II
"Well, just keep on as you do, then," shrilled his wife, at the close of a week's debate. By main force of nagging she had beaten down the captain's good-humored defense and reduced him to a state of unnatural brooding. "Keep on." She raised pious glances to the ceiling: "You 'll only bring my white hairs to the grave."
They were really of a yellowish gray, screwed tightly up in unreverend knobs and horns; nor did their descent to the tomb appear more imminent than ever before in thirty years of hypochondria; but they served her rhetoric.
The captain, studying the fluffy plumes of dried pampas grass over the mantel, was moved to take a rare measure, and to his mind an ignoble.
"I don't want to talk about—anything I 've done, Carrie," was his apology: "but after stayin' home from sea so many year to please you, it ain't likely I 'll go leave you now. I ain't a boy," he suggested, with another vain appeal to humor, "I ain't a boy that can run away to sea no longer."
"Hark!" cried the invalid sharply. "Now who's saying you were? What I complain of, and any woman would complain of, is for you to spend all your time aboard her, idling and gossiping, and leave your wife here alone at home."
This was Position Number Two. If he should reply that every morning, after an hour of frustrate conversation, she told him to clear out and let her rest a while, then the discussion would shift to Number Three: "A woman can't always sit and hear the same person saying the same things." This would lead easily to Position Four: "Neighbors? A fine lot of neighbors!— Why did I ever come to live in this place, among such a set of people?" And that would be the last move; for Captain Christy, knowing the neighborhood opinion on this very point, had never found the heart to answer. Thus the game would end in a kind of stale-mate.
"It ain't worth arguin'," he sighed.
"Of course not," snapped his wife. "It's only a question of my peace and health, or your idle pleasure."
And therefore, through another week of dreary weather, among her vials, and beside window-panes laced with raindrops or blanketed with white fog, she sat and argued sourly.
To know the forgotten, obliterated motives which, in that other world of the past, had joined these two in mutual captivity, would be to read tablets long expunged, to trace beach-wandering footprints after many tides, to restore the drifted volutes in last winter's snow. "How did he marry her?" was an old question of indignant, amused, or speculative neighbors; with no more answer than neighbors have ever found to that mystery which—saevo cum joco—has for ages paired and shackled the unmatched of body and of spirit. Mrs. Christy herself wondered about it openly, redundantly, and with self-reproach; but her husband either saw no disparity, or was loyal to some youthful belief, some illusion of Rachel in the days before he woke to find that it was Leah.
Only once had he allowed himself a retort. As an exalted "U. E. Loyalist," the invalid passed all her reading hours among courts and coronets. Declaiming a paragraph about the Marquis of Lorne, she drew from the captain a cheerful admission:—
"Never heard of him."
"Never heard—!" she sniffed contemptuously. "Next you 'll say you 've never heard of the Queen!"
"Oh, yes," said the captain, "yes, I have. By all accounts, she must be a real nice old lady."
"You!—you!" cried the reader, choking. "You dare to speak of Her Majesty so! You—oh! You miserable—Yankee!" A wild torrent of words followed: an angry lecture on irreverence, a more angry history of "my Family, the Defews," and how they had left "your vulgar Yankee colonies, to be loyal to the Crown."—"Oh, why did they let me marry such people?"
"People?" smiled the captain. "That's bigamy, my dear."
"Oh," she moaned, "if I'd only known what I was about!"
"Well," he replied slowly, "I had no idee I was marryin' the whol' Royal Family."
As days passed, the argument over the schooner grew acute and dangerous. Perversity, it may have been; or a cruel whim of the spleen; or, perhaps, that veiled force which moves below so much of human action,—jealousy. The captain was seen no more about the wharves; now and then, in brief appearance on the streets, he trudged heavily, like a workingman at the end of day, and studied the pink sand before his path, with a gaze deep, introverted, unseeing. There at his feet lay in question the last surviving joy of his life.
Once he stopped his former mate before the post office.
"Zing," he said pointblank, "what d' ye say if we'd sell the vessel?"
Zwinglius looked at him shyly, embarrassed, silent, as at some high priest who might propound a sacrilegious riddle.
"Why," he faltered, "I dunno— What fer, cap'n?"
"May come to that," rejoined Captain Christy, and passed on, cloaked in sorrowful enigma.
The increasing storm in his house, and distress in his mind, made him spend a serene morning of Indian summer in painting his front steps. The house, shipshape with white clapboards and green shutters, stood out so trig and Yankee-fashion among the dove-gray houses of the town, that it might have looked too virtuous, too spruce, had not a vine traced runic patterns over the windows, and the sunlight, through a stalwart yellow birch, poured flickering changes along the whole front, like the play of kindly expression on a plain face. Nor did the steps, that mounted from between the files of pearl-mouthed conch shells, need even a touch of restoration. But the captain worked slowly, painting them a vivid azure.
Tapping two brushes against an axe-helve, he had begun to spatter thick dots of black and white, when a voice calling made his tall frame straighten and turn toward the gate. "Good-morning, Captain Christy!"
Against the pickets leaned the slim body of a girl, and over them, like a hardy, trim-poised flower, her bare head,—a sun-browned face, gentle and serious, but lighted with merry eyes, and breezily crowned with willful brown hair.
"Mornin', Joyce," replied the captain, fixing on her a whimsical look, at once benevolent and stern.
"What are you doing that for?" she asked reproachfully, and pointed at the brushes and the bedaubed axe-helve. In guilty silence the captain laid them athwart his paint-bucket, and approached the gate.
"Oh, nothin'," he answered, looking paternally down at her face of mischief, and then up airily at the heavens. "Sort of a kill-time. Lovely mornin', ain't it?"
"You bad old man," laughed the girl, threatening with a graceful finger. "‘I have heard of your paintings, too.' Every time you paint, Father Captain, there's something up, is n't there?— What are you fretting about now?"
"Oh, nothin'," repeated the mariner, like a schoolboy. With great artfulness he inquired, "What's that book under your arm, Joyce? More fiddlesticks, I s'pose?"
His big, tattooed thumbs split open the stubborn pages.
"Humph! Verses," he commented. "Tell by the way they 're printed,—loose ends all to sta'board. What's this?"
"It's about a great sailor," said Joyce.
He read aloud:—
"‘I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.'
"Why, that's true!" cried the old man. This, his tone implied, was the last thing to have been expected. As he turned back and read the noble lines from the first, his eyes glistened, and above the white beard his cheeks slowly flushed.
"One o' the best things I ever read!" he declared recklessly. "Don't care if 't is a poem!"
At the close he sighed.
"Why, anybody might think jest like that,—a little fancy, p'raps, but—jest like that."
His brown fingers, bent over many a rope, cramped at many a helm, closed the book gently.
"Read as much o' him as you like, my girl."
Joyce laughed, but her brown eyes, watching the heavy-hewn old face above her, shone as with young love and worship of a sage. These chats with the captain were somehow like glimpses of communion with the father and mother whom she had been too little to know: in her vision he remained, through the faith-shaken trials of her youth, "like a great sea-mark standing every flaw."
"Father Captain," she said, after a silence, "what were you painting again for?"
"Oh, well," he answered, with an uneasy shift, "ye see, She's kind o' poorly. Took to her bed again."
"Oh, I'm sorry," replied the girl. Her manner became constrained and timid. "Is—is there anything I can do? I'd come in and see her if—if there was."
Both understood the futility of that offer.
"No, thank ye, Joyce," said the captain. "Don't know the' is. Thank ye. How's the organ play now, sence I mended it?"
"Oh, it's beautiful," she cried, with evident relief. "You made it almost like new. There's only one bad wheeze now. You stopped the worst rumble."
"That's good," he said. "I 'll come hear ye play nex' Sunday,—if She's all right by then."
He watched the girl as with light-footed swing she passed down the grass-grown street. "Clears the ground like—like a filly," he grumbled, his eyes twinkling affection.
"It makes me want to cry!" Joyce told herself, while she hurried along, her cheeks glowing and her fists clenched. "Taken to her bed! That old Dragon! Ugh!"
When she had turned a corner, the captain moved heavily back to the steps and bent again to his task of spattering.
Once he straightened up, to look dreamily toward the harbor, where aslant a sunken ridgepole and tumbled chimney rose a well-beloved topmast.
"Hum! That sailorman," he mused,—"Ulysses, she said it was,—would n't mind doin' like him. … Left his wife, though, did n't he? Humph! Not for me, no more."
The careful process of maculation finished, he made a barrier of two kegs and a plank, with large letters—"P-A-I-N-T"—to warn a neighborhood whose habit of calling there had ceased years ago.
When he entered, a peevish voice issued from the open door of the bedchamber.
"I s'pose you expect me to sleep all this time.— Tap-tap-tap! rap-rap-rap!—what were you puttering about?"
"Paintin' the steps," said the captain serenely.
"Painting the steps!" came a scornful echo. "Hark!— They don't need it more'n the cat needs another tail!"
The captain maintained a long silence. He added a stick of maple to the parlor fire, then took a letter from his pocket, and stood reading. The single sheet appeared to require study; at last he shook his head and drew a weary breath. His next attempt at cheerfulness was plainly forced.
"Might be kind o' fun to have it, though," he remarked.
"What?" called the invalid; and after a pause, fretfully, "Have what?"
"Another tail," said the captain, in an absent voice, scanning his letter again.
A mutter of impatient words—"sense" …"second childhood" … "idiot"—came from the sickroom. The captain's great shoulders squared in a slow, patient heave, as he smoothed the page. It ran in crabbed scrawl, along guide-lines ruled in pencil:—
Capt. Christie, Esq,—
dear sir, yrs. of 16eth to hand and contents noted, in reply will start wensday fortnit per stmr. Auroaria and take schr. at yr. termes as per yrs. of 16eth. and wd. say, wd. hev ansd. soonar but ben suffring from stummick troble but she will suit me fine for smoakwood trade so hopeing you are well I will close from
Yr. Obdt. Servt.
To every man, except smug and petty persons ignored by destiny, comes at least one message—a friendly letter, a passing whisper in a crowded room, a shrewd, cold document clicked off in purple type, the word of a breathless runner, a speech-mangled telegram, or a shout from a boat alongside in the dark—to strike a blow which is the be-all and the end-all for some cherished way of life. More than once he reads the written decree, or in echoing memory hears the spoken; and while coming to believe and deeply understand that a strange hour has struck, that his life has swung into a new cycle whose grief lies onward and whose joy behind, he must—alone, with the thing in his pocket or the words in his head—work at a desk, or navigate a ship, or chat with strangers, or walk floors, or sit in theatres, or paint steps. Slowly, therefore, but with fixed heart and equal mind, the captain had accepted his message in its finality.
"I don't see exac'ly how I 'll do without her," he reflected. His tall bulk filling the little window, he looked out once more at the distant topmast, and summarized the remainder of his old age. "It 'll be like—like haulin' in on a slack rope—with nothin' at the end. But I must 'a' ben kind o' selfish, frettin' Her about it so long."
Treading lightly, he entered the sickroom, to make his offering.
"Well, Carrie," he announced jovially, "guess this 'll interest ye."
"I'm not deef," replied his consort, who sat propped among pillows, her sallow, hostile face appearing, under a white nightcap, like the sinister freak of some ill-omened masquerade. "I'm not deef. You no need to shout so." She frowned upon the letter for a space. "Well, you 're lucky," she continued. "He must be a fool, to want that hulk. What a scribble!— Take it away; it hurts my eyes. Ever going to bring me something to eat? If I can have anything that's fit to touch, I may get up this afternoon."
Thus, past the grimace of many a strange idol, the smoke of sacrifice mounts to the true acceptance.