The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Part 33

When this had sunk, night gave a forlorn and indistinguishable look to everything. A spark of ruddy light glowed deep in the valley. The rocking outlines of the hills were lost in rus.h.i.+ng darkness. At his back sounded the pathetic clatter of a dead spruce against its living neighbor, bespeaking the deviltry of woodland demons.--It was the hour which makes all that man can do seem as nothing in the mournful darkness, causing his works to vanish and be as if they had not been.

At this hour the heart of man may be powerfully stirred, by an anguish, a prayer, or perhaps--a fragrance.

The harbor master, uttering a brief cry, dropped to his knees and remained mute, his arms extended toward the sea in a gesture of reconcilement.

On that night the _Sally Lunn_, Cap'n Sam Dreed, was wrecked on the sands of Pull-an'-be-d.a.m.ned.

Rackby, who had fallen into a deep sleep, lying northeast and southwest, was awakened by a hand smiting his door in, and a wailing outside of the Old Roke busy with his agonies. In a second his room was full of crowding seamen, at their head Peter Loud, bearing in his arms the dripping form of Caddie Sills. He laid her gently on the couch.

"Where did you break up?" whispered Rackby. He trembled like a leaf.

"Pull-an'-be-d.a.m.ned," said Deep-water Peter. "The Cap'n's gone. He didn't come away. Men can say what they like of Sam Dreed; he wouldn't come into the boat. I'll tell all the world that."

The crew of the wrecked s.h.i.+p stood heaving and glittering in their oils, plucking their beards with a sense of trespa.s.s, hearing the steeple clock tick, and water drum on the worn floor.

"All you men clear out," said Caddie Sills, faintly. "Leave me here with Jethro Rackby."

They set themselves in motion, pus.h.i.+ng one against the other with a rasp and shriek of oilskins--and Peter Loud last of all.

The harbor master, not knowing what to say, took a step away from her, came back, and, looking into her pale face, cried out, horror-struck, "I d.a.m.ned ye." He dropped on his knees. "Poor girl! I d.a.m.ned ye out and out."

"Hold your horses, Mr. Happen-so," said Cad Sills. "There's no harm in that. I was d.a.m.ned and basted good and brown before you ever took me across your little checkered ap.r.o.n."

She looked at him almost wistfully, as if she had need of him. With her wet hair uncoiling to the floor, she looked as if she had served, herself, for a fateful living figurehead, like her mother before her.

The bit of coral was still slung round her throat. The harbor master recalled with what a world of meaning she had caught it between her teeth on the night of his rescue--the eyes with a half-wistful light as now.

"Come," she said, "Harbor Master. I wasn't good to you, that's true; but still you have done me a wrong in your turn, you say?"

"I hope G.o.d will forgive me," said the harbor master.

"No doubt of that, little man. But maybe you would feel none the worse for doing me a favor, feeling as you do."

"Yes, yes."

Her hand sought his. "You see me--how I am. I shall not survive my child, for my mother did not before me. Listen. You are town clerk. You write the names of the new born on a sheet of ruled paper and that is their name?"

Rackby nodded.

"So much I knew--Come. How would it be if you gave my child your name--Rackby? Don't say no to me. Say you will. Just the scratching of a pen, and what a deal of hards.h.i.+p she'll be saved not to be known as Cad Sills over again."

Her hand tightened on his wrist. Recollecting how they had watched the tide horse over Pull-an'-be-d.a.m.ned thus, he said, eagerly, "Yes, yes, if so be 'tis a she," thinking nothing of the consequences of his promise.

"Now I can go happy," murmured Cad Sills.

"Where will you go?" said the harbor master, timorously, feeling that she was whirled out of his grasp a second time.

"How should I know?" lisped Caddie Sills, with a remembering smile. "The sea is wide and uncertain, little man."

The door opened again. A woman appeared and little Rackby was thrust out among the able seamen.

Three hours later he came and looked down on Cad Sills again. Rain still beat on the black windows. Her lips were parted, as if she were only weary and asleep. But in one glance he saw that she had no need to lie northeast and southwest to make certain of unbroken sleep.

To the child born at the height of the storm the harbor master gave a name, his own--Rackby. He was town clerk, and he gave her this name when he came to register her birth on the broad paper furnished by the government. And for a first name, Day, as coming after that long night of his soul, perhaps.

When this was known, he was fined by the government two hundred dollars.

Such is the provision in the statutes, in order that there may be no compromise with the effects of sin.

The harbor master did not regret. He reckoned his life anew from that night when he sat in the dusk with the broad paper before him containing the names of those newly born.

So the years pa.s.sed, and Day Rackby lived ash.o.r.e with her adoptive father. When she got big enough they went by themselves and reopened the house on Meteor Island.

The man was still master of the harbor, but he could not pretend that his authority extended to the sea beyond. There he lost himself in speculation, sometimes wondering if Deep-water Peter had found a thing answering his quest. But Peter did not return to satisfy him on this point.

The harbor master was content to believe that he had erred on the side of the flesh, and that the sea, a jealous mistress, had swept him into the hearing of the G.o.ds, who were laughing at him.

As for the child of Cad Sills, people who did not know her often said that her eyes were speaking eyes. Well if it were so, since this voice in the eyes was all the voice she had. She could neither speak nor hear from birth. It was as if kind nature had sealed her ears against those seductive whisperings which--so the gossips said--had been the ruination of her mother.

As she grew older, they said behind their hands that blood would tell, in spite of all. Then, when they saw the girl skipping along the sh.o.r.e with kelp in her hands they said, mistrustfully, that she was "marked"

for the sea, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

"She hears well enough, when the sea speaks," Zinie Shadd averred. He had caught her listening in a sh.e.l.l with an intent expression.

"She will turn out to be a chip of the old block," said Zinie Shadd's wife, "or I shall never live to see the back of my neck."

Jethro Rackby heard nothing of such prophecy. He lived at home. Here in his estimation was a being without guile, in whose innocence he might rejoice. His forethought was great and pathetic. He took care that she should learn to caress him with her finger tips alone. He remembered the fatal touch of Cad Sills's kiss at Pull-an'-be-d.a.m.ned, which had as good as drawn the soul out of his body in a silver thread and tied it in a knot.

Once, too, he had dreamed of waking cold in the middle of the night and finding just a spark on the ashes of his hearth. This he nursed to flame; the flame sprang up waist-high, hot and yellow. Fearful, he beat it down to a spark again. But then again he was cold. He puffed at this spark, s.h.i.+vering; the flame grew, and this time, with all he could do, it shot up into the rafters of his house and devoured it.--

So it was that the pa.s.sion of Cad Sills lived with him still.

He taught the child her letters with blue sh.e.l.ls, and later to take the motion of his lips for words. She waylaid him everywhere--on the rocks, on the sands, in the depths of the hemlock grove, on tiny antlers of gray caribou moss, with straggling little messages and admonis.h.i.+ngs of love. Her ap.r.o.n pocket was never without its quota of these tiny sh.e.l.ls of brightest peac.o.c.k blue. They trailed everywhere. He ground them under heel at the threshold of his house. From long a.s.sociation they came to stand for so many inquisitive little voices in themselves, beseeching, questioning, defying.

But for his part, he grew to have a curious belief, even when her head was well above his shoulder, that the strong arch of her bosom must ring out with wild sweet song one day, like that which he had heard on the November hillside, when Caddie Sills had run past him at the Preaching Tree. This voice of Day's was like the voice sleeping in the great bronze horn hanging in a rack, which his father had used to call the hands to dinner. A little wind meant no sound, but a great effort, summoning all the breath in the body, made the brazen throat ring out like a viking's horn, wild and sweet.

So with Day, if an occasion might be great enough to call it forth.

"He always was a notional little man," the women said, on hearing this.

The old bachelor was losing his wits. Such doctrine as he held made him out not one whit better off than Zinie Shadd, who averred that the heart of man was but a pendulum swaying in his bosom--though how it still moved when he stood on his head was more than even Zinie Shadd could fathom, to be sure.

"It's the voice of conscience he's thinking of, to my judgment," said one. "That girl is deafer than a haddock and dumb as the stone."

Untouched by gossip, the harbor master felt with pride that his jewel among women was safe, and that here, within four humble walls, he treasured up a being literally without guile, one who grew straight and white as a birch sapling. "Pavilioned in splendor" were the words descriptive of her which he had heard thunderously hymned in church. The hair heavy on her brow was of the red gold of October.

If they might be said to be s.h.i.+pmates sailing the same waters, they yet differed in the direction of their gaze. The harbor master fixed his eyes upon the harbor; but little Day turned hers oftenest upon the blue sea itself, whose mysterious inquietude he had turned from in dismay.

True, the harbor was not without its fascination for her. Leaning over the side of his dory, the sea girl would s.h.i.+ver with delight to descry those dismal forests over which they sailed, dark and dizzying ma.s.ses full of wavering black holes, through which sometimes a blunt-nosed bronze fish sank like a bolt, and again where sting ray darted, and jellyfish palpitated with that wavering of fringe which produced the faintest of turmoil at the surface of the water.

This would be at the twilight hour when warm airs alternated with cold, like hopes with despairs. Sparbuoys of silver gray were duplicated in the water, wrinkled like a snout at the least ripple from the oars.

Boats at anchor seemed twice their real size by reason of their dark shadows made one with them. One by one the yellow riding lights were hung, far in. They shone like new-minted coins; the harbor was itself a purse of black velvet, to which the harbor master held the strings. The quiet--the immortal quiet--operated to restore his soul. But at such times Day would put the tips of her fingers mysteriously to her incarnadined dumb lips and appear to hearken on the seaward side. If a willful light came sometimes in her eyes he did not see it.