Wilderness of Spring Part 54

"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 G.o.d, 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d, 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_ cla.s.s 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 compa.s.sed about," said Shawn--"compa.s.sed 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 G.o.dfearing 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sive, 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 pa.s.sive, too pa.s.sive 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 a.s.serted itself and Ben noted it. I don't _know_ how one youth steals a ketch from seven grown men. But....

By the contemptuous a.s.sent 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 c.u.m venerit hora...._"

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

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

"Ha!"