The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Part 34

But even on the seaward side there would not be heard, on such nights, the slightest sound to break the quiet, unless that of little fish jumping playfully in the violet light, and sending out great circles to s.h.i.+mmer toward the horizon.

So it drew on toward Day Rackby's eighteenth birthday.

One morning in October they set out from Meteor for the village. A cool wind surged through the sparkling brown oak leaves of the oaks at Hannan's Landing.

"They die as the old die," reflected Jethro Rackby, "gnarled, withered, still hanging on when they are all but sapless."

Despite the melancholy thought, his vision was gladdened by a magic clarity extending over all the heavens, and even to the source of the reviving winds. The sea was blown clear of s.h.i.+ps. In the harbor a few still sat like seabirds drying plumage. Against the explosive whiteness of wind clouds, their sails looked like wrinkled parchment, or yellowing Egyptian cloth; the patches were mysterious hieroglyphs.

Day sat sleepily in the stern of the dory, her shoulders pinched back, her heavy braid overside and just failing the water, her eyes on the sway of c.o.c.kles in the bottom of the boat.

Rackby puckered his face, when the square bell tower of the church, white as chalk, came into view, dazzling against the somber green upland. The red crown of a maple showed as if a great spoke of the rising sun had pa.s.sed across that field and touched the tree to fire with its brilliant heat.

So he had stood--so he had been touched. His heart beat fast, and now he stood under the Preaching Tree again, and drew a whiff of warm hay, clover-spiced, as it went creaking past, a square-topped load, swis.h.i.+ng and dropping fragrant tufts.--This odor haunted him, as if delights forgotten, only dreamed, or enjoyed in other lives, had drifted past him.--Then the vivid touch of Cad Sills's lips.

He glanced up, and at once his oars stumbled, and he nearly dropped them in his fright. For the fraction of a second he had, it seemed, surprised Cad Sills herself looking at him steadily out of those blue, half-shut lazy eyes of his scrupulously guarded foster child. The flesh cringed on his body. Was she lurking there still? Certainly he had felt again, in that flash, the kiss, the warm tumult of her body, the fingers dove-tailed across his eyes; and even seen the scented hay draw past him, toppling and quivering.

He stared more closely at the girl. She looked nothing like the wild mother. There was no hint of Cad Sills in that golden beauty unless, perhaps, in a certain charming bluntness of sculpturing at the very tip of her nose, a deft touch. Nevertheless, some invisible fury had beat him about the head with her wings there in the bright suns.h.i.+ne.

Disquieted, he resumed the oars. They had drifted close to the bank, and a shower of maple leaves, waxen red, all but fell into the boat.

"These die as the young die," thought the harbor master, sadly. "They delight to go, these adventurers, swooping down at a breath. They are not afraid of the mystery of mold."

His glance returned to the wandlike form of his daughter, whose eyes now opened upon his archly.

"So she would adventure death," he reflected. "Almost at as light a whisper from the powers of darkness, too."

They were no sooner ash.o.r.e than the girl tugged at his hand to stay him.

The jeweler's gla.s.s front had intrigued her eye, for there, displayed against canary plush, was a string of pearls, like winter moons for size and l.u.s.ter. Her speaking eye flashed on them and her slim fingers twisted and untwisted at her back. She lifted her head and with her forefinger traced a pleading circle round her throat.

A dark cloud came over Rackby's features. These were the pearls, he knew at once, which Caddie Sills had sold in the interest of Cap'n Dreed so long ago. They were a luckless purchase on the part of the jeweler. All the women were agreed that such pearls had bad luck somewhere on the string, and no one had been found to buy.

"Why does he display them at this time of all times, in the face and eyes of everybody?" thought the harbor master.

A laugh sounded behind him. It was Deep-water Peter, holding a gun in one hand, and a dead sheldrake in the other. The red wall of the Customs House bulged over him.

"Ah, there, Jethro!" he said. "Have you married the sea at last and taken a mermaid home to live?"

"This is my daughter, if you please," said Jethro Rackby. An ugly glint was in his usually gentle eye, but he did not refuse the outstretched hand. "You have prospered seemingly."

"Oh, I have enough to carry me through," said Peter. "I picked up a trifle here, and a trifle there, and a leetle pinch from nowhere, just to salt it down. And so all this time you've been harbor master here?"

His tone was between contempt and tolerance, as befitted the character formed in a harder school, and the harbor master was bitterly silent.

Day had turned from the jewels and was coming toward her father. When she saw the strange man beside him she stopped short and averted her face, not before observing that Rackby might have pa.s.sed for Peter's father.

"Not so shy--not so shy," murmured Deep-water Peter, as if she had been a wild filly coming up to his hand.

"She cannot hear you," Rackby interposed. The gleam of triumph in his eye was plain.

"Can't hear?"

"Neither speak nor hear."

Peter Loud turned toward the girl again--and this time her blue eye met his, and a spark was struck, not dying out instantly, such a spark as might linger on the surface of a flint struck by steel.

Was it a certain trick of movement, or only the quickened current of his blood that made Deep-water Peter know the truth?

"This is strange," he said.

That wind-blown voice of his, with its deepwater melodiousness, had dropped to a whisper.

"Even providential," the harbor master returned, and his eye glittered.

Peter would have said something to that, but Rackby, with a stern hand at his daughter's elbow, pa.s.sed out of hearing.

Peter Loud was promptly taken in the coils of that voiceless beauty whose speaking eye had met his so squarely. The mother had played him false, as she had Jethro--but with Peter these affairs were easier forgotten.

Within the week, as he was striding over the bare flats of Pull-an'-be-d.a.m.ned, he saw the flash of something white inside a weir.

The sun was low and dazzled him. He came close and saw that this was Rackby's daughter. She had slipped into the weir to tantalize a crab with the sight of her wriggling toes and so had stepped on a sharp sh.e.l.l and cut her foot to the bone.

Peter cried amazedly. The shadow of the weir net on her face and body trembled, but she uttered no slightest sound. It was as if some wild swan had fallen from the azure.

In falling she had hurt her leg and could not walk. Peter tore the sleeves from her arms and bound the foot, then bent eagerly and lifted her out of the weir.

Immediately she hid her cheek in his coat, s.h.i.+vered, set her damp lips with their flavor of sweet salt, full against his.

Deep-water Peter held her tighter yet. How could he know that here, on Pull-an'-be-d.a.m.ned, within a biscuit's toss of the weirs, Cad Sills had served the same fare to Rackby. He turned and ran, holding her close, and the tide hissed at his heels like a serpent.

The harbor master, lately returned from evening inspection of the harbor, heard the rattle of oars under his wharf, and in no great while he saw Peter advancing with Day limp in his arms.

The sailor brushed past him into the kitchen, and laid the girl down, as he had laid her mother, northeast and southwest. Rackby at his side muttered:

"How come you here like this? How come you?"

A fearful misgiving caused him to drop to his knees. The girl opened her eyes; a new brilliance danced there. With a s.h.i.+ver, the harbor master perceived those signs of a fire got beyond control which had consumed the mother.

"She has cut her foot, friend Rackby," said Peter. "I took the liberty to bring her here--so."

Wrath seized the little man. "Thank you for nothing, Peter Loud!" he cried, and these again were the very words Cad Sills had hurled at him when he had saved her life at Pull-an'-be-d.a.m.ned.

"That's as you say," said Deep-water Peter.

"You have done your worst now," said Jethro. "If I find you here again I will shoot you down like a dog."

Peter laughed very bitterly. "You have got what is yours, Harbor Master," he said, "and it takes two to make a quarrel."

But as he was going through the door he looked back. The girl unclosed her eyes, and a light played out of them that followed him into the dark and streamed across the heavens like the meteorite that had once fallen on Meteor Island.