; but that man that shall display devotion beyond the common unto our endeavors, he shall have such additional reward as the Captain may decide.

"3. That man that shall utter blasphemy or foul speech in the presence of the Captain, or suffer any filth or uncleanness to remain on the deck of the vessel or in the hold, shall receive ten stripes.

"4. That man that shall snap his arms, or smoke tobacco in the hold with pipe uncapped, or carry a lit candle without a lanthorn, or strike flint or carry flame within three paces of gunpowder except he be the gunner, shall receive not less than twenty and not more than thirty stripes on the bare back.

"5. That man that shall offer to meddle with a prudent woman without her consent shall suffer the loss of his tongue and both hands, and shall be set adrift, or marooned, as the Captain may direct.

"6. That man that shall secretly bring a lewd woman aboard this or other vessel of our company, with intent she shall remain aboard, the vessel being at sea, shall be bound to his doxy by wrists and ankles and they both be cast into the sea beyond sight of land.

"7. That man that shall be found in liquor during his hours of duty or in the presence of an enemy, shall receive Moses' law for three succeeding days; but for a second offending he shall suffer death.

"8. That man that shall display cowardice in battle shall be hanged by the neck from the yardarm until dead.

"9. That man that shall practise the vice of Sodom or other unnatural lust shall be hanged by the neck from the yardarm in presence of the entire company, his body there to remain for the space of three days, when it shall be quartered and cast into the sea.

"10. If it shall become known that any man, woman or child hath entered aboard this or other vessel of our company as a spy or agent of the Crown of England or any other foreign power, such spy or agent shall be put to death in whatever manner the Captain shall direct; but if such spy or agent be one who hath signed these articles and presented himself to be an honest member of our company, he shall before his dispatch be nailed by the hands to the foremast for the space of five days without meat or drink.

"This shall be your Decalogue," said Daniel Shawn, "and you agreeing. And yet if any man among you be not agreeable, I do not rightly know what we shall do with him the day, seeing I cannot spare a boat, and the distance to the mainland may be something tedious to the best of swimmers."

They laughed. All seven, even Judah Marsh, for the dry grunt that came from him was certainly meant for a laugh. The laugh of Tom Ball, who had taken over the helm during the ceremony, rolled forward like greasy bubbles. Ben Cory, an eighth man who stood apart from the group by the larboard gun and had not been summoned by Shawn to join them, was reflecting that though the life of his body might continue for a while, the part of it that had known laughter was surely ended; reflecting also that his presence here was, in part and obscurely, a result of his own actions. Drugged and kidnapped, yes, but ever since the morning when Reuben had spoken out against Shawn, some part of Ben had understood that his brother was right; another part, swift to deny it, had been stronger in him at the time, and so—so the drinks in the cabin of the sloop, and the waking.

And so perhaps a man's every act is but in part his own, in part a yielding to the thrust of other forces. And perhaps a man is strong in just so far as his actions may be called his own; and so—little gray Joey Mills had begun to sputter words, no one preventing him—and so where is the way where light dwelleth? "Gawd, sir, that part there—I mean——"

"What part, Joey Mills?" Shawn asked that not loudly, and he spread the paper against the bulk of the mainmast, his left hand restraining it against the breeze. Manuel stood by him holding an inkstand and goose quill from the cabin. So much, Ben thought, for the fireside legends that such documents were signed with the heart's blood. Or maybe they were. "Some article you wished to question, Joey Mills?"

"Oh no, sir, nothing like that, sir. I only thought—that there part about forswearing allegiance—well, sir——"

"You wished it more strongly expressed, belike?"

"Well, sir, you see, sir——"

"Ah, I have it!" Shawn beamed in a great glow of generous satisfaction. "You're not the big man, Joey Mills, though sure it's the heart of a gamecock under your old hide, so do you make yourself the greater by coming forward now and being first to sign, ha? Come, Joey! Let me behold your handwrite plain and large!"

Ben noticed no tremor in the grimy fist. That might have been because Joey Mills clutched the quill like a rope, his whole arm toiling in the grave task of shaping the letters, his tongue protruding from clamped lips, his brows a cat's cradle of distress, while Shawn's right arm spread kindly over his sparrowy shoulders. "There, sir! And now, sir——"

"Whisht, man!—time to speak of all things, but now you've signed, and happy am I to have your pledged word in writing, but now, man dear, you must step aside for others."

Joey Mills gave it up and stumbled away, his glance meeting Ben's rather wildly. He seemed almost to be imploring Ben, of all people, for something or other, an impression soon blotted out by a weakly apologetic chuckle. As Joey Mills then scuttled aft to relieve Tom Ball at the helm, Ben thought of Jesse Plum....

Matthew Ledyard the carpenter, last to join the group, had stalked forward—from the captain's cabin, Ben thought—and had halted, demoralized with astonishment at sight of Ben. Ben had supposed Ledyard was murdered with the others, yet there he stood in the sunlight, gaunt face flushed to the eyes under the broad birthmark, lips moving without words. Shawn had drawn him aside for a word or two that seemed to calm him. He had listened to the articles with a sleepwalker's gaze at nothing, and now was the second to sign, shaking his head afterward like a man who hopes to understand something sometime but cannot do so in the present.

After him came Manuel and Dummy and French Jack, these three guided by Shawn's hand to make their marks, and he wrote their names for them with amiable flourishes. Tom Ball then signed, a remarkable lightness and delicacy in his fat fingers.

Judah Marsh wrote slowly but steadily with a savage gouging, his writing a pattern of cutlass gashes. Shawn took the quill from him, regarding the point in sorrow and the man who had nearly ruined it. Some current of understanding was flowing between them, no affection in it and no mirth. Shawn signed his name, handsome and large and bold, pocketed the folded paper, and flung the quill dartwise over the side. "Stay as you be, men," he said—"we'll choose the watches presently." He jerked his head for Ben to follow him, and went forward to the bow, leaning there idly at the rail, the wind at his back. "Cory, I did not require you to sign. Men go with me of their own will, one way or another."

"And so I'm to go overboard?"

"You seem not to be shaking.... I've not been so instructed."

"Instructed?—I don't understand you."

"Never mind. Time, time."

"We are strangers, Mr. Shawn, who never met before. You could have forced my hand to take the quill, maybe. I'd never sign such a thing any other way, and I will not serve you on this venture." Shawn's face did not change. "Are the others all dead?"

Shawn watched the ocean in the south. "Several died and no help for it," he said quietly. "Peter Jenks lives—not harmed, I dare say. A thick skull. He'll share my cabin for a while at least."

"Share——"

Shawn laughed, not musically but almost soundlessly, a thing Ben had not seen him do before. "Under restraint, Ben. Like all good vessels, Artemis, who must now be named Diana, carries irons for malefactors. I have had Chips staple a chain in the floor of the cabin for the leg irons. Unpleasant, but I'm obliged to question Mr. Jenks in certain particulars. Then no doubt he can be released."

"Released to go overside."

"Time, Ben, time. And so you will not serve me?"

"I will not."

"I like that stubborn will. Mother of God, what a power of strength it might be when you're a man!... Ben, those fellas back there, they are servants. Good men—chose 'em with much thought—but servants, cattle. You are not as they."

"If I did you any service aboard this vessel of Mr. Kenny's I'd be no better than they are."

But it seemed impossible for Ben to make Shawn angry. The man continued strangely gentle and reflective in all he said. "I grant I may have done Mr. Kenny some harm, but he's a wealthy man." About to protest that Mr. Kenny would be so no longer with Artemis lost, Ben held his peace. "I do regret it. If you will not serve me—as yet—perhaps you will serve the ketch? A vessel hath many needs, Mr. Cory. An idle or unskillful hand may do her much harm, come tempest or other misfortune. You cannot expect to share in any prizes——"

"Do you fancy I ever would?"

"Shall we hope to soften this Puritan virtue to some degree?"

But Shawn was not at all angry. "I say, you cannot share in prizes, but while aboard you will be fed and clothed like the others, and for this perhaps you might make some return in labor, if only for Artemis' sake?"

"I suppose I must, as a captive slave, if I wish to live. But I will do no act of piracy, I will do no violence to anyone except in defense of my life, and I will escape you when I can. I believe any slave has that privilege."

"Then I'll require of you no act of violence, only the labor of a foremast hand—can I say more? You have my word on it. And tell me something—have you ever spoken in this fashion to any man before?"

"I never did. I never had cause."

"Knowing quite well that by a lift of my finger I could have you put to death? Human life is nothing to these men, you know. And there'll be muttering a-plenty because you haven't signed."

"Knowing that, of course."

Shawn's hand swung out and gripped Ben's upper arm, not with intentional cruelty, Ben guessed, but he could feel the nerves of his forearm going numb. "Ben, Ben, do you not also hear a voice, sometimes behind your shoulder as it were?—saying now for instance, 'Resist old Shawn, resist him even if you die for it!'" Shawn shook him impatiently. "Is there not such a voice?"

"I don't understand you."

"Tell me the truth!"

"I hear my own mind—heart, conscience, whatever you wish to call it. It serves me as well as it may, and I listen to it."

"Strange! You are not a believer, I think? Do you pray?"

"I haven't truly prayed since my father and mother were murdered.... Is not conscience enough?"

Shawn released him and sighed and turned away. "You spoke of slavery. Ah, Beneen, don't you see, all this is but prologue? I serve a great end. I spoke to you of the western sea and the new lands, and I did see the thought strike fire in you, don't try to deny it. Why, I'd not go on the account, nor meddle with this rabble, nor do violence to anyone, if I could help it. Mother of God, two or three fine ships, a handful of brave men, say fifty, sixty—it needs no more. We need no women—we'll take us native women in the new lands and raise up a new breed of men, and they shall be like gods. You must see it, Beneen, the way I have no choice?"

"I do see—as my father and my mother taught me, as I learned from my tutor and my great-uncle, and above all from my brother, whose understanding is better than mine—I do see, Mr. Shawn, that you cannot serve a good end by evil means."

"Ochone!—a Puritan indeed but very young, now that's no lie. I know that talk, that doctrine, Ben, know it of old, a stick to beat the young and no truth in it, and so I deny it altogether."

"I will affirm it while I live. Damnation, Mr. Shawn, it's no article of faith, only a plain observation any man can make. Your great end lies in the future, but the future grows from the present. The evil you do in the present can only generate evil in the future and not the good end you dream of."

"Puritan and philosopher! Now I have seen flowers growing from a dunghill."

"They grow from the seed of other flowers and would do so in common ground. The dunghill itself only makes a stink."

"Feeds them, does it not?"

"I dare say nothing's purely good or purely evil. What's good in the dunghill feeds them, the rest is a stink."

"Damn the thing, blind and stubborn as you are, I like you, Ben Cory.... Do you play chess?"

"A little."

"I found a set of men in the cabin. We must play now and then."

"If you like...."

"Nothing left then, Beneen, of the friendship I hoped there was between thee and me?"

"I don't know how to answer that. I don't see how there can be friendship if one man enslaves another, if one man does what another must hate and reject."

"You're very bitter, boy."

"I don't possess my own life, if it can be destroyed at your whim, a lift of your finger. I think his life is all any man owns. I think that's cause for bitterness, Shawn. I refused as soon as I understood, the first day. There've been three nights when you could have stood in to shore and let me swim for it." Shawn laughed a little, silently. "I know—you couldn't have me spreading word of you. And it's true, I would have done so at once."

Shawn said slowly: "I could not destroy your life, I think. I spoke as if I might, only in hope of persuading you, opening your eyes. I keep you with me for the same reason, now that's no lie. The friendship abides in me, though you've turned against me. And now you have my word on this: when I have won my little fleet, and my men, and am ready for the regions where none will follow me, I will be finding some means to set you free, and you still unwilling to go with me. I'll put you aboard some other ship, or leave you in a foreign port if I can. You have my word on it—yet I think you may go with me. And for the present I do be asking nothing of you but a seaman's labor, no violence. No violence, Beneen."

Ben knew somehow that, even in that moment, when brown stains were still visible on the deck in spite of all the scrubbing and washing down, Shawn's sorrow at Ben's rejection of him was quite real, quite honest and deep, and so was his belief that Ben's mind would change and that he himself could change it. A most divided man, who could condemn war and practice it. One could picture him sheltering a fallen nestling in his hand, while his heel pressed on the bloody corpse of one of his own breed. But Ben was forced to understand after a while that such insane division is not, by most men, called insanity. They call it necessity.

For a year now, Shawn had kept his word. No violence was required of Ben. When action approached, as it did hardly more than a dozen times in the whole year, Ben was tied, not cruelly, down in the forecastle, and saw only the aftermath.

It seemed to Ben now as he watched the tropic glory of the May moon—this fading slowly, for morning was not far away—that it was true enough, as was said in the Book of Proverbs: For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he—and maybe, Ben speculated, any madman is merely one who believes a thing which the one who names him mad is forced to call a lie.

Shawn's blunders in chess were of a curious kind. Ben could beat him as a rule, with effort, and Shawn took it graciously except for a compulsion to curse at his own mistakes. Ben was reminded each time (but did not say) how Reuben could have given the man a handicap of a rook or better and still have beaten him in fourteen or fifteen moves. Shawn would prepare a good enough attack—squatting by the board in the sunlight of the quarterdeck, on days of small wind when the Diana held an even keel and no work needed to be done—and he would be cheerful in the beginning, a little excited, humming in his teeth, moving his pieces with a mirthful flourish. One could not think of him then as anything but a kindly, humorous, thoughtful man, almost a young man, a man on holiday. But in the decisive moment, when he must push through the attack or be damned to it, the humming would cease, the copper farthing would appear in his fingers, and Shawn would either abandon the attack for some meaningless scrimmage in another part of the field, or make one of his blatant errors—a piece left hanging unprotected, a reckless sacrifice gaining nothing. After that, Ben's limited knowledge was sufficient to demolish him. Daniel Shawn would never seem to understand just how this had happened, and Ben did not tell him.

The Diana won no big prizes in that year of prowling up and down the Caribbean. True, she was woefully undermanned, reason enough for risking no lives on anything less than a flat certainty. All the same (said Judah Marsh in Ben's hearing), John Quelch would not have chased a French sloop for three days and then turned tail merely because the little rascal put about in despair and uncovered a gun she shouldn't have possessed. Shawn heard that too, and stared blankly at Marsh, rubbing the coin, until Marsh turned away; but Shawn turned away too, without a reply.

There were braver occasions, such as the breathless evening in July when the sloop Schouven died. That was an open battle with everything risked. Tied securely in the stifling forecastle, Ben could hear as much for himself—the coughing thunder above him of the Diana's larboard gun, presently a distant animal howling, a banging of small arms, a piercing squeal like a stuck pig that was French Jack's war cry. When Ben was released to come on deck the Schouven was already afire, the Diana leaving her behind in the gathering night. Tom Ball and Dummy and Jack were gaudily bleeding from minor wounds, but the Diana had lost nothing. She had won about fifty pounds in silver, a month's provisions, a little long-tailed black monkey and a man—a tall, gray, soft-spoken scoundrel, Cornelius Barentsz, who was even then scrawling his name on the Diana's articles with Shawn's blessing. The terrified monkey clung frantically to Dummy and found a friend....

Ben saw little of Barentsz, who spoke almost no English and was assigned to Mr. Ball's watch, relieving French Jack of his occasional double duty for a week or so until Barentsz was hanged. Ben never altogether understood that. The execution was carried out with no ceremony in the silent hours of the first watch, when Ben was asleep below. Manuel at that time was serving on the larboard watch, and Joey Mills on Marsh's watch with Ben; the two changed places after the hanging, at the request of Mr. Ball, who said he didn't wish to be tempted to do violence to the dirty Portagee when the ketch was so short-handed. It was Matthew Ledyard, in one of his rare impulses to communication, who snarlingly explained the incident to Ben. Barentsz had been discovered in the darkness of the first watch trying to embrace poor giggling weakwitted Manuel like a woman. The articles of the Diana were specific. A week later, though, after the body had been disposed of in the manner prescribed, Shawn asked in the middle of a chess game: "Do you know the true reason why that Dutchman was hanged?" And he set down a Bishop where it could not legally go.

"The piece can't be played there," said Ben.

"Ha?" Shawn stood abruptly and pushed the board aside with his foot. "Devil with the game, my mind's not on it." He had already made his blunder. "You heard my question?"

"I can't say I know the true reason for anything you do."

"I did not hang him, Ben. His destiny hanged him. Nor I don't make much of poor Manuel trying to cut the body down, for 'tis Manuel's destiny to remain weak in the wits and no harm in him, except he may be used for harm by others. But—ah well, 'tis true enough what I told the men, I did find Barentsz so, and I'll have no such Devil's foulness under my command, now that's no lie. But"—he glanced about the sunny deck, where no one else was in earshot—"there was another reason, one I didn't wish the men to know. On second thought—on further instruction—it doesn't matter. You may even tell them if you see fit." He waited, the silence forcing Ben to look up at him at last. "It might be of especial importance to you, Ben Cory, to know that I know Barentsz's true reason for coming aboard my ketch."

"His reason! He was brought aboard a captive, that or be drowned."

"That was the seeming," said Shawn, rubbing his coin, looking gravely down with the sun behind him, his eyes all black. "Yet Barentsz could have gone with the others. They thought (not understanding the end I serve) that I would give them a boat. But no, this Barentsz chose to make a show of favoring my enterprise, so to deceive me and get himself aboard my ketch. Then soon enough, hearing what he muttered under his breath, I understood why."

"I could make nothing of what he tried to say in English."

"That's no matter."

"Do you speak Dutch?"

"Enough."

"Well?"

"You wouldn't care to say 'Well, sir?' or 'Well, Captain?'"

"Well, Shawn?"

"How you do play with your own life, the way it might be a thing of no value!"

"While I'm a slave it's of no value," said Ben, knowing that this was not at all true.

"Mother of God, it's your very impudence that saves you. If you were what I've sometimes feared you might be, your conversation would not be so. You'd be sly, I think. You'd try to please me, I think, and not spit back at me like a little wildcat.... Well—Cornelius Barentsz was an agent, and that in the service of Queen Anne of England."

"I don't believe it."

"It doesn't matter. You haven't my ways of discovering truth. But now that you know I know this, will there be any particular thing you wish to tell me, Ben Cory?"

"No, Shawn."

"If you be what I devoutly pray you are, you've nothing to fear even in your impudence. But those who betray me I do not forgive."

Ben knew—and had known for some time, he supposed—that he was in the presence of madness, whatever that is. It seemed not to be the simple, half-supernatural thing that the common speech heard in Ben's childhood had made of it. Shawn did not rave or babble or foam at the mouth; he never acted as one possessed of a devil ought to act, and besides, are there any devils? If so, what are they, and how was one who had lived three years with the calm skepticism of John Kenny to believe in them? One remembered Reuben snorting and gurgling and sometimes cursing over Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World, and then reading with greater joy the burlesque of it written by the merchant Robert Calef of Boston, whom Uncle John admired. Never mind about devils.

Ben knew his own life could end at any moment. At that time, however, he had already lived three months with the nearness of sudden death—his own defiance, he sometimes thought, the sheerest bluff. Like living in the same den with a tiger who, for his own reasons, has so far refrained from destroying you. You can cringe and shiver for only a limited time; then it becomes tiresome, and you must look after your own occasions of eating and sleeping and waking no matter what the tiger does. And doubtless a tiger is more likely to pounce on a creature that cringes than on one who spits back at him. And in spitting back, in turning his face directly toward the lightning and to hell with the consequences, Ben had found, no doubt of it, a hot pleasure as definite, almost as keen as in the surging moments when Clarissa had loved him.

Shawn played few chess games with Ben after that day, appearing to lose interest in them. He seemed to Ben to be changing in some gradual, obscure fashion—more aloof, more silent except for the occasional furious monologue after some ship had been sighted, and followed a while, and then allowed to slip away over the horizon because Shawn's voice told him the moment was not ripe and his forces not sufficient. Several times Shawn had robbed small interisland vessels—trivial occasions when Ben was not tied below but allowed to remain on deck with Manuel and Dummy and the monkey. The Diana swooped down on these helpless chickens like the wrath of God, but having taken what little they held of provisions and valuables, and having learned that no man aboard them was willing or worthy to go with him, Shawn showed contemptuous mercy and let them depart unharmed. What they could tell, he said, was no threat to him—he had already satisfied himself, after the pursuit by the frigate Dread, that the Diana could outrun anything afloat.

Vessels in the Diana's class or larger were always too well manned or too well armed, or sighted too near the land or in the presence of other shipping, or simply rejected by the inner voice. Something—("I am compassed about," said Shawn—"compassed about")—something was always not quite right.

Shawn spent more and more time in the cabin, where Ben had not been allowed to go the whole year long.

There was an October afternoon of aching sunlight in the waters off Grenada, when Ben noticed a thick scattering of silver at Shawn's temples and wondered how long it could have been there....

No one entered that locked cabin except Shawn, who kept its key and one other key on a cord at his neck, and Judah Marsh, and Joey Mills. Mills entered it only long enough to carry in food and fetch out the pail of slops. Since no one was ever of a mind to question Shawn or Marsh, Ben and the others (even Tom Ball) relied on Joey Mills for news of Peter Jenks. Mills did not much enjoy talking on the subject.

It was ever the same, Mills said. Jenks was there, and alive; but what the Captain wanted of him was beyond the imagination of an old man who'd been brought up Godfearing in Gloucester. Jenks' ankles were close together in irons; Ledyard had stapled the chain of the irons to the floor and nailed a plank over the staple so that nothing less than a crowbar would ever tear it loose. The chain was long enough to allow Jenks to lie in his bunk or sit at the stationary bench by the built-in table. When the ketch was careened for cleaning, Mills said, the Old Man must be obliged to lie braced against the side boards of his bunk—never speaking a word. Nothing movable was allowed within Jenks' reach except a light wooden food tray that Mills pushed to him by a long stick, and the slop bucket, managed with the same stick, and a leather flask of rum. Under Shawn's strictest orders, Mills observed all the precautions one might with a chained bear. Jenks laughed at that sometimes, Mills said—but spoke not a word. He had not once touched the rum; Mills was certain of it. The flask lay in a corner, some motion of the vessel having dislodged it from the table where Shawn had tossed it. It still lay within Jenks' reach: Mills doubted if he even looked at it. And the leather had turned green on the outside with tropic mold.

Shawn actually slept in that cabin, the door locked. Beside the bunk across the cabin from the one Jenks used, Ledyard had built a heavy wooden screen, and after that Ledyard also had been forbidden the place. The screen, Mills supposed, would keep the chained bear from hurling his bucket at Shawn while Shawn slept—if Shawn ever slept....

The May moon sank into a grayness of horizon cloud behind the island, then sank altogether, lost out of the night, and with its passing the shadow of the Diana vanished into the black immensity of the sea. Under the blackness that spread above him like another sea bearing a foam of stars, Ben stood in a loneliness complete, feeling nothing for a time but the loyal secret motion of his own heart and the noise of ocean not concerned with him. He was waiting: waiting at least for the gradual fading of the dark that must soon begin in the lower sky, maybe for something more. That light would come in its time, over the open waters in the east, pouring upward, compelling the sea of blackness to a luminous change and then dissolving it away. But what is morning to a slave?

Why, nothing. Nothing unless in some way the light can grow within the slave as well as upon the world where he drags out his captivity.

I have been too passive, Ben thought, and that for much too long a time. Defiant, yes, and maybe brave enough, but in a child's way, to no real purpose. For that first month or so I may have had some excuse—I was dazed; I had never dreamed any such thing could happen, to me. But since then, no excuse for drifting, letting things happen. There must have been something I could have done.

Oh, and passive, too passive by far, a long time before that evening in the cabin of the sloop. Drifting, letting things happen instead of taking a hand in forcing them to happen. Maybe a child is compelled to that. But childhood ended—when? Did not Reuben at fifteen discover a purpose?

He will have turned sixteen a few days ago, and I not there; and doubtless he believes I am dead.

Faith surely imagines I am dead, she who said with her lips at my ear that she would wait for me a thousand years.

There must have been something I could do....

Dry logic of arithmetic asserted itself and Ben noted it. I don't know how one youth steals a ketch from seven grown men. But....

By the contemptuous assent of Daniel Shawn himself, I still possess the knife my father gave me. He gave me also a word: readiness....

The stars weakened; some of them were gone. The sky, no sea of blackness now, became a paleness and then a glory. Shadows acquired weight and relief, substance and sharpness in the transfiguration of daylight—the rail under Ben's hand no pallid blur but familiar with every spot and imperfection of the polished wood. The headland out yonder at the southern arm of the cove, a looming dullness not long ago, became the gray hand of a giant, then green, then manifest jungle, a fragment of solid earth, and the lonely red flare of the sun burst free in silence over the rim of the world. Clouds hung high in the west; none lingered over there on the morning side to obscure the birth, and at the moment of completion a light sweet wind tranquilly arrived, a northeasterly breeze, cooling Ben's face, roving across the island, waking in the bare cordage a music of morning and perhaps of spring.

There must be something I can do....

"Mr. Hibbs, was Reuben uncertain what time he would come home?"

"Yes—late, I think, Charity. There was something—a cutting for the stone to be precise, and the patient living somewhere near Cambridge. You know he goes with Mr. Welland on nearly all the visits now. On this occasion, I understand, he's to aid with the surgery, holding instruments I suppose, or whatever—the which maketh me ill only to contemplate it, but when I saw Ru this morning he was cool as you please, and quite unmoved, and cracked a joke or two that I'm sure Mr. Kenny was able to hear and enjoy. I dare say the doctor is right, that to visit the sick in all their trials will provide a learning not to be won from the best of books. Yet I wish it did not mean that he must neglect his other studies."

"Perhaps he'll come back to them one day."

"Ay—'tis absurd of me, but I feel in a manner cheated. There was so much more I had hoped to teach him—nay, I dare say any teacher is a fool, seeing only his small island of knowledge, forgetting how wide is the world beyond it. Can you stay the night, my dear?"

"Yes. Kate's most kind, allowing me to share her bed. I fear I'm a plague to her, I'm that restless, but she says not."

"I believe there's another bed in the attic that we could bring down, if she wishes."

"Ben's?"

"Oh, no! That hath remained in Reuben's room—their room, I'd rather say. I don't know that Reuben ever said anything of it, but—you can imagine no one of us would suggest taking it out."

"Of course. I spoke something foolish. I do so often."

"Not at all. It is—may I say this, Charity?—a blessing, that you do come to us here. In this house we are, all but Reuben—oh, how shall I say it?—old, dusty, something discouraged perhaps. There was so much of youth and gaiety, the which we took for granted when we had it, when Ben was here, the two of them alway in some harmless commotion or other—why, merely to hear them talk together was—was.... What are you sewing, Charity? Something for the—for what I believe fair young maids do call a bride chest?"

"I am no-way fair, Mr. Hibbs. And—honestly now, doth this appear to you like an item of female apparel?"

"Oh! Marry it don't, now you hold it up—you had it bunched under your hand so I couldn't see."

"A nightshirt of Mr. Kenny's, and I only trust I may mend this hole so it won't chafe him. He wears them out in the back, you see, lying on them constantly, and—oh, the fidgeting that's all he's able to do. I pray you, Mr. Hibbs, would you sit the other side of the lamp? You're in peril of my elbow, besides shutting off the light."

"Of course—clumsy of me.... How deftly your little hands do work at whatever they find, Charity!... Te spectem, suprema mihi cum venerit hora...."

"I sew very badly, Mr. Hibbs, and I have no Latin."

"Forgive me. I think, though, you sew excellent well."

"Ha!"

"'Twas only a line of Tibullus that cometh now and then to my mind. Et teneam moriens deficiente manu.... I never read Tibullus with the boys. Not altogether suited, I felt, to their time of life. And yet sometimes, as in those particular lines, my dear, he is quite innocent, indeed expressing sentiments appropriate to a man of honorable feeling. 'May I'—(saith Tibullus, my dear)—'may I look on thee when cometh my last hour, and may I hold thy hand as I sink dying!'"

"I must tell Kate this one is nearly past mending, but if she'll make a pattern for me I believe I could follow it in my blundering fashion. He ought to have a change of them for every day. I know a place on Sudbury Street where they have better material than this, and cheap."

"I recall some other lines from the same poem—me mea paupertas vita traducat inerti, dum meus adsiduo luceat igne focus.... 'Let the humble fortune that is proper to me lead me through a quiet way of life, if only my hearth may glow with an unfailing fire!' You'd suppose that the sentiment of an aging man, wouldn't you? And yet they tell that Tibullus, he died young.... Charity...."

"Yes, Mr. Hibbs?"

"Charity, having spent, I must admit, very nearly twenty years—beginning, let us say, with the year I commenced study at Harvard, the which was the thirteenth year of my life—having spent so much time, I say, in what would seem, to some, a most arid employment, namely the cultivation of the abstract, the exploration (tentative, limited by the frailty of mine own poor powers) of the borders of philosophy—having spent thus much time in—shall I call it, perhaps, a sanctuary of loneliness?—not altogether unrewarding, you understand; not without the consolation of the poets; not without an occasional satisfaction, like unto discovery, within the region of the inquiry: nevertheless, out of such loneliness—out of——"

"Sir——"

"Nay, forgive me, Charity, I'm most clumsy with words, and could never speak bold and plain what's in my mind, the which plain speaking I do much admire to discover in others, but let me essay it. Having spent, I say, almost twenty years, yes, almost a full score in the—I must call it the dust of scholarship, save the mark—one may then, suddenly as it were, look out as through the window of a study, let us say, and observe that outside this not altogether despicable refuge there is—oh, spring perhaps, as it is even now, my dear—and one may presume to hope that one hath not remained so long out of the world, nor grown so old, but that—but that——"

"Mr. Hibbs, I pray you——"

"Not so old but that perhaps one who is truly at the very brightest beginning of the springtime might find—might find in one's maturer years—oh, nothing like the call of youth to youth, my God! but—but.... You have not known how I—how since you began coming here in so much kindness—I think you have not known——"

"Mr. Hibbs, I must speak too, and I pray you say no more till I have done. The sentiments you express, the which—oh bother! There goes my thread again and I wasn't even pulling at it, they needn't to make it so miserable weak, do they? The sentiments—look, Mr. Hibbs: when we moved to Dorchester last autumn, I found there a place on the shore, just beyond reach of the high tides, a pretty place, a kind of—what was it you said?—a sanctuary of loneliness, at any rate I made it one. The rocks hide it from the house, from the land; 'tis like a room overlooking the open waters, where all the ships from the south must pass when they come in for the harbor, and I go there—oh, whenever I may. My mother thinks I'm looking for seashells or other such employment suited to children, and so I do bring in any pretty ones I find—and then throw them away secret-like, la, to make room for more—why, I'm a deceiving small beast, Mr. Hibbs, learned deception young, marry did I, I often wonder that anyone can put up with me. Well—even last winter, if it wasn't outright storming, I'd bundle up in my coat and go out there. The rocks break the wind. You can look a long way out.... I told Reuben about this. He understood—well, of course he did. One expects understanding from Reuben, I don't quite know why."

"I am not certain that I myself understand you, Charity."

"I must say more then?... But perhaps you will tell me, as my mother would, that at my years I can know nothing of love, and yet I do.... Sometimes I'll see a sail that looks from a distance like the Artemis. But I watch any sail that appears, because—because who can say what manner of ship it will be that brings him home?—and now you are weeping, but Mr. Hibbs, I never intended——"

"Nay, I—am not. The fireplace a'n't drawing properly—I'll push these logs further back."

"I am a beast."

"Hush!... I think he will come home, Charity—older, as you are, but what you saw in him will not be greatly changed.... But I may be your gray-headed counselor, and—friend?"

"Of course. You aren't gray."

"Soon enough."

"What is it, Mr. Hibbs—what is it that doth compel one to—eh, as they say, to give away the whole heart to another? I would be better, I would be happier, I suppose, if I...."

"I could wish for mine own sake that I knew the answer to that. Why, Charity, it seems we love where we must and no help for it."

"I remember I was not happy, very far from it, a year and more ago, when I was a silly child, had not even met him, indeed had none to love but—oh, poor Sultan. Clarissa of course, but it seems to me I never knew I loved her until I lost her, only took her for granted like sunlight until the day she was no longer there."

"Sultan?"

"Don't you remember Sultan, Mr. Hibbs? Why, the child I was would never forgive your forgetting Sultan. He died, very fat and ancient, soon after we moved to Dorchester. It was the sea air, my mother said. I wept like a fountain. But I think it was some while before then that I had ceased to feel like a child."