Beached Keels/Blue Peter/Chapter 4
IV
On the height their footing changed to bare pink ledges with grass-grown intervals of thin earth. A spiked wall of dark firs and a little grove of white birches disappointed him by cutting off all view of Black Harbor on the seaward side. Powell's cove, too, had vanished: the hollow field, the spring, the house itself, had, in a few steps from the edge of the ascent, dropped from sight so utterly that the island seemed one great table-land some ten miles long, continuous, though curving at the middle to a narrow ridge. From their way along the verge, they could look back, straight down upon the shining channel, the low mainland, and the smoke-blurred elms, masts, and crisscross streets of the petty town. Alone and aloft, they walked slowly, their shadows already spindling before them over the ledge and the yellow grass. Sometimes they crossed a bare scar of rattling pebbles, that in the shelving places rolled from under their feet, and, unless stopped in some green slant of matted ground-pine, fell silently over the cliff, down to the black seaweed at the foot of that dizzy height.
"I come here often," said Helen, after the long silence of outdoor companions. "This little faint path is all my own making. Oh, it was your boat I saw crossing yesterday afternoon!—Two of you?— But you could n't have seen me, for I was lying down close to the edge, and just saw you disappear round the southern end."
"It must be melancholy to come up on this height all alone," said Archer.
"Oh, no," she returned. "That's the strangest part of it. I never feel alone anywhere on the island, partly because I used to make believe so much. And then I 've always had a queer feeling that there was some one moving along parallel to me, not far off, and not very near—a kind of invisible person that you might almost see out of the corner of your eye—especially in or near woods, and among white birches more than anywhere. My father says it's very interesting, and shows how paganism begins. I don't know. But it seems real. Sometimes—like drinking from the witch's spring, you know—I 've looked up quickly to catch a sight of it—the presence. But it never appears. It makes you feel quite safe—and yet somehow—cautious. See how I talk about my notions! It's your fault. You 've been silent. Tell me more about what you 've seen and done."
"No, please," said Archer. "I've told you most of it. It's been a pretty dull life, sailing round; and yours is so much better." Walking behind her again, he could see the neat springing of her ankles, the free play of white-clad shoulders, the bronze gleams in her hair, blown away from him. But he was thinking of this childhood into which she had given him glimpses; and pity strove with admiration.
"The white birches I spoke of," she continued, gayly voluble, facing about and pointing, "see, there they are, behind, against the firs. You should see them in winter, too. Once, after a storm, they were all weighed down with ice till I was afraid they would break. But it was very beautiful—bending along together under the evergreens behind—and made me think of princesses in a fairy story, all stealing by the foot of a dark wall, you know, to escape."
They clattered across a frail foot-bridge, spanning a narrow black gorge, in which the sea splashed somewhere down in the darkness. Then, between the empty sunlit air of the verge to the right and the wall of firs to the left, the breadth of yellow grass led them upward to the skyline and the southern end of the island. Often Archer had to climb ahead and pull her up the arduous hillside. As they gained the top, the firs gave place to pines and cedars, whose trunks, bleached by salt winds, had been blown about till the roots writhed above ground and the distorted branches grew away from the sea. From among the trunks gleamed the eastern sky. This was the same tempestuous grove that Archer had seen from the boat; and perhaps it was some remembrance of the lurking ambiguity of movement among these trunks that made him ask:—
"Have n't the fellows in Black Harbor ever troubled your father or you? They seem a rough set"—
"No, indeed," replied Helen wonderingly. "They 're just poor fishermen, I think. They only came and lived there; my father said nothing. But he has forbidden me to go up on the hill above the harbor, so I 've never even seen them. Oh, that's not true. Once last spring an awful man met me up here,—a young man, but dreadful, with a kind of flat face and nose,—and began to speak to me. I was so frightened I almost started to run, and did n't hear what he said. And then another man, very tall, in a blue jersey, with very bright eyes, and blue veins in his forehead, overtook him and spoke to him, and they both went away. I did n't come up here for weeks after, not even on the Sunday mornings. But I did n't see them again. There! if I 've not told you the only secret I have from my father!"
Archer rejoiced in this guileless compliment. At the same time he seemed to recognize two acquaintances in the narrative, and was greatly disturbed. But just then the ocean lay before them. They had come to the very end of the island.
One peep over the edge, where blue harebells quivered in the wind, made him look well to his footing on the parched grass. He drew back beside Helen, and the two stood looking down the great sheer drop of shattered brown rock,—broken pillars of basalt, stained with orange, and rust, and deep green, and whitened with bird-droppings. From the foot of the cliffs and the little crescents of shingle beach below, the tide was ebbing away almost without a sound, it was so calm under the lee of the head. Helen tossed over a pebble, and a score of white gulls started up from among the rocks, to go wheeling from headland to headland, with peevish cries as of lonely wickedness. Amazingly high in the sunlight the big birds soared, with heads bent down; amazingly far beneath moved the sea,—endless, inward-toiling lines, rising away to the weary, straight, infinite circumscription of the horizon.
"It is beautiful," said he at last, "and unspeakably sad. One is very little—and yet glad to feel so."
"That was well added," said the girl thoughtfully. There was nothing further to be said.
Out here at the meeting of earth, air, and water, the wind seemed more cold, the sunlight pale, and the girl's face, from being young, had taken on the mysterious look of age that sometimes comes to one who has long watched the sea. Their comradeship grew closer,—little human allies tacitly united in the face of vast and melancholy nature. A slow-forming thought suddenly overwhelmed him: here was a girl who, in her eyes, her speech, her acts, showed that her life could include and master sorrow. And he had walked with her hardly two hours, and he could not bear to leave her.
"The hardest part," said the girl sadly, as if speaking to herself in the void of ocean air, "is not to know what my father really believes and really does n't. He answered me once that God was the Ether of Euripides. Now what can a young girl make of that?" Suddenly her wide brown eyes turned to him. "Oh!" she exclaimed, "I was thinking—what have I said?— But you 'll forget it—and you 're not a stranger"—
"No," he faltered, his voice thick and coming with an effort. "No, I'm not a stranger—I won't tell—and even if I did, no one aboard ship would care—or know who—My three days' leave are up. I 'll be gone to-morrow, anyway."
She cried out in pure dismay.
"Oh, you must n't!" Then, flushed and confused,—"I forgot, of course. You 're such a wanderer—and have your duties, too"—She smiled uncertainly. "Why, I must have been making believe once more—it becomes a habit, probably—even to playing I had a big brother again. It was very nice to have one—just for an afternoon—but silly—and for a grown-up!—I beg your pardon"—
"Helen!" he cried, forgetting everything, and stepping in front of her, as if to intercept her look and her thoughts from going wide upon the sea. What he would have said further, he never knew; for in the wild manœuvre he nearly slipped from his feet.
"Come back from the edge!" she cried, and seized him by the jacket. "You must n't!" The movement swung them together, she still grasped the rough cloth by instinct, and for one fiery moment their faces were perilously close, their spirits passed in flame between the shining eyes.
"Oh," she cried again, letting go and shrinking back astounded, staring at him with a pale face of terror. "Oh, what have we done? We don't know each other, not even know each other!" She covered her face. "Something passed between us, it can't be unsaid or undone. What must you—please, please go away! I shall pay for this alone,—oh, the long retribution!" She cried bitterly, bowed down and trembling.
Archer drew near, neither allowed nor forbidden, and tried to console her, like a clumsy child striving to put together the fragments of some priceless thing.
"Helen," he said. "Don't cry so. Don't." He awkwardly patted her head, but she only nodded once as if to acknowledge the consolation. The slanting sunlight fell kindly round these two troubled children, aloft on the lonely headland.
"I mean it for good, always," he begged hurriedly. "The time is no matter—long or short—if it had n't been then it would have been never. Don't you see, Helen? Just believe. I can't prove it to you. Why," he cried in despair, "if I had n't meant it for always, I'd no more have done it than I'd have tried to kiss good old Barbara the cook!"
The girl still hid her face, but laughter mingled funnily with her sobs.
"You can prove it," she declared suddenly. And seizing him by the hand, but with her face averted, she began to lead him away from the precipice, toward the grove of wind-swept cedars and pines. "You can say it to me before my brother," she said, eagerly tugging him along.
Wondering, he followed. They found themselves in a little natural clearing among the bleached trunks and dark, distorted branches. At the back of the clearing a tall wooden cross, with gray arms wide-stretched, faced out toward the sea. Helen dropped his hand, and they entered side by side, quietly, as if into a little chapel. They stood in shadow, the sunlight barely tipping the dark trees.
"Here is where I come on Sunday mornings," she said with reverence. "It's my—it's everything to me."
Together they read the inscription on the gray cross.
To the Memory
of
ARTHUR POWELL
buried at Sea
February 7, 18—
Lat. 10° 24' 17" N. Long. 135° 0' 43" W.
"He was my brother," said Helen, almost in a whisper. "Older than I, and dearer to me than any one else. I can't remember my mother, but he seems to have been here only yesterday. You were just his age, and somehow like him: that was what made my father—made him more sad even than usual, last night."
The gulls complained in the wide solitude of the air.
"This is your church," said Archer, at last. "And if your brother were here, I would tell him just what I told you outside."
The girl gave him her hand with a kind of grave joy.
"Perhaps he hears you," she said, and her voice was full of mystery. "My father comes here seldom; but once, after he had stood here for a long time, he said at last, 'Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore.' I like to believe that of Arthur."
Hand in hand they moved away.
"Was that a noise in the trees?" she asked, stopping suddenly. They looked about, but saw nothing, and went on, slowly, out of the little clearing. Still silent, they faced the homeward way along the cliff.
Archer took her hand in both of his.
"You believe now," he said.
Swiftly, for an instant, she clung about him, astonishingly small at close quarters, and hiding her face comically under his elbow.
"Oh, I knew you would come!" she said brokenly, laughing and crying together. "I knew you'd come. When you drank from the spring, and answered the two questions, I knew it was you—all the time. No, no, you must n't." She sprang away, laughing, and raced down the slope toward the sunset.
Archer could run, but the chase lasted to the brink of the farthest hill. They stopped, laughing with what breath they had, and from the height, still lit by the sun, looked down into the cove and the fields of home,—a deep bowl of soft evening shadows.
"Oh, my poor father," said Helen, changing. "I'd forgotten his side of it." She paused, in a study. "You must n't come to dinner, " she said. "Come in late, and make some excuse. I could n't carry it off with you there. Do go over the hill and see them fish. He has n't forbidden you." Her face was clouded at the prospect of deceit.
"I 'll go, then," said Archer, bitterly disappointed, and yet happy as a lord of the world. "But I can't stay."
"Oh, to-morrow," she called back from below, "to-morrow we must talk—a great deal. We must know each other first. But your ship?"
"I 'll go see the captain, and he 'll swear," said Archer. "There she is." And he pointed to the masts of a barkentine lying at a wharf in the distant town. "But she can sail without me," he laughed, and tossed his hand gayly in the air, snapping his fingers at the mainland. Then he watched Helen, as she ran down the lower slope into the pastoral shadows.