The Cruise of the Shining Light Part 46

"The lights o' the mail-boat!" he exclaimed. "She've left Fortune Harbor. Ecod, b'y!"

He withdrew at once and in haste, and I heard him stump off to my tutor's quarters, where, for a long time after that, there occurred many and mysterious noises. I could not understand, but presently made the puzzle out: John Cather was packing up. 'Twas beyond doubt; the thump and creak, the reckless pulling of drawers, steps taken in careless hurry and confusion, the agitation of the pressing need of haste, all betrayed the business in hand. John Cather was packing up: he was rejected of Judith--he was going away! It hurt me sorely to think that the man would thus in impulsive haste depart, after these years of intimate companionship, with a regard so small for my wishes in the matter. Go to sleep like a babe? I could not go to sleep at all; I could but lie awake in trouble. John Cather was packing up; he was going away! My uncle helped him with his trunks down the stairs and to the stage-head, where, no doubt, my uncle's punt was waiting to board the belated mail-boat--the mean little trunk John Cather had come with, and the great leather one I had bought him in London. I was glad, at any rate, that my gifts--the books and clothes and what-not I had bought him abroad--were not to be left to haunt me. But that John Cather should not say good-bye! I could not forgive him that. I waited and waited, lying awake in the dark, for him to come.

And come he did, when the trunks were carried away and the whistle of the mail-boat had awakened our harbor. He pushed my door open without knocking, knowing well enough that I was wide awake. 'Twas then dark in my room; he could not see me.

"Where are your matches?" says he.

I told him, but did not like the manner of his speech. 'Twas in a way to rouse the antagonism of any man, being most harsh and hateful.

"I can't find them," he complained.

"You'll find them well enough, John Cather," I chided, "an you looks with patience."

He had no patience, it seemed, but continued to fumble about, and at last, with his back turned to me, got my lamp lighted. For a moment he stood staring at the wall, as though he lacked the resolution to turn.

And when he wheeled I knew that I looked upon the countenance of a man who had been broken on the wheel; and I was very much afraid. John Cather was splashed and streaked with the mud of the hills. 'Twas not this evidence of pa.s.sionate wandering that alarmed me; 'twas his pallor and white lips, his agonized brows, the gloomy depth to which his bloodshot eyes had withdrawn.

"Now," says he, "I want to look at you."

I did not want to be looked at.

"Sit up!" he commanded.

I sat up in bed.

"Put the blanket down," says he. "I have come, I say, to look at you."

I uncovered to my middle.

"And _this_," says he, "is the body of you, is it?"

The lamp was moved close to my face. John Cather laughed, and began, in a way I may not set down, to comment upon me. 'Twas not agreeable.

I tried to stop him. 'Twas unkind to me and 'twas most injurious to himself. He did us vile injustice. I stopped my ears against his raving, but could not shut it out. "And this is the body of you! This is the body of you!" Here was not the John Cather who had come to us clear-eyed and buoyant and kindly out of the great world; here was an evil John Cather--the John Cather of a new birth at Twist Tickle.

'Twas the man our land and hearts had made him; he had here among us come to his tragedy and was cast away. I knew that the change had been worked by love--and I wondered that love could accomplish the wreck of a soul. I tried to stop his ghastly laughter, to quiet his delirium of brutality; and presently he was still, but of exhaustion, not of shame. Again he brought the lamp close to my face, and read it, line upon line, until it seemed he could bear no longer to peruse it. What he saw there I do not know--what to give him hope or still to increase the depth of his hopelessness. He betrayed no feeling; but the memory of his pale despair continues with me to this day, and will to the end of my years. Love has never appeared to me in perfect beauty and gentleness since that night; it can wear an ugly guise, achieve a sinister purpose, I know.

John Cather set the lamp on the table, moving in a preoccupation from which I had been cast out.

"John Cather!" I called.

My uncle shouted from below.

"John!" I urged.

"Parson," my uncle roared, "ye'll lose your pa.s.sage!"

Cather blew out the light.

"John," I pleaded, "you'll not go without saying good-bye?"

He stopped on the threshold; but I did not hear him turn. I called him again; he wheeled, came stumbling quickly to my bed, caught my hand.

"Forgive me, Dannie!" he groaned. "My heart is broken!"

He ran away: I never saw him again....

And now, indeed, was the world gone all awry! What had in the morning of that day been a prospect of joy was vanished in a drear mist of broken hopes. Here was John Cather departed in sore agony, for which was no cure that ever I heard of or could conceive. Here was John Cather gone with the wreck of a soul. A cynical, purposeless, brooding life he must live to his last day: there was no healing in all the world for his despair. Here with us--to whom, in the years of our intercourse, he gave nothing but gladness--his ruin had been wrought.

'Twas not by wish of us; but there was small comfort in the reflection, since John Cather must suffer the same. Here was John Cather gone; and here, presently, was my uncle, pacing the floor below. Up and down, up and down: I thought the pat of his wooden leg would go on forever--would forever, by night and day, express the restlessness of thirst. And here was Judy, abroad, in trouble I could not now divine--'twas a thing most strange and disturbing that she should stand in distress before me. I had accounted for it, but could not now explain--not with John Cather gone. I was mystified, not agitated by alarms. I would meet the maid on the Whisper Cove road in the morning, thinks I, and resolve the puzzle. I would discover more than that. I would discover whether or not I had blundered. But this new hope, springing confidently though it did, could not thrive in the wretchedness of John Cather's departure. I was not happy.

My uncle roughly awoke me at dawn.

"Sir?" I asked.

"Judy," says he, "haves disappeared."

He held me until he perceived that I had commanded myself....

XXV

TO SEA

Judith had vanished! Our maid-servant, astir in the child's behalf before dawn, in her anxious way, was returned breathless from Whisper Cove with the report. There was no Judith with the wife of Moses Shoos: nor had there been that night. 'Twas still but gray abroad--a drear dawn: promising a belated, sullen day. We awoke the harbor to search the hills, the ledges of the cliffs, the surf-washed sh.o.r.e.

'Twas my uncle hither, the maid-servant thither, myself beyond.

Clamorous knocking, sudden lights in the cottages, lights pale in the murky daylight, and a subdued gathering of our kind men-folk: I remember it all--the winged haste, the fright of them that were aroused, the shadows and the stumbling of the farther roads, the sickly, sleepy lights in the windows, the troubled dawn. We dispersed: day broadened, broke gray and glum upon Twin Islands--but discovered no lost maid to us.

'Twas whispered about, soon, that the women had spoken evil of Judith in our harbor; and pursuing this ill-omened rumor, in a rage I could not command, I came at last upon the shameful truth: the women had spoken scandal of the maid, the which she had learned from Aunt Esther All, the Whisper Cove gossip. The misfortune of gentle Parson Stump, poor man! who had in the ear of Eli Flack's wife uttered a sweetly jocular word concerning Judith and the honorable intention of John Cather, who walked with her alone on the roads, about his love-making.

But, unhappily, the parson being absent-minded, 'twas into the dame's deaf ear he spoke, and his humor became, in transmission, by pure misfortune, an evil charge.

There was then no help for it, old wives being what they are: authorized by the gentle parson, depending upon the report of a dame of character, the t.i.ttle-tattle spread and settled like a mist, defiling Judith to the remotest coves of Twin Islands. And Judith was vanished! I knew then, in the gray noon of that day, why the child had cried in that leafy nook of the Whisper Cove road that she could go nowhere.

I cursed myself.

"Stop, Dannie!" cries my uncle. "She's still on the hills--somewheres there, waitin' t' be sought out an' comforted an' fetched home."

I thought otherwise.

"She've lied down there," says he, "t' cry an' wait for me an' you."

I watched him pace the garden-path.

"An' I'm not able, the day, for sheer want o' rum," he muttered, "t'

walk the hills."

I looked away to the sombre hills, where she might lie waiting for him and me; but my glance ran far beyond, to the low, gray sky and to a patch of darkening sea. And I cursed myself again--my stupidity and ease of pa.s.sion and the mean conceit of myself by which I had been misled to the falsely meek conclusion of yesterday--I cursed myself, indeed, with a live wish for punishment, in that I had not succored the maid when she had so frankly plead for my strength. John Cather?

what right had I to think that she had loved him? On the hills? nay, she was not there; she was not on the hills, waiting for my uncle and me--she was gone elsewhere, conserving her independence and self-respect, in the womanly way she had. My uncle fancied she was a clinging child: I knew her for a proud and impulsively wilful woman.