Читать книгу The Heart that Knows - Charles George Douglas Roberts - Страница 3

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An unremitting wind, blowing down the vast and solitary green levels of Tantramar, bowed all one way the deep June grasses over the miles on miles of marsh. A tall girl, standing alone on the crest of the dyke,—the one human figure visible in the wide, bright-coloured emptiness of the morning,—caught its full force and braced herself sturdily against it. It flapped the starched wings of her deep white sunbonnet across her face, twitched out a heavy streamer of her flax-blond hair, and pressed her thin, blue and white calico gown close upon the tenderly rounded lines of her slim young figure. The soft, insistent noise of it, mingled with the sound of the shallow, dancing waves that swept along past the dyke-front, confused her ears and partly numbed her thought. But her eyes, which were large, and of a peculiarly positive porcelain blue, were fixed with anxious strain upon a ship riding at anchor far out across the yellow waves. That ship, a black-hulled barquentine on the yards of whose foremast the white sails were being broken out, was evidently the one thing her eyes took note of in all the spacious scene.

The scene was all space,—all high, light colour, wind-washed brightness, and loneliness. Toward the southeast, where the girl was looking, and in a vast sweep around the southward horizon, spread the tawny, tumbled waters of Fundy, eternally vexed by their terrific tides. Beyond the ship—leagues beyond, and across the yellow water—rose the low blue hills of Minudie. To eastward outspread the interminable light green levels of the Tantramar marshes, with the dark green spur of Fort Beauséjour thrust out to fence them off from the marshes of the Missaguash. Further around to the left the grassy solitudes were cleft and threaded by the many-winding channel of that most mutable of rivers, the Tantramar, just now at full tide, and pouring its pale, copper-coloured flood into the bay almost before the girl’s feet. The windings of the river—which twisted hither and thither as if it had forgotten its way—made bright, reddish yellow slashes and patches over the wide green of the marsh.

Still further to the left, along the foot of the uplands which ran diminishing northward, a far-off group of roofs, with a couple of church spires and a cluster of masts, showed the little town of Sackville on its gently billowing hills. Much nearer, a promontory of wooded upland bore, half-hidden in its front, an old colonial mansion, “Westcock House,” with horse-chestnuts and Lombardy poplars ranged majestically before it. Outspread behind the watcher on the dyke lay a mile-breadth of the same light green marshes, traversed by a meandering creek which came to the sea reluctantly, close at the girl’s right. It pierced the massive barrier of the dyke by an aboi d’eaux (or “Bito,” as the country-folk called it), and formed a tiny port for the boats of the shad-fishers, whose high, brown net-reels sentinelled its borders. The broad belt of marsh, secure behind its rampart of dyke, ran off in long curves toward the southwest, and terminated at the rocky, oak-crowned heights of Wood Point. Behind it, trailing out sparsely along the tilled slope of the upland, and dotted here and there with dark fir-groves, lay the southerly portion of Westcock village, the rest of it hidden from sight behind a shoulder of dark fir-groves.

The marshes, at this season of early summer, were covered with a three-foot growth of timothy and other fine hay-grasses. Here and there, for acres at a time, the grass could not bow and turn blue evenly before the wind, because it was stiff with the blooms and tangled leafage of the great red clover. Here and there, too, instead of the rosy stain of the clover, vast patches of blossoming vetch, entwined with the grass stems, spread a wash of undulating purple over the pale green. For the most part, however, the levels bore no colour but green, vivid and pure when the grass stood up in a rare lull of the wind, but bluish and beryl-pallid as the bending tops revealed the lower surfaces of blade and bloom. Along the twisting banks of the creek, along the inner bases of the dyke, along every deep but narrow drainage ditch, and along both sides of the rutted road of dry mud which led, a rusty streak across the green, from the little haven of the shad-boats to the far-off, sunny uplands, ran wild roses, their leafage of yellowish bronze now thick strewn with golden-hearted blossoms of pale pink. Everywhere, in a riot of summer exuberance, hummed and foraged the great black and gold bumblebees. Brown marsh-hawks winnowed low over the grass-tops, quartering every grass-packed acre for the field-mice which scurried among the grass-roots. And over all this shining world of green earth and yellow sea hung a low-vaulted sky of light, pure blue, the blue of thinned cobalt.

For nearly two hours the girl had waited on the wind-swept dyke, watching the ship. She had been expecting to see a boat put off from the ship’s side, and head for the mouth of the creek. The tide had crept in yellow over the red flats, till it brimmed the creek mouth with its broken, white-topped waves and washed foaming along the bases of the dyke below her feet. After half an hour she wondered and grew impatient. Then, at slack of tide, she began to grow angry,—for Jim had asked her to meet him out here on the dyke at high tide that they might talk over certain matters of intimate concern at safe distance from eye and ear of the village gossips. That night, in Westcock church, a great event was to take place, before the sailing of the ship on the morrow’s ebb; and Luella felt that on such a day, when she had so much to do, it ill became her lover to be late.

But when, after this long waiting, the girl saw that the ship was beginning to make sail, anger gave way to an anxiety which soon grew to a terrible fear. A child of the fisher and sailor folk of Fundy, she read the signs only too well. The tide was just on the turn. Presently the tremendous ebb would begin and for six hours the vast Chignecto Basin, which forms the head of Fundy, would disgorge its tawny waters toward the ocean, till its level would be lowered by some thirty or forty feet, the tortuous channels of Tantramar and all its tributary creeks would be changed to glistening, red, steep-sided chasms of mud, and league upon league of oozy, red-gold flats would lie uncovered between the water and the dykes. Luella saw that, with wind and tide agreeing, it was a most favourable time for the G. G. Goodridge to set sail, and work her way out from the shoals and mad currents of the upper bay. The G. G. Goodridge was what is known as a “barquentine,” a ship of three masts, the foremast carrying yards and square sails,—square-rigged, that is,—and the main and mizzen masts schooner-rigged, with booms and gaffs. When Luella saw the canvas spreading white on the yards of the foremast, she could not long delude herself. She could not see the men at the windlass, heaving the anchor, but her overtense ears hypnotized by the implacable drumming of the wind, seemed to hear the far-off chantey and the rhythmic creaking of the windlass. Soon the ship began to forge slowly ahead, and she knew that the anchor was up. Then a jib was broken out, bellying full; and then up went the great white mainsail, gleaming marvellously in the sun. The G. G. Goodridge was now a half-mile from her anchorage, and gathering headway. In a few minutes she was fairly hidden in her cloud of canvas, careening majestically, and passing down the bay with the full favour of wind and tide. Only too well Luella knew how long would be the voyage thus begun before her anguished eyes. She had talked it all over, and over, and over with Jim. The G. G. Goodridge was bound for Montevideo with a cargo of fish and deals, there to discharge, and perhaps take freight for around the Horn and up the Pacific Coast to Valparaiso. From some Peruvian port—Luella could not remember whether it was Arequipo or Callao that Jim said—she would load with nitrates for Liverpool, and then, possibly, return to New Brunswick, after an absence of perhaps two years. Luella knew that Jim Calder was aboard the vessel now passing so swiftly from before her eyes. Three weeks ago that day he had signed his papers as second mate of the G. G. Goodridge. For two years he had been Luella’s acknowledged lover; and it had been a pledge between them that they should be married when Jim got his papers as mate. The wedding was to have been that night. And Luella was to have sailed with him on the morrow as far as St. John, there to bid him farewell, and return to Westcock to await his home-coming.

When, at last, the whole overwhelming significance of what had happened penetrated her numb brain, Luella sank down into a huddling heap upon the dyke, staring dry-eyed, and clutching unconsciously at the long strings which tied her sunbonnet beneath her chin. In her unheeding grasp the bow came untied. Instantly the wind twitched the sunbonnet from her head, carried it flapping and turning out to sea, and dropped it into the huddle of yellow waves. The great coils of her hair came unpinned, and streamed out, pale flaxen yellow and softly rich, like silk. But Luella did not know that her sunbonnet was gone. She was unconscious even that she had sunk down upon her knees. She only knew that Jim was on that vanishing ship,—that he had gone without a word to her,—that not for two years, at the very best, could she hope to see him again,—that there would be no wedding that night in the little Westcock church,—and that a formless horror of fear and shame and anguish was drawing near to engulf her. Her set lips, slowly turning gray, uttered not a sound, as she stared steadily after the fleeting cloud of canvas. At last, it disappeared around the lofty shoulder of Wood Point. When it had vanished, she sprang to her feet with a cry, caught at her heart, and made a motion as if to throw herself into the water. Death, at the moment, seemed so simple a solution, and the only effective one. But while she had been watching the ship the tide had been ebbing in fierce haste, after the fashion of these tides of Tantramar; and where, the last time she took note of things, the waves had been tumbling at her feet, spread now a dozen rods of mud flat, oozily glistening in the sun. She could reach the water only by wading knee-deep in slime. The picture of what she would have looked like if she had flung herself from the dyke forced itself upon her, and she sat down suddenly, with a hysterical cry. In this the first perilous moment of her despair, she was saved. Then her strong will, and the sanity of those who have lived simply and naturally, came to her aid. She turned her back upon the water, took one desperate look at the far-off uplands and the houses of the village to which she must return, then descended the inner face of the dyke, and ran and threw herself face down in the deep of the grass.

For hours she lay there, hidden from all eyes but those of the marsh-hawk, which now and then winged over her to fly off to one side with a sudden heavy flapping and a shrill piping cry of astonishment. The girl’s brain was too numb to think, but it was scorching dry with grief, and amazed injury, and terror of a future of humiliation which she realized only as a monstrous, uncomprehended nightmare. She lay with her eyes shut, and covered by her hands, and tearless, but with her parched lips half-open. Over and over, but with the futility of utter inconsequence, her brain clutched at every conceivable or inconceivable explanation of the blow which had fallen upon her. Over and over, with deadly repetition and never any possible advance, she recalled and dwelt upon and squeezed to dryness every word of her last talk with Jim, only the afternoon before,—when he had been all tenderness and loyal passion, she all trust and forward-looking gladness, in spite of the weary two years of separation which she had braced herself to face for his sake. While her heart and brain were surging with the tumult of her pain, outwardly she was as still as a dead thing. A bright-striped garter-snake, hunting among the grass-stems for mice and crickets, came suddenly upon her, and darted away in frightened writhings. And later, a foraging yellow weasel, hardly less sinuous and soundless than the snake, stole around her with unfriendly eyes for nearly half an hour.

Meanwhile the yellow tide retreated down the glassy flats till the noise of the waves quite died away, and there was no sound on the air but the hum of the bumblebees and the swish of the wind in the bowing grass. The sun rolled slowly across the light blue arc of sky, and sank below the fir-crested ridge of uplands behind Westcock village. The sky grew one transparent orange blaze over the ridge, barred with three long, narrow, horizontal clouds of purest crimson. The crimson died slowly to cold purple, the orange blaze to tenderest lilac and lavender; and the zenith took on the green of a clear sea that washes over white sands. The wind died suddenly. The uplands grew bottle-green, then black, and the wide, unshadowed spaces of the marsh melted through citron and violet into a dusky gray-brown, full of inexplicable warmer lights. At last a few stars glimmered forth, and the marshes fell into an aerial, indeterminate blackness, with the unending barrier of the dyke a solid black rampart against the hollow sky. Lights gleamed yellow in scattered windows. Then, from far over the hill, came the faint sound of a church-bell, elusive and sweet as a fading memory, the summons of the little Westcock congregation to that evening service at which every one in the village was expecting to see Luella Warden married to Jim Calder. The sound of the bell pierced to the girl’s brain. She rose slowly, noticed how drenched her heavy hair was, and re-coiled it punctiliously. In a flash she pictured the amused wonder that would presently grow on the faces of the congregation, the anxiety with which the kind eyes of the rector would keep glancing at the door, expectant. For a moment, as she thought of his loving interest in her marriage, the concern he had shown for the welfare of herself and Jim, and the way he had helped Jim study to pass his examinations, her mouth quivered and her eyes softened. This was but for a second, however. Then, with lips set hard as stone, she took the dim road homeward.