Wilderness of Spring Part 40

He pa.s.sed through the gate in a golden haze. Molly was restless. She meant no disrespect, but sometimes found it humorous to fidget and dance ponderously at the moment he was lifting his foot for the stirrup. She did so now, perhaps in comment at the obvious remoteness of Ben's mortal mind. It had the effect of drawing him back to the present world, a few mild expletives quivering on the edge of utterance, when the brown girl Clarissa, returning from some bit of marketing with a parcel under her arm, observed his difficulty, set the parcel on the steps and came to him. "May I hold her for you, sir?"

"Oh, thanks!" Ben smiled without knowing it, and mounted easily as she competently held the bridle and stroked Molly's friendly repentant nose.

He was in the saddle, but her hand remained there a moment longer, and her look held him, a look profounder than a touch, demanding nothing, declaring nothing except some kind of understanding which (until he thought about it later) seemed to Ben quite natural. As if they, the two of them alone, understood and recognized certain things that concerned no one else, that no one else had ever guessed.

Clarissa spoke also, quietly, looking up at him in the sun with no smile: "Good fortune, wherever you go."

"And to you," said Ben--involuntarily, in a way, or because no other words could possibly have been spoken. She turned aside to take up her parcel, and Ben rode home--across Boston Neck, past the waters of Gallows Bay, the marshes and the quicksands.

In the nights that followed Ben's return from Boston with a glowing dreambound face, April became May, but Reuben did not slip outdoors while the house was slumbering to walk in the dark woods. He had done so sometimes last year and the year before--usually on summer nights of light airs and starshine when beauty like something dangerous commanded him to approach, even though it be madness or immolation, because to retreat was a sure kind of dying. The summery warmth was continuing; the nights following Ben's return were as soft and full of sorcery as any that had ever called outside his window, but Reuben did not go. A certain new trouble had come on him, and part of it was a simple and shameful physical fear, like that of the boy who watched the careful advance of a wolf.

Shawn--that devil Shawn.

To Reuben, on the morning after Jan Dyckman's death, the office at the warehouse had stunk of guilt from the moment Shawn strode into it. He could rule that out as a morbid fancy for which Mr. Welland might have chided him; he could d.a.m.n himself half-heartedly for owning a suspicious nature; nevertheless one fact remained clear to him (and apparently to n.o.body else): the death of Jan Dyckman was simply too convenient for Mr.

Shawn, and Shawn was a man driven by a demon of ambition. Never mind whether the ambition itself was good or bad: whatever it was, Reuben felt, it crowded to fullness that part of the man's nature which in most human beings held the capacity for love, kindness, and compromise with the needs of other lives.

And now, Reuben knew, he would find no calm out there in the calling, sweet-breathing night if he must imagine that devil Shawn behind every tree, and fear the moonlight itself because it would illuminate his body for--what? A knife-throw? A lethal rush?

Once Reuben had supposed that everyone possessed something like his own electric awareness of the emotional state of others. In school at Deerfield he used to foresee disaster whenever the teacher was about to break into rage at Johnny Hoyt or Tom Hawks or some other favorite b.u.t.t; Reuben had never been wrong, wincing in sympathy for five or ten minutes before the ruler slammed on a palm or the birch was lifted in ceremony from the wall. At fifteen he still found it difficult to credit that few actually did possess that awareness. The thing itself, he guessed, was merely a sharp observation for tiny shifts of expression or inflections of the voice.... Shawn had reeked of guilt--but more. The large blue eyes had met Reuben's once above the glittering coin; and had understood.

Unable to suggest anything in the realm of proof, Reuben quailed at thought of speaking out. On Sunday, briefly alone with Uncle John, he did attempt it, and fumbled it; the old man was shocked, confused, a little angry and apparently not in a mood to listen; Reuben in misery cancelled his own words. After that, with pain but doggedly, Reuben considered the possibility that he was suffering from green vicious jealousy because Ben so plainly admired the big Irishman. But the one fact that needed no proof, the fact of the convenience of Jan Dyckman's death for a man who wished to be mate of _Artemis_, remained like a cold lump of indigestion, inescapable and sour.... That devil Shawn would not have used the knife himself. That would be Judas Marsh. It could be one-eyed Marsh behind the peaceful dark trees of John Kenny's orchard.

When Reuben could sleep at all, Shawn invaded sickly dreams, his features rather changed, sometimes carrying a flintlock, but always rubbing the brilliant coin, sardonically ready to tell Reuben something or other. His words (usually) were no more than "_Floreat_ Rex"--but the Irishman's true meaning appeared to be that the house was afire, or that somebody, somewhere, was being flogged, and Reuben too much a womanish coward to do anything about it. "_Floreat Rex_," said Shawn, meaning also of course: "I think I'll cut that off--you can't plant anything with it." Three times Reuben woke in a sweat from such a snarling dream, the third and worst time being on the Sat.u.r.day night after Ben's return from his hour with Faith in the garden--of which he told Reuben with shy self-deprecating astonishment, a need to speak, a need to marvel aloud that anyone could be as fortunate as himself.

On Monday night Reuben dreamed that he was (as he truly was) lying in his bed in this familiar lovely room, but frozen to immobility, the house as silent as though everyone had died and no wind would ever again rattle a shutter or chuckle outside in the expanding leaves. One sound, however, could be felt--leisured footsteps on the stairs. Reuben's eyes were glued shut; he knew that, knew also that the stairs were dark, the night-light somehow blown out; but with another kind of vision he could watch the man Shawn coming up-black patch over left eye, bright farthing in the busy fingers of the left hand, flintlock in the right. If Reuben could have spoken, as he tried to do, he would have said: "I killed a wolf." He could not. He knew that if he did, the man would merely lift him with gouging fingers under the cheekbones and toss him aside, because it was not for Reuben, or rather not only for Reuben, that he was gliding up the stairway. A halting then, a steady, purposeful raising of the flintlock until Reuben must stare down into the small black eye of the muzzle and understand that it was all over. Then waking, swift cool wave of understanding how once more the thing was a dream.

It had been much like that not so many years ago, when the dreams were of h.e.l.l.

The moon was not shining, but the sky was a field of a million untroubled lights. As Reuben got up and stretched a cramp out of his arms--his body must have been locked like iron in the dream--he could make out something of his brother's face, enough to sense the tranquillity of Ben's healthy sleep, and envy it.

Ben's smooth forehead was turned away; his hand, firm and large, curled childishly under his rounded chin. Ben's eyelashes were long as a girl's, darker than his brows and curling upward at the tips, darker than the thickening down on his lip that he must now shave every other day. Reuben sat quiet, staring in the dark, until the dim pattern of his brother's face was set free from natural bounds, became incomprehensibly vast, all else a background, then dizzyingly small and far away, unreachable as an image in the bottom of a well.

_What are you? What am I?_

What is fear?

What is happiness?--well, that arrives unsought, if at all: to seek it, I know, is to stumble in a quicksand; to wait wearily hoping for it is simply one tedious way of dying.

What if nothing is real at all except the present moment?

Why, if so, then eternity is only a word. As I look on him now, I look on him forever. But there's deception here, for we do move and change: eternity is a word.

If the present alone is real, then do we ourselves create it from moment to moment? What is memory? I remember looking over hemlocks to the North Star, and Ben looked there too, and I have no way of knowing, ever, what he saw. I remember a day of summer----

Mid-July, for the hay was ripe then, and Reuben and his mother were returning from carrying a noon meal and a jug of beer to the outer fields. Other men beside Father were there, and Ben too, and some other older children and women to help with the raking, but Reuben at seven years old was no use with a rake. He had been allowed to carry the beer, sipping one mouthful and no more on the way. This was the homeward journey, and she in a smiling mood, tanned cheeks flushed, dark eyes full of mischief.

She sat in the long gra.s.s by the palisade gate, sweeping her skirt about to cover her feet in one graceful glide of her arm, lightly as any young girl----

(And so she was of course. Always young. Never to be old.)

"Sit by me, Puppy." No one else was about: only the men in the fields now toylike with distance, a flock of cloud-sheep radiant in the lower sky, a b.u.mblebee lighting with clumsy abruptness on Reuben's knee. "Ah, don't stir! He won't sting thee. See!--yellow packets on his legs, he's been a-gathering. Tell me where he's been and what did he see?" (Warmth of a laughing face expecting nonsense.)

"Why, Mother, he went away over England, away over France, even way away over Boston, and he went awa-a-ay over the places in Ben's Hakluyt book where the Spice Islands are, and there was a king with ten thousand courtiers and he stung them. Every one."

"Now why? Did they do wrong?"

"They stole the king's beer."

"What, all ten thousand of 'em?"

"Every-each of the ten thousand."

"Now, love, what a selfish old pig the king must've been, for if there was beer enough for all ten thousand, I vow that was more than he'd ever drink alone, la?"

"Phoo, he was a big king."

"Ah, I see.... And was there a queen of the Spice Islands?"

"There was, and she did try to prevent them stealing the beer, but one would be tying spoons to her ap.r.o.n the while the rest was after it, she could no-way catch 'em."

"Wicked things!... Was she beautiful?"

"Ay, but not like you."

"Reuben, thou'lt have me weeping."

"Why, Mother? What for?"

"I don't know, Puppy. They say women must weep sometimes, if only because--I don't know.... Don't ever leave me."

On the same Monday night Ben Cory dreamed:

Faith arrived in the coach to call politely on those who lived in the stockade, and Ben was embarra.s.sed for them, because they allowed her blue skirt to become draggled in the mud as she stepped from the coach at the stockade gate. She was not annoyed, but walked in grace to the inner citadel under the red parasol that Clarissa held unopened above her head. Ben shook hands with her pleasantly, and climbed with the girl named Clarity up the long spiral ladder to the top of the citadel.

"Deerfield hath no citadel," said Clarity, Ben good-naturedly agreeing.

From this eyrie they could watch the country beyond the stockade, while in the inner rooms far below, Faith and some friend of Uncle John's were enjoying cakes and coffee and Madeira. "Like crosstrees," said Clarity, Ben good-naturedly agreeing, and she placed her brown sweet sunlit hands at the edge of their perch and pulled at it to make it set up an agreeable swaying, entertaining as a swing in a garden.

The forest beyond the stockade was alive with gray dogs.

"He is compa.s.sed about," Ben said, knowing Clarity shared his anxiety.

"He may be obliged to sell a tetradrachm of the time of Dyckman."

Clarity nodded, moving their crow's-nest back and forth with her little brown hands, so that he could see her body arch and sway, arch and sway, bending and straightening as the wind blew her hair back to him and hid her face from time to time--still he could look down and see Faith walking out through the stockade walls into the woods. The parasol was the only thing the gray dogs were likely to desire, and Clarity had that now, under her arm; therefore the dogs were not likely to attack Faith, but Ben nevertheless felt a certain gloom, because she was too far away, too far down for him to shout a warning. No real danger of course. He said to Clarity: "Mind that thing, Mistress Coronal--I must be going."

"Rest, John! All evening you was like a cat on a hot stove, la, and all Sunday too. Can't you sleep? Can't I help you sleep?"