Читать книгу Even So - Charles Boardman Hawes - Страница 4

It all happened a century ago. “On this day,” the village minister of those other years wrote in his slow, regular hand—the pages of his journal are yellow as saffron now, and the ink is faded brown—“on this day did Captain Hastings sail in command of the Amaryllis, taking with him as hitherto, poor Christine Widmer, concerning whom there has been so much talk. For my own part I cannot be properly scandalized by their relation. Certainly the thought of marriage with one in her condition is not to be tolerated, and I believe her to be happier with him than elsewhere.” Christian charity, indeed!

There have always been men of the Hastings name in the village. They came in the days of its first settlement. There are a score of them living here at this very minute. And, like the most of them in the early years of the republic, Donald Hastings followed the sea. Holiest, impetuous, young, as were so many of those sea captains in that golden era of the early nineteenth century, he left but one shadow on his memory—perhaps not altogether a shadow. Therein lies the story.

* * *

Above the junk the masts and spars of a ship loomed in the moonlight.

Singsong voices swelled to a wild chatter, and the steering sweep was swung hard over. But the old junk, clumsy and slow to obey her helm, remained in the center of the channel. For a moment, collision was imminent. Then from the deck of that Chinese vessel on the Chu Kiang, one of thousands as like as their yellow masters, came the sharp call:

“Ahoy there! Bear off!”

“Who’s there below?” A deep voice from above roared the words in a tone of amazement.

A rattle of commands came down to the junk, hoarse and loud on the night air. The Chinese clamored in ducklike harshness of speech. Then the slowly turning junk and the veering ship passed by a margin of inches. And as they passed, seven men came scrambling over the bulwarks of the ship to a deck filled with shadowy figures that gathered in a silent circle. Then the circle opened and one man, standing out from the rest, confronted the seven in the near darkness.

“Well,” said he, in a low, deliberate voice, “who and what are you?”

“This,” replied the leader of the seven, with a quick gesture, “is all that is left of the crew of the Helen of Troy.”

“Ah!” The voice was cool and noncommittal. “Of the Helen of Troy. Do you know what ship this is?”

“Who are you?” the man from the junk demanded suddenly.

The other laughed shortly. “I—” he began.

“You are Amos Widmer!”

And Amos Widmer it was.

“Yes, I am Amos Widmer—and you are . . . all that is left of the crew of the Helen of Troy!”

There was a suggestion of irony in his tone. He stood there for a time, smiling queerly in the dusk, and looking past the other, who faced him with folded arms. His was not a pleasant smile.

“Boy,” he said at last in a soft, gentle voice, “Captain Hastings, of the Helen of Troy, will have the unoccupied stateroom. Show him down, and put yourself at his service.”

There was one porthole to the stateroom, iron gray it seemed, and a lantern swung from an overhead beam. When the boy had gone, Hastings leaned back and surveyed darkly the narrow confines of the little room.

Then he heard a woman laughing somewhere in the ship, as if a long way off, and was swept by a flood of conflicting emotions.

In a way, it had all begun long before, when the Helen of Troy slipped through the narrows of my old New England port on a day in early June, the wind abeam, and was passed by a ship outward bound under full press of canvas. The scene came back to Hastings there in the dim light of the stateroom; the New England shore dark against the yellow sunset; the ship, phantom-like, her sails barred by shadows of spar and rigging; then the rumbling voice of the mate of the Helen of Troy: “The Winnemere, as I’m alive! It ain’t in nature to be meeting with her always. Nagasaki! Batavia! Sumatra! Aye, she sang another tune, though, the night we passed her in Macassar Strait.”

It seemed to Hastings that he could hear again his own reply, faint and far off: “There were light winds that night. But she’s an able craft in coarse weather.” Training his glass at the tall figure on the deck of the outgoing vessel, he had muttered, “Grin, damn ye, grin!” and flung back his head with an air of elation. Not in ships alone were Donald Hastings and Amos Widmer rivals.

So the Winnemere had sailed to meet the oncoming dusk, and the Helen of Troy had come bravely into port. And there Donald Hastings had heard an old story, and like many a better man before him, had gone back to the sea to forget that he ever had loved. But one thing he had not been able to forget.

After a time that faint laughter, breaking the pregnant silence of the little stateroom, came again to Hastings’ ears. There was in it a strange note that puzzled him, an unfamiliarity that overbore the lingering familiarity of its tone. Presently, as he stood with parted lips, the boy came, knocking, and asked him to the captain’s cabin. As he traversed the narrow passage he heard the laughter yet again, louder now, and more than ever was puzzled by it. For though it reminded him of Christine Duncan’s voice, it had a penetrating wildness like no laughter he had heard before. He entered the door with his hands half raised, as if to guard against an unexpected attack. But the gesture was needless. Amos Widmer, calm as Buddha, was seated already at the oak table.

Smiling softly when his guest appeared, Widmer motioned him to a chair. “Now then, boy,” he murmured, “what has that black scoundrel in the galley got ready for us?”

And the boy vanished, flinching in the door.

“I did not expect this honor,” Hastings began.

“The honor is mine.” Unstopping the decanter on the table, Widmer filled two wine glasses. “Your health, sir!” he said.

Hastings fingered the stem of his own glass. Young and hot-headed, versed in rough courtesies and frank enmities, he was placed at a singular disadvantage by this quiet man with the eyes of a devil. “I did not expect this honor, sir,” he repeated, “or this pleasure. Your—” his pause was almost imperceptible—“wife?”

“She is ailing.”