Blue Peter

I

“ YES it’s been swum,”puffed the boatman, tugging till the ashen tholepins creaked. “On’y onct, though, an’ — the feller was a buster — that done it back in '56.”

He spat over the gunwale, so that a brown stain of tobacco swept astern on the heaving slant of the green wave. Archer, on the stern thwart, turned his head and looked back over the dazzling water at the mainland, a dark bank of rocks and low hills, with a few roofs and a spire against the late afternoon sun. “He must have been,” he answered.

The distance to the American shore was not three miles, but the water was an arm of the icy North Atlantic, and the tide went racing out to sea through the passage.

“Trim the bo ’t, sir,”rejoined the man at the oars, in a tone of cheerful Yankee independence. “It’s mortal hard pullin’ in this sea, an’ if you don’t keep ’er headed pooty sharp, we may run afoul o’ the South Rocks, after all.”

Archer faced the bow again. “All right,” he said easily. In the last two years he had learned that “I beg your pardon" is not a gracious form with all men.

The boatman screwed his lean brown face like a monkey, as he blinked at the sunlight following them, and caught the high waves deftly with his short, tough oars. Beyond him and the pitching bow, Archer saw the tremendous cliffs of the island, a gunshot ahead, towering all pink and ruddy in the sunlight. A few gulls wheeled with forlorn cries along the face of the crags. Above, on the verge against the sky, a clump of tiny trees leaned inland as if tossed by a gale. Years of ocean storms must have blown them thus, for now so deep an autumnal calm lay over sea and island that they were startling in their suggestion of wild motion. It was like a freak in the landscape of some forgetful and bungling painter.

For an instant Archer thought he saw the figure of a man, crouched and furtive, slinking among the trees; but it might have been the gnarled trunks shifting and interweaving with the patches of sky that showed through. And the next instant he was busy with the tiller-ropes. The boat tossed laboriously, dragging as if up-hill, round the foot of the lofty broken columns of basalt, where the waves tumbled with a heavy and hollow noise as of caves.

“They’s no landin’ that side now, ye see,” grunted the Yankee. And even as he spoke, they rounded a point of lifting seaweed, and ran into the cool shadows of the eastward cliffs. Here, though the tide was still against them, they rowed more easily, in almost a calm. Under the astounding lee of the cliffs there fell a kind of instant twilight, a melancholy evening stillness and dusk, so that Archer, turning his eyes from this dark precipice that overawed their cockle-shell boat, was surprised to find the wide ocean still aglow, and the tiny sail that nicked the horizon still white in the sun. This island was a sombre place, thought Archer, for an adventure planned so boyishly.

Northward the boat labored, sometimes making a long circuit where a weir straggled into the sea, sometimes tossing an oar’s length from the giant columns and boulders, and always without a sign of human beings, and always preceded by the ominous, echoing cries of startled sea-gulls.

“Black Harbor’s round this p’int,” said the boatman at last.

At the point, the cliffs were split asunder into a mighty cove, across the mouth of which ran a bleak sea wall higher than a man’s head, — all of gray stones as round as cannon-balls,—wave-built, impregnable, Cyclopean masonry. Through a gap midway in this wall the boat entered Black Harbor.

Letting her run in the still water, the Yankee mopped his bald forehead and grinned.

“Cheerful sort o’ place, ain’t it ? ” he asked. “Real homelike and neighborly.”

It was a place where Old-World smugglers might land their brandy-kegs, or where pirates might put in and share alike. Instead of these, two or three dismantled sloops and pinkies lay moored in a half circle of dark water still as a mill-pond. Archer could barely descry, landward, a steep black gulch of fir-tops that ran widening down in the darkness, a glacier in evergreen. On either side jutted a headland, both wooded, one scarred with landslides. On the bar, close astern, a solitary figure in yellow oilskins moved along, stooping to gather up wine-colored rags of dulse that had lain drying in the brief sunlight.

To him, the first man they had found on this sombre island, — unless the furtive shadow on the cliff had been a man, — Archer raised his hand in salute. The dulse-gatherer made no response, but stood sullen or apathetic, watching them pull shoreward.

“Go to hell, then,” growled the Yankee under his breath. After a few strokes he added, “Won’t git much out o’ these fellers. Ye better not try a night’s lodgin’ among them, specially if you’ve got money on ye. Ol’ man Powell might put ye up. He ’s queer, they say, but he might. I would n’t ast them. I’m a-goin’ to sleep in this bo’t an’ go back in the mornin’. But by Godfrey!” he broke out with fervor, “ ’fore bunkin’ in with that crowd, I’d ruther resk the whirlpools a-goin’ back in the dark.”

“Listen, though,” said Archer.

The boat was surrounded by the darkness of the looming headlands. A single light from the shore pierced the pool deeply before them, a long, wavering blade of brightness in the still water. The silence had been suddenly broken by a small, sharp, metallic voice singing, — a phonograph squealing out the Handicap March. “We’ve got money to booyin!” it cried nasally. In this dark, forlorn harbor it seemed incredible. Strange echo of cheap New York, thought Archer, it told that rusticity and simple merriment were no more.

“They seem gay enough,” he said aloud. The boatman, however, only gave a skeptical grunt.

On the beach, where the good salt air was lost in a stink of fish, the two men parted, — the Yankee, with his fee in his pocket, to pull stolidly out of this harbor which he hated; Archer, to go scrambling up a footpath which, littered with broken fish-flakes, wound upward among a few unlighted, silent, and malodorous huts. In one of these, through the open door, he saw men and boys plying bloody knives by lantern-light; but to his “ Goodevening,” the fishermen replied only with churlish stares. Plainly, it was an inhospitable shore. Even the phonograph had ceased. The place lay stifled in such a profound silence that he felt the oppression of the headlands towering in the dark. Also he felt himself an ass to have left his decent quarters aboard ship in the mainland town, for the childish whim of visiting an island that had loomed offshore so high and so romantic.

Suddenly, turning the corner of a hut, he halted in a stream of lamplight from another open door. It was very smoky lamplight, and there was a powerful smell of tobacco and stale beer. On the doorstep he nearly fell over a man who lay sprawled and speechless, — a white face with eyes staring upward, apparently in drunken communion with the stars.

“Well,” thought Archer, looking into this hillside barroom, where through the gray smoke-layers the figures of men moved tipsily, “I ’ve found plenty of it.”

His entrance no one noticed. A snarled group swayed in midfloor, three men pawing one another’s shoulders, in an effort to light their pipes from a single match. There was no talk, no sound but the shifting of feet. Other men, ill-favored, sprawled in a half-stupor on a bench that edged the room. On the bar, in the light of the tin reflector behind the lamp, stood the phonograph, silent, its conical throat yawning. A mean little man in a dirty shirt — evidently bartender — had stooped to pitch something out of a window into the yellow grass that waved flush with the window-sill and rose on the abrupt slope of the hillside: an easy exit in the event of a raid.

“ Where’d the city guy blow in frum ? ” mumbled a voice. “Look at ut, would ye Say, this ain’t Camperbeller ner Baw Hawber.”Mischief was in the voice and the thick laughter.

The attention of the drunken roomful focused itself in silence on Archer, who turned sharply toward the speaker, a redfaced young fellow in hip-boots, leaning unsteadily against the bar. He had evil little eyes, bad teeth widely spaced, and a squash nose that showed the nostrils in front.

Archer was a young man of sudden likes and dislikes, who did not calculate his retorts. The “city guy” could not have appeared in his six feet of solid build, or in the heavy sea clothes, which failed to obscure the convex lines of strength. It must have been suggested in his face, which was of the dark, clear brown that only a very blond man takes from long weathering, and which, though at once impetuous and resolute, showed a fineness of line. He lowered his great, rough, shining head as he answered, —

“You would n’t look half so much like a kid’s jack-o’-lantern if you ’d keep your mouth shut.”

Two years of seafaring had taught him the advantages of bluntness. They had also taught him to stand by the swiftest disadvantage. He warded off the heavy tumbler with his elbow, leaped forward at him who had thrown it, and pinioned him against the bar. Next instant an illsmelling half-ton scrimmage of drunken men had surged upon them both

“ Leggo — hell — soak ’im, Beaky — stop that, ye damn fool!" came in smothered fierceness from the swaying, punching, tugging knot of men. Archer, braced mightily, and straining all his muscles, had just cracked two heads together, and was being pulled down, when he was aware that his assailants had slowly fallen apart and stood about, flushed, breathless, and speechless. Some one was knocking at the door masterfully.

Archer followed their drunken eyes. A door at the end of the counter silently came ajar, and a hand was thrust in. — a great, red, freckled hand, fat, but powerful in every joint. Steady as a rock, it held itself there, waiting. The bartender swiftly poured out and passed to it a tumbler brimful of gin. It withdrew with this monstrous drink, while the whole company stood as if bulldozed into silence. Almost instantly the glass was tossed in empty, the door closed, and heavy footsteps departed.

So strange was the episode that Archer had almost forgotten his own predicament. He turned to find his enemies dispersed, — part of them, led by the young man of the jack -o’-lantern mouth, already slinking into corners.

Tardy and timid, the bartender piped up: —

“No more o’ this, boys. The Old Man ’s round. He don’t stand fer no rows, some nights.”

Needless enough the warning seemed, for the men sat cowed. Silence fell again, except for a hiccough or two from the bench. Archer found himself once more the centre of hostile eyes, glowering through the smoke.

“There’s no need of any rows,” he spoke out. “I did n’t come in here to start one. This man here,” he said, nodding toward his broad-faced antagonist, “this man here got no worse than he gave me. If he wants it to go farther, all right; if he doesn’t, all right. I don’t bear any grudge. And all I came in for was to ask if any of you would put me up for the night.”

No one volunteered.

“If any one will,” — the boatman’s warning about money checked and changed his speech,— “why, it ’ll be better than sleeping out these cold nights.”

The silence remained discouraging.

“I was told that Mr. Powell might,” he persevered. “Can you tell me where he lives ?”

The young man in hip-boots broke out angrily.

“Old man Powell!" he sneered, lurching in his seat. “Ho. yes, I guess he will! I see him doin’ it! An’ I guess” — He spat out obscenity which showed that Powell had a daughter.

“That’ll do for you, Lehane,” called a clear voice from the farthest corner, behind the stove. A tall man stepped out from the shadows, and fixed on the young drunkard a pair of stern eyes. Taller than Archer, and very dark, he was lithe as a cat, with a grace that would have been courtly had it not been wholly native. “That’ll do for you,” he repeated, in a voice strangely clear and deep.

Young Lehane seemed to shrink before the steady brightness of his look. The speaker turned to Archer and scrutinized him as steadily. Without ceremony, yet without offense, he took Archer by the arm and wheeled him about toward the light. The two men stood looking each other in the eye. Archer saw before him a man of his own age, entirely sober, with the face of a thinker, — a face swarthy but clear. The searching eyes, that seemed almost to emit light, were wide-set and very blue. Three big veins scored the broad forehead with irregular lines as blue as the eyes, or as the jersey that clung to the sinewy frame. Intellect, and a kind of grave passion, shone in the whole countenance: the man might have been Hamlet in the rough, but Hamlet with the will of Fortinbras, sad but strong.

“My name’s Peter,” he declared simply. “I’d like to have yours.”

It was as if he had forced a reply that he might study a face out of repose. Archer felt that this young fisherman was weighing his character. But he answered without resentment.

“Mine’s Hugh Archer. I ’d be obliged to you if you’d tell me of a night’s lodging somewhere. These other men won ’t. As for Powell’s daughter" — he was going on half jocosely —

“Never mind what Beaky said,” the other cut in, with severity. “ He’s full o’ smut. It’s best forgotten.” Then after a long silence, during which the sharp blue eyes studied further, and seemed to look through Archer into futurity and consequences, Peter added, “Yes, Powell may take ye in. It’s just as well, after all, I should n’t wonder.”

The tone, unmistakably sad, was one of final decision. The eyebrows under the blue-veined forehead unbent.

“My brother’ll show you the way.”

And with this, stepping to the open door, he whistled into the darkness. Presently there came a patter of bare feet, and a small, ragged boy, bounding up the steps, stood and peered in with sharp, mischievous eyes.

“Hippolyte,” said his elder brother, “show this man over the hill.”

Thanking his strange helper, who only nodded in reply, Archer went out, followed by the stares of the silent company. In the dark on the hillside, he found it difficult to keep within view of the white patch that was the shirt of his little guide. The boy ducked under fir trees, scaled ledges, dove into underbrush, and clambered always upward, nimble as a goat. Once Archer, though he too was nimble, called a halt, halfway up the steep bank of the gulch. As they rested a moment under the firs, he could see a host of stars, large and bright in the chill air of early autumn, and even larger when seen thus from the depth of the black pass.

“Who is Mr. Powell?” he suddenly asked.

The boy gave an odd chuckle.

“Powell ?” he said, in a little dry voice like a satirical old man. “Oh, he owns the island.”

“Really!” said Archer in astonishment. “And so,” he continued, after a pause, “you’re all his tenants, I suppose.”

“I s’pose so,” replied the boy, breaking out into impish laughter. When they had started climbing again, he threw back, " ’Specially the Old Man—Matt Lehane

— oh, yes!” And for some distance up the rocky path under the brushing firs, the child laughed to himself in a kind of pert irony.

At last, gaining the summit, they found themselves high in the open, on a bare ledge. Over this landward side of the island there still lay a twilight in which the stars looked pale, and which showed the gleam of water far below, and the land sloping downward in long, hollow fields.

“See that light ?” said the boy. “That ’s Powell’s. Did Peter say he’d take ye in? Then p’raps he will. I never seen no one there.” Instantly he had slipped out of sight among the firs, through which Archer heard him brushing his way down to Black Harbor again.

As no reply came to his shout of thanks, Archer began the long descent toward the lighted window. In the west still glimmered a strip of afterglow, brownish red, as if the evening had been hot on the mainland. Still, too, a thread of bright water outlined the shore; and farther out, in the dark, lay vaguely the deeper blackness of the whirlpools. North and south loomed the colossal cliffs of the island. But his way toward the cove led through a gentle, pastoral country,— concave slopes, with short, dry grass, still warm as in early evening. By crossing the ridge above the harbor, he had been transported into a different region, of Thessalian rocks and Arcadian fields.

When at last he rounded the corner of Powell’s house, he was surprised to find it an apparently civilized dwelling. About the door the leaves of a vine stirred faintly in the air. A stone doorstep sounded grittily beneath his feet; and just as his hand was raised to knock, he saw through the open window a room lined with books, a flickering fire, and the dim figure of a little elderly man sitting by a yellowshaded lamp. From beyond the lamp came the clear voice of a girl reading aloud; but he could see only one arm of the chair, and the white skirt flowing down over her knees.

The man raised his gray head to interrupt the reader.

“That’s not so good as the original,” he said, in a tone of fretful resignation.

Archer let his hand fall, and instinctively turned to go back toward Black Harbor.

II

The instinct was that of the social rebel. The house seemed too plainly the comfortable summer cottage of sophisticated people. He had not been in that atmosphere since the days when his uncle and aunt had dragged him to the seashore, to dress, and eat, and talk, and — among rich women growing fat and rich men growing bald — to plan trivial monotonies beside the moving eternity of the ocean, it was to escape just this that he had turned sailor, and set his own naked character to wrestle with life. So now he turned to go away.

But the girl’s ears must have been sharp.

“There’s some one at the door, father,” he heard her say. Instantly perceiving that it would not do to disappear and leave them alarmed, he stood where he was on the doorstep. But he afterwards remembered that the girl’s voice showed merely surprise, and no trace of fear.

The figures disappeared from the room, he heard the scratch of a match, and presently footsteps approached the door. It opened to show the light of a shaking candle, the little man’s peering face, smooth-shaven but lined with years, and over his narrow shoulders the face of the girl, alert, clear, large-eyed, in a dusky radiance of brown hair that glimmered in the uncertain light. Their shadows leaped and swung on the walls behind them. Dim eyes and bright, sharpened brows and serene, both fixed their sight on the burly young sailor-man before them.

“ Who is it ?” said the man, in a gentle voice.

Archer, who had easily met the hostile looks of the revelers in Black Harbor, was abashed before this girl.

“Never mind,” he said confusedly, “that is — I was looking for a night’s lodging, — and they — over in the harbor — they told me that Mr. Powell — But of course,” he floundered, “I did n’t know what you were like — or your house — I beg your pardon.”

The little man laughed quietly, as one not given to laughter. The girl’s eyes shone with encouraging merriment.

“What am I like, then ?” asked Mr. Powell, holding up the candle, so that the girl’s head disappeared in his shadow. It was a sad face, long, thin, very pale, with black eyes. He was bald over the temples, and a triangle of gray hair ran to a point midway above a forehead engraved with parallel lines. “I had hoped to seem no worse than other men,” he continued, with an irony not unkind. “And as for my house, if you will come in, you will find it tolerable.”

“Why, sir,” replied Archer, somewhat nettled, “of course I did n’t mean that. The others seemed a rough lot, and I expected — Your house is too good, sir, — too good for a sailor. I would n’t have disturbed you " —

“My dear young man,” said the owner of the island soberly, “there’s no place but this fit for you to sleep in. Besides that, I’d be heartily glad to have you here. We have no visitors year in and out.” He shifted his candle, so that the girl’s face reappeared, shining with undisguised interest in the situation. “But you ’ll be able to sleep here, — better than I, at least. A sailor — and of your age — you’re doubly welcome. Come in.” With the stiffness of courtesy in disuse, he stepped back to make room. The girl retreated into the shadows.

“You ’re very kind, sir,” said Archer, entering. As the man set his candle down on a low table, the light revealed a little hall and staircase of brown butternut wood. The absence of ornament might have made the place severe, had it not been for candle-light and soft shadows, and the presence of the girl, a slim white figure against the dark panels.

“ You called yourself a sailor,” the man continued; “the navy, perhaps?”

“Tramp sailing vessels, mostly, sir,” Archer replied with some stiffness.

“Ah, — English, I should say?”

“American.”

His host’s face fell somewhat. It brightened as he ventured: —

“Did you ever chance to be in Eastern ports with any of Her Majesty’s ships ?” And when Archer, wondering, gave a negative answer, there was silence for a time.

“It is a pity,” the little man reflected. “It was a foolish hope, of course, — but we like to reach out after all the little fragments — glimpses” — he ended with something like a sigh. This time the silence grew embarrassing.

“Father,” said the girl quietly, “don’t you think ” —

The large eyes of the pale little man came back sadly, as from a distance. “ Your pardon, Helen,” he said. “ I have long since forgotten my manners. This is my daughter, Mr. ” —

Archer, supplying the name, spoke to the girl for the first time face to face. Her words were as conventional as his, but something in voice and manner, something frank, bright, and simple, made them her own. The girls among whom his aunt had so carefully brought him he had known at first glance for natural enemies and strategists. This one seemed as naturally a direct and wholesome character. He liked her brown face, her speech, and above all the light, free motion of her walk as she crossed the hall and led them into the lighted room where he had first seen them sitting.

Here there was comfort, — the soft radiance of the yellow-shaded lamp, the warmth of a fire that tempered the fresh evening air from the open windows. The rows of books that lined the walls from floor to ceiling gave out a faint, pleasant smell, indefinable. Over the fireplace, in the only space left vacant of books, looked forth the white cast of a head, the tragic beauty of Meleager.

After a few questions and answers as to Archer’s presence on the island, “You will pardon me,” said the prim little man, motioning him to an armchair by the fire, “ if we continue our reading and finish the chapter. I have perhaps become too methodical in my habits. It is not a merry book, but you can warm yourself meanwhile.”

The girl said nothing, though she looked possibly a little disappointed. As they took their places, she became once more for Archer a voice from behind the lamp, and a white skirt flowing down beyond the edge of the table. But the sound of her was, in a way, as good as the sight; and the voice was filled with reality, with the meaning of the words: —

“And finally, the first night that followed that day! . . .

“Lying in the ‘Arabian room,’ I felt constantly through my weary half sleep the haunting impression, infinitely sad, of the unaccustomed silence that had fallen on the other side of the wall — and forever—in the room of Aunt Claire. Oh! the dear voices and the dear protecting sounds that I had heard there for so many years through this wall, when the quiet of night had come in the house! Aunt Claire opening her great closet that creaked in a peculiar fashion (the closet where they had put away forever the Ours aux pralines); Aunt Claire exchanging a few words, which I could just hear, with my mother who lay in the room beyond: ‘Are you asleep, sister ?’ And her great clock on the wall — now stopped — that used to strike so loud; the clock which made so much noise when it was wound, and which, to our great amusement, she used sometimes to wind on the stroke of midnight, — so that it had become a traditional pleasantry in the house, whenever we heard any noise at night, to lay the blame on Aunt Claire and her clock. . . . Ended, all this, ended. Gone to her place of burial, Aunt Claire,—and my mother, doubtless, will prefer not to return to the room next to hers; silence, then, has fallen there forever. For so many years, it was my joy and my peace to hear them both, to recognize their dear, good old voices that came clearly through the wall in the stillness of the night. . . . Ended, now; never, never shall I hear them more.”

Archer was happily ignorant of what the book might be. But when the girl’s voice had ceased, he was aware that her father, forgetful of guest and daughter, was staring into the fire, lost in remote thoughts; that Helen herself had risen, and stood looking on them doubtfully; and that the silence in the room was insufferably mournful. At last, as he was about to make a rough attempt at breaking it, his host rose, picked up the book, and crossing to the inmost corner of the library, copied out something upon the broad page of another book that lay open on a desk. “A bad rendering, but it will do,” he said. Then, stooping, he carefully took from against the bookshelves a violoncello which had stood gleaming soft and brown in the lamplight.

The girl turned and smiled at Archer, as if reassured, and yet appealing.

“Now you will have better entertainment,” she said, with a gayety that seemed not quite so natural as the rest of her ways. “ Perhaps you would rather have something to eat,”she added, as her father tuned the strings. “ I ’ll get it for you when he has played.”

Archer smiled in return, but only shook his head, for her father was already waiting, and now formally announced, —

“ Bach — Suite for violoncello — præludium.”

The fervent voice of the ’cello filled the room. Archer, who knew good playing, listened in delight; but presently his eyes wandered to the girl, as she now sat looking into the fire in her turn, and to the sad, pale face of her father, bending over, rapt in his music. Strange entertainers; yet stranger still was the calm, unconscious egotism of sorrow in this host who had forgotten him. Through præludium the music ran, through sarabande, and into bourrée, when of a sudden it stopped lamely.

“I’ve not the heart for it to-night,” said the player, as he restored the violoncello to its place. “This young man from the sea has set me thinking about Arthur. ”

“He must be hungry, father,” the girl suggested, with something like timidity. “Shall I get” —

“No,” he decided. “Tell Barbara to come here.”

The girl’s face darkened, and she went out with visible reluctance. Presently came a shuffle of feet, and through curtains at the back of the room there entered a tall old woman, bent but strong, who at the sight of Archer spread apart her clumsy hands in surprise.

“Barbara,” said her master, “please bring us something to eat and drink.”

When the old woman had disappeared, the girl looked in again at the door of the hall, mystically bright once more above the candle flame.

“Good-night to you both,” she called. Once more the cheeriness of her voice was troubled. “I’ll show you about the island in the morning, Mr. Archer. You will like it, I hope.” She stood for a moment undecided, then slowly went up the stairs, a shining figure against the brown panels.

Archer, replying with some commonplace, was conscious that she had stolen the brightness from the room. Though hungry after his wandering, he hardly noticed what the old servant left on the table before him. While he nibbled at something, and slowly drank the whiskey - and-water that Mr. Powell had poured out, his interest, for the time, became merely polite. And his host, though helping himself rather freely from the fatbellied bottle, was calmly distant in his own thoughts.

“Do you come here every summer, Mr. Powell ? ” asked Hugh, after an interval.

The sad, prophetic eyes returned to the present, and as they studied the young man anew, their melancholy look was modified by a smile that was essentially kind.

“Every summer ?” the little man repeated. “My boy, we live here all the year round, and have lived here since — for the last fourteen years. You look astonished. But why is not this island as good to live and die on as the mainland ? They send us over clothing, and food, and books. You see for yourself how comfortable ”—and he waved his hand about.

“And your daughter is always with you here ?” asked the visitor, amazed at this new aspect of the case.

“ Yes, indeed — like the best of daughters,” was the calm reply.

Archer meditated, with thoughts unfriendly. There was some hidden malice in his next words,—

“Why, sir, you’re like Prospero and Miranda.”

The other started in his chair, suddenly wide awake. But the hint was lost.

“Prodigiously apt!” he exclaimed, all in a flutter. “So simple, but so good. It holds closely. And I had never once thought of it! — Young man,” he cried, almost beaming, “why did n’t you tell me you were no common sailor ?" In his joy, he poured for himself from the bottle. “ A boy who has read, in these days! ” He drained his glass and refilled it. “You must stay with me — a week at least — and we shall have good talk, I foresee. — This parallel of yours — I am ashamed never to have seen it — showing that an outsider has the better perspective of one’s life.” He got up and walked about nervously before the fire. “I am Prospero, to be sure, — and my book — and as for Trinculos and Stephanos, Black Harbor is lousy with them. Here is my cell — and Helen is Miranda — and luckily there are no Ferdinands” —

Suddenly he stopped, glanced at Archer’s broad shoulders and shining head, and then stared into the fire.

“Hm!” he said, his enthusiasm gone. After a silence, his voice was sad again. " Yes, though I am Prospero, I have no magic.” And he sighed. “But you shall see my book. No one else has read it, not even Helen.”

Stepping to the desk in the corner, he brought over and laid in the lamplight a large book in black leather, — the same into which he had been copying. Archer, looking on over his shoulder, could see in his movements a tremulous pride.

On the first page they read the title,— “This Bank and Shoal of Time.”

“You see,” said the little man, already transformed into the explanatory author, “the title is naturally suggested to one living, as I do, on an island surrounded by the eternal sea. But I must explain that you will find here not so much my own thoughts as those of other men in all ages and countries, — their most serious thoughts, and far-reaching. I have not yet connected them with my own interpretation, or indeed arranged them in any orderly fashion.”

Archer could hardly forbear to smile. But he had no such difficulty when he had once begun to read. Under the title stood a quotation, —

The other pages were a kind of nightmare hodge-podge, in neat manuscript, of mortuary fragments. A few he could recognize, many he could not. He read rapidly, with the assistance of his host, who turned the pages eagerly.

“Sancti Ambrosii: de Excessu Fratris Sui, Satyris, lib. i, 18. — Habeo plane pignus meum, quod nulla mihi peregrinatio jam possit avellere: habeo quas complectar, reliquias: habeo tumulum, quern corpore tegam: habeo sepulcrum, super quod jaceam.”

“Life is like traveling backward in a cart; we see only what has passed and is moving away from us.”

“Meleager, fragm. 532.— All men, once dead, are nothing more than earth and shadow. Nought returns to nought.”

“ Von Hartmann : Philosophy of the Unconscious, ii, p. 480. — After a serious consideration we have been obliged to reply that all existence in this world brings with it more pain than pleasure; that consequently it would be preferable that the world should not exist.”

“That was a fine euphemism of the Greeks’, to call the dead ‘the tired ones.”

“The prophet Silenus answered in these words the question of Midas, king of Phrygia: ‘Children of a day, of a race doomed to pain and hard trials, why do you force me to say things that it were better for you not to know ? For it is for those who are ignorant of their misfortunes that life has the least sorrow. — Of all things the best for man is not to live, even though he have an excellent nature; what is best for all men and for all women is not to be born.’ Aristotle: on the Soul.”

“All this lamentable mockery: to love with all our heart beings and things which each day, each hour sets itself to wear away, to weaken, to carry off piecemeal; — and after having struggled, struggled with anguish, to keep some few bits of all this which passes away, to pass in our turn.”

Archer could read no more with patience.

“It is a remarkable book,” he commented with sincerity, and drew away from the table.

“Remarkable! You may venture as much,” retorted the scholar, still bent over the melancholy pages, on which he seemed to batten. Then, slowly straightening himself, he closed the book and put it away in the desk. “The only book of its kind, and the deepest, the truest — These are only the crude material, but you shall see.” He took a sip from his glass, wandered thoughtfully to the window, — which the old servant had closed,

— and stood looking out. “It must be a calm night. The stars and the lights from the town — the reflections are very clear. It would be beautiful, but it is a symbol. Ah, ‘this bank and shoal of time !' Out there in the dark are the whirlpools — and the channel ” — he broke into muttered quotation: —

“Enaviganda,” he repeated, and was silent for a long time.

Archer was moved to question him: —

“Are n’t those fellows in Black Harbor dangerous neighbors, sir ?”

The scholar turned on him his long, pale face, showing eyes dull with indifference. “I hardly ever see them, even/ he said.

“And your daughter ?” the young man could not help persisting. But the answer missed his point surprisingly.

“Helen ? — oh, you mean that it is lonely here ? — Perhaps. But then, she is well and healthy, as you see. And she has lived here since a child. When my wife died, I came to this island, to retire for a time, as I thought. But when the news came that Arthur was gone, too — it was impossible to think of going back among men and cities. It is better here.

— As for Helen, — why, after all, you know —

Archer could have struck the man. He held his peace with difficulty, until, after pacing up and down, smiling faintly at the aptness of his quotation, Mr. Powell came to himself again to say : — " Here comes Barbara to show you your room. Good - night, sir, and I hope you will sleep well.”

Archer followed the servant and her candle, up the stairs to a landing and into a plain but pleasant little bedchamber, warmed by an open fire, and overlooking the cove, the water, and the long reflected lights of the town. The tall old woman hesitated as she said good-night.

“It’s good to have you here, sir,” she ventured, in her timorous voice. “ It is, indeed.” And her face, brown and wrinkled as a walnut, shone with kind ness.

Left to himself, he stood thinking over this strange landfall. The black glacier of firs over the hill had been gloomy enough, the inhabitants like the place; but this pastoral slope of the island — was it better? Pity for the girl was his uppermost thought, — a pity to which his rough, working life had rendered him unfamiliar. Sometimes in his youthful melancholy he had thought his own lot hard, — an orphan, too rich, among worldly relatives who could neither inspire nor direct a right ambition. But this girl, living alone here —

“Odious!” he almost cried aloud. He could not wait till morning to see her and talk to her. At least he could not sleep: for an hour or more he must have sat on the edge of his bed, thinking over this philosopher of charnel fragments, this vague egotist who could quote so inhumanly, and survey with such mournful gusto the transiency of things. At times a faint stir in the house showed that others were still awake.

His windows were open. So, apparently, were those on the landing of the staircase; for suddenly he heard a voice near at hand speaking into the night, — a muddled voice that ran the words together thickly:—

“ Fair-ss-a-scar—when-on’y-one— is-s — shining-in-the-sty” —

Then collected, and very precise : " Disgusting metathesis! — No, that is not the word ” —

“Come along, please, sir,” whispered the old woman’s voice plaintively.

III

The pillow and the counterpane were damp when he awoke, late, after a night of worried tossing. Fog, white and cold, filled the chamber as with smoke, and drifted so thickly past the window that he could see only the dim outlines of a little garden below; a few shrubs, a soft colored tangle of sweet peas, and the high heads of golden glow shining through the white obscurity. Out of the fog came the smell of seaweed and the faint noise of waves.

Quickly putting on his damp clothes, he hurried downstairs, in some disquietude as to the time of day. No one met him in the little hall of the butternut paneling. A breakfast-table still waited, white and shining, beside a fire that roared in the wide chimney; and in the corner a tall clock beat heavily toward the hour of ten. He waited, glad of the chance to warm himself before the crackling birch logs.

At last a little door opened under the stairs, and the tall old woman looked in, smiling, to wish him a good-morning.

“Miss Helen said,” she announced, “ that you must n’t mind eating alone, sir. She and Mr. Powell won’t be down till later.” Something in the situation had fluttered and embarrassed this good creature, who nearly spilled the coffee when she brought it in.

So at an excellent breakfast he found himself alone, and vastly disappointed. All the morning he sat about, watching by turns the fire within doors, the white void without, and fidgeting more than he had ever believed possible. At one time a voice overhead somewhere continued steadily as in reading aloud; he could only hope that if Helen was helping her father to pass the forenoon, she did not do it too willingly. When the voice stopped, and still no one came downstairs, he flung outdoors in disgust, and wandered down the little path in a misty profusion of bright flowers. Smoking his pipe, he watched the sun burn away the fog, which lifted enough to show that the house, a comfortable building of the native red stone, faced the shore from a beautiful hollow field which curved as wide and graceful as the long arc of pink sand-beach below. Headlands north and south were blotted out, but the base of the great red walls stretched along between the green, heaving water and the white, slow-rising mist. The voice of the sea, vague, widespread, and hushing; the heavy air, a tepid mingling of fog and sunshine; the sense of lonely heights obscured: and this was the island where a young girl, radiantly alive, must wear out her years with a tippler who studied the crumbling of time!

When he returned to the house, the sunshine had already conquered; and in the hall, father and daughter were awaiting him, — the former very white and evasive, the latter a little tired, and not beautiful as by candle-light, but browneyed, winning, a gracious young whiterobed mistress of the house.

“ Good-morning,” she cried, with honest gladness, and came quickly forward to meet him. Her hand was a funny little tanned thing to be shaking his hard paw.

Just what happened during lunch he could never recall, except that his host’s hands trembled slightly, and that he himself could look at Helen over a bowl of poppies, — “astonishing how late they lingered in this salt air,” remarked the scholar, — and that he willingly did most of the talking, when he found that to a pair of shining eyes his two years of sordid knocking about appeared rich as an Odyssey. Once, when he happened to speak of a burial at sea, the eyes were troubled; but Mr. Powell, pricking up his ears, demanded particulars. Then came a tedium of sitting about while the scholar talked, kindly but feebly. At last, however, he declared: —

“Helen has promised to show you about. I’ll not spoil your young enjoyment by going. — No, no,” he chirped, as Archer would have feigned to protest, “I’m not well to-day. And to tell the truth, Mr. Archer, I cannot care so much for nature as I did. I see the changing of the seasons, rather than the seasons themselves. But go you on, you two.”

And so Archer found himself outdoors in the sunshine with the girl, talking and laughing, while her father, from the door, looked mournfully after them down the little flowering path.

Their escape led them southward along the curve of the hollow field, high above the shining water, and toward the steep ascent of the southern cliffs. The short, yellow-bleached grass of autumn was already dry and slippery underfoot, its tiny spears quivering in the warm breeze that had sprung up since the vanishing of the fog.

“I’m glad you came here,” she said, looking up happily. Walking beside him, brown-faced, bareheaded, she had changed into a creature of the sunlight and sea air, a light-footed huntress of the island heights.

“There is our vegetable garden,” she said, pointing to some green rows behind the house. “My father and I work there a great deal.”— He laughed to hear the young huntress deliver such prosaic words. — “If you do that to things I’m proud of, perhaps you won’t think much of what I was going to show you,” she threatened. “I forgot — such a traveler as you are ” —

“No, indeed,” he laughed. “I never saw anything I liked better.” He had been looking down at the back of her head, and her hair, wind-blown, that gleamed like newly weathered bronze. “Show me everything. That’s a landing-pier down on your beach. Do you sail ?”

“No,” she confessed. “My father won’t go on the water. We had a rowboat, but it went adrift last spring.”

“But in case of sickness or anything ? ”

he wondered. “Can you telephone to the mainland ?”

“Why, no,” replied the girl, in surprise. “ I don’t believe he ever thought of that. The boat brings us over all we need, every Saturday. Oh, and in such weather! In winter it’s larks to wade down through the snow and help them land. And sometimes there’s a letter from my uncle Morgan. And sometimes it’s too rough for the men to go back, and they stay and talk. I like them very much, though my father does n’t.”

Her happiness was truth itself. She had forgotten whatever troubles the night before or the morning might have contained.

Far below in the cove lay the long red curve of the beach, with a thin black line of dead seaweed drawn as if by a compass along the high-water mark. The tide was beginning to ebb, but near the shore a “back eddy” moved toward them, and with it a strange multitudinous plashing, like continual waves among myriads of tiny rocks.

“Oh, look!” she cried, plucking him by the sleeve. “See the herring!” Familiarity could have made the sight no less beautiful to her.

Where the spurs of the cliff sprang upward from the cove, the turmoil was working toward them over the water. Countless tongues of silver flame leapt up, fell, leapt, and advanced with the same continuous plashing; here and there the curved flash of little bodies wove swiftly in and out of water, pliant threads of white fire. It was like a squall of silver pieces blown along the surface of the tide, with the noise and the upward-leaping drops of a ponderous, concentrated, and invisible shower.

“There’ll be good fishing to-night for those poor fellows over the hill,”said Helen, “if these greedy herring-gulls don’t eat it all.”

Sure enough, a white flock of the lesser terns came wheeling, on bent, sickle wings, along the red face of the crags, and with mournful cat-calls pursued the shoal, poising, swerving, diving under water, to stagger into the air again, each with a glitter in its bill and a sprinkling of bright spray from its wings.

“I never liked them very much,” she said, “since I read a fairy story, when I was a little girl, where they were persons transformed by a wicked queen. They ’ve always seemed uncanny. Is n’t it queer ? But they are really very white and clean; and, poor creatures, they live round these cold rocks, and their cries are so lonely.”

The two had stood close together, frankly sharing their happiness in the sight, frankly glad of each other’s company, like old friends. Shyness and constraint were beneath the nature of this girl, who had the clear self-possession which comes from a life lived rightly alone, or which a young person receives from association with an old one.

“Did you have any playmates here when you were a little girl?” he asked.

“No,”was the answer, possibly with a tinge of sadness. “Arthur was so much older” — She paused, looking absently after the wheeling gulls, and the shoal now black in the distance. Then, as she started walking again: “But I had many games,” she said brightly. “You would think them silly. Why, this field that we’re crossing: I used to walk from end to end of it all day, alone and perfectly happy, tapping the ground with a forked hazel stick my father cut for me, and playing I was a witch, divining. It was the happiest day in my life when I came tapping along into this — see” —

The rise of the hill had become more abrupt, as they neared the ascent to the high land above the cliffs. In the deepest of the slope, smooth-curved as an amphitheatre, sheltered, and facing the warmth of the southwest, the grass lay greener than elsewhere, and there grew a clump of alders. Toward this she led him, and pointed proudly to a tiny spring of clear water, with a bottom of pink sand. A song-sparrow, surprised in his bath, flitted into the bushes, leaving the water all a-quiver.

“Was n’t that good divining for an inexperienced witch?” she asked, elated.

“I found it the first day. Afterwards I tried to find gold and silver, but never did; and so I played more round this spring, and made up things about it. Some of them I made up so hard that I believe them even now, — like this, that whoever drinks of it must come back to the island before he dies.”

Archer flung himself down, bent his shining head, and drank deep of the cool water. He rose, laughing, but more than half in earnest.

“I’m glad you did that,” said Helen, in the same spirit. And they moved away, silent, along the slope of the amphitheatre.

“Now here,” she suddenly declared, stopping, “ here I’m going to ask you two questions. You’ll never guess them. The second depends on the first. It ’s a test. You can’t ever guess them. But if you don’t,” she laughed, “I shall be disappointed and shan’t like you.”

Archer forbore to make the complimentary retort. With her, it would have been silly. “I’ll try my best,” he replied.

“Now, first,” she said, with a pretty air of pedagogy, “my father and I call this hollow the Marathon field, sometimes. Why is that ?”

Archer rubbed his brows and frowned.

“Now it is n’t Byron. I hate him,” said his examiner. “I’ll give you a clue. What is this underfoot ? You ’ll never find it growing so far north again.”

They were standing in a little patch of feathery green stuff, with a few belated yellow flowers. A faint aromatic smell came to the aid of his memory.

“Fennel!” he cried joyfully. “I know — it’s what old Pan gave to what-washis-name ? — the runner: and the Greeks fought in a field of it.”

“Good, good!” she cried, in unconcealed astonishment. “I never expected you to. But you won’t answer the second right. What is the happiest kind of death ?”

His honest brown face clouded. Here, he thought, the poison of her father’s spirit worked in her. Yet her bright eyes showed only interest in the game.

“Of course you can’t. I ’ll give you another clue,” said this Ariadne. “The second answer is in the same story, and it is n’t about fighting the Persians. Now what is it ?”

“What is the happiest kind” — he reflected. This time he really gave thought to the question. “Why,” he said at last, with conviction, “the way this same fellow in the poem died, running into Athens with the news of the victory, among them all — still young” —

The slim white-gowned figure almost danced in the patch of fennel. “You ’re wonderful! ” she cried, clapping her hands. “That was it —

Now you know just what this place always makes me think of, and yon thought of it, too, nearly all by yourself.”

It was idle to pretend that this simple game had not established a bond between them. The world might have been young again, or they might have known each other since Marathon itself. For a moment they stood in the warm sunlight, with faces shining on each other, undisguised; then they began to climb toward the bare skyline of the heights, slipping on the yellow grass, scrambling, helping each other up the steep bank, happy as the encircling sunshine. The warm breeze followed them, sweet with pennyroyal crushed underfoot.

(To be continued.)