Wilderness of Spring Part 23

Mr. Hibbs stared at the paper Ben handed him, like a man hit by a chunk of firewood. "Done without aid, ha?"

"It was, sir. I even waited till Ru was asleep, for fear I'd give up and ask him for help after all."

Reuben gazed deeply into the swirling black midgets that had been the text of Ovid; he instructed himself: _It doesn't matter. It does not matter. Seeing that he will go--_

"No objection," Mr. Hibbs was saying vacantly--"no objection to the two of you helping each other: I expect it and you profit by it, but I can see, I understand, Benjamin, I--uh--commend your industry and the sentiment that must have prompted it." His voice trailed away under the threat of another sneeze, and Reuben knew that he must speak.

"It's quite true, Mr. Hibbs. I knew nothing of it till just now." _Was that good enough? Did I snarl, or squeak?..._

"Of course. This translation is--not bad, Benjamin. Some errors, but nothing that cannot be caught up--uh--tomorrow. I'm a.s.suming your great-uncle hath nothing against it, or you would mention it, being"--the sneeze arrived and pa.s.sed on--"being an honorable boy. Yes, you may have the afternoon. No precedent, of course."

"I understand that, sir, and thank you."

There was grammar, there was logic, there were Greek verbs, there was in the air a warm premonition of luncheon. Mr. Hibbs tucked his books under his arm and marched upstairs, where he would allow himself a five-minute meditation before the meal. He was willing to explain this exercise without embarra.s.sment. It was not the same as prayer, but a contemplation of nothing, a device for clearing his mind of trivia in the hope of perceiving a moment of truth.... "Ru, why don't you come too? You could easy catch up the work if he gives you the afternoon, and he would--for all his barking you know you can twist him any way you please."

"No, bub," said Reuben lightly--but he was afraid to look up from his desk at the puzzled kindness he knew he would see. "There'll be a tag end of the afternoon when Pontifex hath done his worst, and I--wish to do something else."

"Something else?"

"Oh, I--nothing too important."

Ben looked hurt. "About the Cicero--haven't I leaned on thee too much, Ru? I never did think to wound thee, doing that."

"I'm not wounded! I"--_careful, Ru Cory!_--"I commend your industry."

"Ru!"

"I'm sorry. About this afternoon--you remember Mr. Welland?"

"Welland? Oh, the doctor?"

"Yes, I--he knows so much--I met him by chance the other day, when you was in Boston----"

It was no use. What had seemed clear a little while ago, a lamp in a parting of the mist, was now once more submerged in fog, and Reuben lost his way in a tangle of half-exasperated words, trying to rea.s.sure Ben that a wish to see Mr. Welland had nothing whatever to do with being ill.

Older and neater than neighboring houses, the Jenks house was shielded from them by a coach house, and on the other side by a small fenced-in garden. Such aloofness would not save it if flames like those of 1679 or '91 ever raged into this western quarter of the city, where many still owned the forbidden wood-framed chimneys and hoped for the best. Fires in the past had usually started near the docks. That might be the reason why Captain Jenks wished to keep the breadth of the town between him and the ships that were his daily bread.

Approaching the house, Ben had been sharply aware of second-floor windows, feeling eyes in a way remarkably like fright if only it weren't absurd to be frightened at calling on a girl. Now he held back his hand from the knocker, studying the garden with unstable dignity, suppressing a hope that n.o.body was at home. He admired the grape arbor, enlivened already by a white and brown of buds, and noted here and there the brave glow of daffodils. Flagstone walks suggested a trust in permanence.

He remembered other doorways, how they had stood between him and the unknown. Three years ago one had opened, himself and Reuben standing in rags on the threshold and unable to speak at all to the face with owl-tufts, for John Kenny had answered the door himself, looking down his nose. "To what have I the honor--oh, my soul! Your mother's look, the both of you--come in out of the cold!" Not until hours later, when they were washed and fed and settled in the room where they now lived, did John Kenny speak of his sister's letter announcing their tragic death in the jaws of the beast, a pa.s.sing hard example of the infinite wisdom of G.o.d. He had answered the letter, he said, with the proper sentiments. Very much later, weeks later, Mr. Kenny's own conscience moved him to write another letter even more stately, explaining that the boys appeared to be abundantly alive and would remain with him until of man's years. This letter was never answered by Rachel Cory; after three years, it seemed unlikely that it ever would be. That doorway had opened on years of change, as all years are, but Ben held a private notion that the century really turned then, in March of 1704: for himself and Reuben an end to flame and trouble except for whatever stirred within--and this only natural, since any boy or man is a volcano with a thin crust and knows it.

Ben sounded the knocker. Now he must remember to take off his hat after the door opened, not before--supposing it ever did.

It opened. In Puritan gray and white, she of the brown face was regarding him with amiable recognition. Ben had started to claw his hat at the first rattle of the latch; he checked that, and was now able to remove it, not gracefully but at least without dropping it on her shoes.

All this the slave girl observed with calm, secure in cool gravity, a well-trained servant waiting for him to speak, but there could be no doubt about that flash of welcome. "Mistress Faith Jenks--is she at home?" He spoke so softly he could hardly hear the noise himself.

"I think so, sir." Again a sparkle shared, as if she had said aloud: "Of course she is, Ben Cory of Deerfield, but I must make a show of going to find out." In her actually spoken words Ben heard a puzzling foreign quality: the _th_ was almost a _t_. "Will you come in, Mr. Cory, the while I inquire?" The foreign stress altered his name to something like Cor_ee_. But she did remember him, name and all.

Clarissa showed him through the entry--he knocked over no furniture--into a parlor dim with heavy drapes at the windows such as Ben had never seen. Mr. Kenny liked his windows casually plain to the world. Clarissa moved to the drapes with the grace of a wild being incapable of clumsiness. She said: "Let's have more light."

"Thank you," Ben said. She glanced at him quickly, startled maybe by the thanks, then flung the cloth open and lingered briefly, a golden hand raised to the drapery, the round of her cheek lovable in the sun.

Ben realized he was rudely staring, in a sudden loss of blindness. He automatically d.a.m.ned himself for shameful thoughts--he came here to call respectfully on _Faith Jenks_!--not to yearn and l.u.s.t after a slave wench who doubtless owned not even a last name. In his confusion he could no longer look at Clarissa. He heard her murmur some pleasant word about sitting down and making himself at ease. She was gone, and the room cold.

Clarissa's hand--now Ben could not even scold himself. He could not escape the sweetness of a golden hand, pink-palmed, shining in sunlight as a part of sunlight.

Seated and short of breath he tried furtively to clean an over-looked fingernail with a thumbnail, an operation tinged with futility. On the wall a sampler confronted him, not very well made--Kate would have sniffed--a.s.serting: _And thine ears shall hear a voice behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left. Isaiah, x.x.x; 21._ Ben Cory ventured a modest alteration in the angle of his chair.

He remembered he did not know the religion of the Jenks family; had stupidly failed to inquire about it of Uncle John. What if Faith were strongly devout?--it was likely. What if she discovered with shock that he had not seen the inside of a meeting-house since coming to Roxbury?...

He fretted at the fingernail, borrowing trouble. Could a man dissemble, hiding essential doubts from a woman if he loved her? Shabby bargain: for my pretense, your love. He gave up the fingernail as a lost cause, and begged the moral dilemma to go away a while.

Slowly, as it may dawn on a wanderer in the forest that he is under examination from a thicket by the feral unconciliating eyes of a Something--bear, catamount, Indian, he doesn't know, doesn't exactly wish to know--so it dawned on Ben that he was being studied from the hallway, in perfect silence, by a square lump of girl and a smaller lump of yellowish dog.

Following her inclinations, the mother of Charity's dog might have conceived and born a spaniel, but she must have been tempted by the Devil in the shape of a terrier. The snuff-colored result had been amended by years of overeating into a hairy sausage too close to the floor. His silky ears were tolerable spaniel, his eyes all spaniel in foolish sadness, blurred in the iris like some old human eyes. When Ben smiled, a wag disturbed the squirrely tail; he shambled up to a.n.a.lyze the smell of Ben's feet and p.r.o.nounce it fair. Charity nodded. "He worships you. I foresaw it plain. Most uncommon for Sultan to worship anyone."

Ben studied Sultan in some alarm. He was lying on Ben's shoes, true, but it looked more like sleep than worship. "Often he growls with menace"--Charity approached, awkward in a shapeless brown frock that did her no good--"the which he was prepared to do when we ambushed you."

"I'd've gone straight up in the air. A perfect ambush."

Charity planted her feet far apart and hid her hands behind her back.

"Did you play Inj'an when you was young?"

"Oh, I did, Mistress Charity, my brother and I. Used to sneak off to the woods where we were forbidden to go, which was wrong of us."

"Why?"

"The woods were dangerous--real Inj'ans."

"I've seen real ones--not wild, though." She came nearer, not by walking but by a side-to-side evolution of spread feet, carrying her like a statue on small wheels. "Christian Indians, talked English all piggedy-gulp."

"I remember an old Indian at Deerfield, supposed to be a Christian. A Poc.u.mtuck. Wore a cast-off bodice for a breechclout, and was alway----"

Ben remembered the failing of Captain Jenks--"was alway a little foolish."

"Faith is dressing her hair different, the which you're obliged to notice or she'll be in a taking, the which I think is poo."

"I'll be sure to notice it, Mistress Charity."

"Be you"--Charity jerked her head; upstairs Ben could hear a muted ripple of women's voices--"in love with _her_?"

Ben evaded. "Charity, I've met her but the once."

No good. "I thought a person alway knew."

"Oh--maybe they do and I'm just foolish."

"I guess you are, but very wonderful."