and she was forced to hurry through her acknowledgments in order to
overtake him.

The night at once absorbed them.

The air, charged with the fumes of gunpowder and rumbling with low
intermittent thunder, was oppressive and disturbing. Gerrit's head was
exactly opposite her own, and she could see his profile, pale and still,
moving on a changing dark background. He walked with the short firm
stride men acquire on the unsteady decks of vessels, swinging his arms
but slightly. Neither spoke. The rain, Nettie saw, was hanging off;
probably it would not reach Salem, Washington Square was already empty
except for a small obscure stir by the scaffolding for the fireworks. A
murmur of young voices came from a door on Bath Street. Such minute
observations filled her mind; beneath their surface she was conscious of
a deep, a fathomless, turmoil. It was a curious sensation, curious
because she couldn't tell whether it was happiness or misery. One now
exactly resembled the other to Nettie Vollar.

She grasped, however, one difference--it was happiness now, the misery
belonged to tomorrow. But suddenly that last unrealized fact--at once
immaterial and the most leaden reality of all--lost its weight. The
greater freedom she had lately grown into became an absolute
indifference, a half willful and half automatic shutting of her eyes to
everything but the present, the actuality of Gerrit Ammidon walking by
her side. She wanted him to speak, so that she could discover his
thoughts, feelings; yet she was reluctant to have their companionship of
silence broken: words, almost all the possible terms she could imagine,
would only emphasize the distance between them.

She was thinking of one now--a word he had never pronounced, but which
she felt had been, however obscurely, at the back of the attention he
had paid her: love. It was a queer thing. It seemed to be--everyone
agreed that it was--of the greatest, perhaps the first, importance; and
yet all sorts of other considerations, some insignificant and others
mean and more, yes--cowardly, held it in check, drove it back out of
sight, as you might hurriedly shut some shabby object into a closet at
the arrival of visitors.

"How have you been?" he demanded in the abrupt voice of the expression of
his determination to see her home. Well enough, she assured him, if he
meant her health. He glanced at her with somber eyes. "Not altogether,"
he admitted; "it included your family, things generally."

"They are as bad as possible," she told him. She admitted this frankly, a
part of her entire surrender to the moment, careless of how it might
affect him. "They would be," he muttered savagely. "It's a habit ...
here." The "here," she knew, referred to life on shore; his gloomy
attitude toward the management and affairs of the land had caused her a
great deal of precious laughter. He had revealed a most astonishing
ignorance of necessities that she had understood instinctively when
hardly more than a child; and this simplicity had, as much as anything,
brought her affection for him to life. At the same time she in particular
had felt the justice of a great many of his charges. But no one could
reasonably hope for the sort of world--a world as orderly and trim as
that of a narrow ship--he thought should be brought about by a mere
command. Nettie wished that it could! She sighed, gazing at him.

"Then it's no better than before?" he asked, adding, with a descriptive
gesture: "the town and people?"

"I hardly speak to ten in a year, outside the stores and like that. Of
course they nod going into church, or a lady, I mean really, your
sister-in-law, will say something nice, even do what you saw to-night.
Though it's the first time anything like that has happened."

She caught a repressed bitter oath.

"I suppose I'll get used to it," she continued. "No, I won't," she added
differently; "never, never, never."

"If you were a man now--" he said with an incredible stupidity.

She wondered angrily if he'd rather have her a man; there had been a
time, Nettie reflected, when such a possibility would have stirred him to
violent protest. And this brought out the reflection that, while at one
time he might have cared for her, now perhaps he was merely sorry for her
unhappiness. Yes, this must be it. She had a momentary fatal impulse to
throw back at him scornfully any such small kindness. She didn't, she
told herself, want condescending sympathy. What silenced her was the
sudden knowledge that she did; she wanted anything whatsoever from Gerrit
Ammidon. The fact that he had a Chinese wife was powerless to alter her
feeling in the smallest degree. On the contrary, she was shocked to find
that it had increased immensely, it was growing with every minute.

She wondered drearily if her stubborn love--the term took its place
without remark in the procession of her thoughts--for Gerrit didn't, in
spite of her protest to the contrary, stamp her as quite bad. Perhaps
her grandfather was right about them all--her mother and Uncle Edward
and herself, and they were wicked, lost! The energy with which she had
combated this charge now faced by the circumstance of her realized
affection for a man married to some one else, even Chinese, wavered.
All the cheerful influences of the day, rising to the supreme tranquil
hour on the Ammidon porch, sank to dejection; it was like the flight of
the rockets.

She walked listlessly, her brain was numb; she was terribly tired. Gerrit
Ammidon's head was bent and she was unable to see his expression. He
might even have forgotten, by the token of his self-absorbed progress,
that she was at his side.

"There's going to be a stir in Ammidon, Ammidon and Saltonstone," he said
presently, "when my father hears of the new program. Everything is
turning to the fastest California runs possible. William and James
Saltonstone want me to take command of a clipper. But I find I'm like my
father, Nettie; all my experience has been in the East and the China
service. I'm used to it. I'd never get on navigating a passenger boat, a
packet ship, from Boston to San Francisco and San Francisco to Boston.
The other's in my blood, too--running the northeast trades to Brazil and
coming up into the southwest passage winds for the Cape of Good Hope. A
long reach nearly to Australia and then north again to the Indian Ocean
and southeast trades.

"I'm fit for that, for long voyages, a blue-water sailor and all it
means; but battering back and forward round the Horn with my deck
cluttered up by prospectors and shore crews the mates would have to slam
into the rigging--!" His exclamation refused every face of such a
possibility. She understood his necessity completely; and the brief
account of such far happy journeys, safe from everything that Salem had
come to mean for her, filled her with longing.

"I'm beginning to see," he took up again the self-examination, "that I am
to blame for a good deal that I've found fault with in others. I mean
that I'm a different variety of animal, and, naturally, no judge of the
kinds of holes they live in or the way their affairs are managed."

"You are worlds better!" she cried.

He turned to her, obviously startled, and she held for a long breath his
unguarded intense gaze. "Not very useful, I am afraid," he replied at
last; "not today, anyhow. I belong to a life that is dying, Nettie; mark
my words, dying if not already dead. And I'm newfangled to my father. It
goes as quickly as that."

This was a fresh mood to all her knowledge of his impatient arrogance,
and one that sent her to him in a passionate unperceived emotion. They
had arrived at her home and were waiting aimless and silent. Beyond, the
gate to the yard was standing open, and Nettie saw that his discovery of
the fact had occurred at the identical moment of her own. She made an
involuntary movement forward and he followed her through to the blurred
tangle of bushes and bare trodden earth. Mutely they turned to the sod
spread at the harbor.

The thunder had died away, but pale sheets of reflected lightning hovered
at short intervals low in the sky. Directly above them stars shone again.
The window of the sitting room still bore the illumination of the lamp
within; and Nettie could picture her mother, with stained and rough hands
loose on their wrists, opposite Barzil Dunsack's gaunt set countenance.

"You said something about things as bad as possible."

In a level voice she told him about her discovery of Edward Dunsack
unconscious in his black wrap on the bed. "I thought he had died," she
repeated almost monotonously; "he had such a yellow gone look."

"But that can't be allowed!" he cried. "You mustn't see it. Indecent,
worse. The beast will have to be removed. No one will hear of his staying
about with two women and a fanatical old man." She was afraid that he
would go into the house at once and appear with her uncle, very much in
the manner of a dog with a rat. Her sense of a worldly knowledge, a
philosophy of realization, far deeper than his own returned. Things
couldn't be disposed of in that easy manner; it was probable that they
couldn't be disposed of, righted, at all. Her mother, with her help, must
continue to keep Barzil's home: there was no other place for Edward
Dunsack to go. "He won't hurt us," she said vaguely. "It's principally
bad for him. Then, at first, I didn't know. You get used to so much."

He, Gerrit Ammidon, wouldn't have it, he asserted in a heated return of
his familiar dictatorial manner. The fellow would be out of there
to-morrow. It was a damned unendurable outrage!

She smiled softly and laid a momentary hand on his sleeve. "That's
nothing, Gerrit; nothing compared to the rest, to me." He frowned down at
her out of the gloom.

"What am I to do?" she asked.

He again cursed Salem and the world with which he had proclaimed himself
out of date and sympathy. This, while it communicated to her a certain
warm comfort, resolved nothing, made no reply to her question. To-morrow
offered precisely the same hopeless outlook of yesterday. No answer from
Gerrit, Gerrit married, was possible. She saw that.

"I'm not fit to go around on land blubbering and setting tongues to
clapping," he declared. "I ought to be locked in my cabin when the ship's
in port, and let out only after sail's made again."

She heard a slight movement in the grass; and turning sharply caught the
vague outline of a man, the thin unsubstantial shape of Edward Dunsack.
He vanished immediately; Gerrit, absorbed in bitter thought, had missed
him. Strangely her uncle only filled her mind with the image of China,
the China that had ruined him, and which, too, in the form of a woman, a
Manchu, had destroyed the hope of any acceptable existence of her own.

"Great pretensions and idiotic results," he went on; "no ballast. Take
what your grandfather said to me--nothing in that unexpected or to drive
a man off. Yet off I go and--" he halted oddly, just as her breath was
suspended at the admittance which she was certain must follow. But he
fell into another glooming silence.

After all, she couldn't expect him to continue that development. A
different man might; and Nettie wasn't sure of her refusal to
listen...to the end. But she was familiar with Gerrit's unbending
conception of the necessity of truth alone. If he married a woman,
yellow, black, anything, he would perform, the obligation to the entire
boundary of his promise. Good and bad seemed equally united against her.
Little flashes of resentment struck through her leaden, conviction that
all this was useless.

"I must be of some use to you."

But, Nettie realized, there was only one way in which he could help her;
only one thing she wanted--could take--from him. She was terrified at the
completeness with which love had possessed her, making every other fact
and consideration of little interest or importance. Suddenly it seemed as
if she were being swept by an overwhelming current farther and farther
out from safety into a bottomless immensity that would claim her life.

"Yet," he cried, "if I lift a hand, here, in Salem, if I as much as cross
the street to speak to you--the clapping tongues! I can do you nothing
but harm. Though Rhoda might--"

"I don't want your Rhoda!" she interrupted passionately. "I've managed
without them all up to now." He raised his arms in a hopeless gesture.
"Nothing's to be done," she concluded. "I saw that all along; that is,
this last time."

"It's late," he muttered absently; "you have had a day." He turned
mechanically and moved away from the indefinite black rim of the harbor.
The lamp in the sitting room had been extinguished, the house was dark. A
brief embarrassment seized her as he stood trying vainly to find
something confident, even adequate, to say for farewell. And as the stir
of his footfalls died away up Hardy Street the memory of his last futile
words mocked her laboring heart.

She turned and faced Edward Dunsack, advancing from an obscurity deeper
than the rest. He murmured approvingly, she caught words of commendation
and unspeakable reassurance. She hurried away blindly, sick to the inmost
depths of her being. The morning, when she had tied her gay bonnet
ribbons and started out with the scarlet merino shawl on her arm, seemed
to belong to a long, long time ago, to a girl.... The popping of a final
string of firecrackers died outside.

VIII

The dejection, the sense of a difference that held from him any
comprehension of the vast maze of shore life, persisted as Gerrit Ammidon
walked toward home. It was such an unusual feeling that he was conscious
of it; he examined and speculated upon his despondency as if it had been
something actually before him. The result of this was a still increased
disturbance. He didn't like such strange qualities arbitrarily forcing
their way into his being--he had the navigator's necessity for a clear
understanding of the combined elements within and without which resulted
in a harmonious, or at least predictable, movement. He distrusted all
fogs. In a manner the course before him was plain--married to Taou Yuen,
shipmaster in his family's firm, he had simple duties to perform, no part
of which included sailing in strange or dangerous waters; yet though this
was beyond argument he was still troubled by a great number of unpleasant
conditions of mind and obscure pressures.

Gradually, however, his normal indignation returned, the contempt for a
society without perceptible justice, centered principally in what Nettie
Vollar had had from life. This, he assured himself, wasn't because he was
in any way involved with her; but because it was such a flagrant case.
She was a very nice girl. It was entirely allowable that he should admit
that. As a fact, he warmly felt that he was her friend; the past
justified, no, insisted on, that at least. He wondered exactly how fond
he had been of her--in other words, how near he had come to marrying her.
It had been an obvious possibility, decidedly; but the desire had never
become actual. No, his feeling for her had never broken the bounds of a
natural liking and a desire to secure decent treatment for her. The last
had been vain.

If his mental searching had ended there it would have presented no
difficulties, created no fog; but, unfortunately, there was another
element which he admitted with great reluctance, an inborn discomfort.
Although he had been clear about what had actually happened with Nettie
there was reasonable doubt that the same limitations had operated with
her. Briefly she had missed him more than he had realized. He explained
this to his sense of innate masculine diffidence by the loneliness of her
days. She had missed him....something within whispered that she still
did. Women, he remembered hearing, were like that.

In the light, the possibility, of this he saw that he had done her a
great wrong.

It had been his damned headlong ignorance of the dangerous quality of
life, the irresponsibility of a child with gunpowder. With all this in
his mind it seemed doubly imperative that he should do something for her;
he owed her, he was forced to admit, more than a mere impersonal
consideration. His thoughts returned unbidden to the fact that she--she
had liked him. He insisted almost angrily on the past tense, but it
surprised him and gave him a perceptible warm glow. Nettie was very
pleasing: he inferred that she was a creature of deep emotions,
affections.

At this he shook himself abruptly--such things were not permissible.
Gerrit felt a swift sense of shame; they injured Nettie. His mind shifted
to Taou Yuen. He found her asleep on the day bed she preferred, her
elaborate headdress resting above the narrow pillow of black wicker. He
could distinguish her face, pallid in the blue gloom, and a delicate,
half-shut hand. He was flooded with the intense admiration which
increasingly formed his chief thought of her; this, with the obvious
racial difference, put her, as it were, on an elevation--a beautifully
lacquered vase above his own blundering person. She was calm, serious and
good, in the absolute Western definitions of those terms; she had her
emotions under faultless control. Taou Yuen should be an ideal wife for
any man; she was, he corrected the form sharply. All that he knew of her
was admirable; the part which constantly baffled him didn't touch their
relationship.

It was reasonable to expect small differences between her and Salem: at
times her calm chilled him by a swift glimpse of utter coldness, at times
he would have liked her gravity to melt into something less than ivory
perfection; even her goodness had oppressed him. The last hadn't the
human quality of, for example, Nettie Vollar's goodness, colored by
rebellion, torn by doubt, and yet triumphing.

If he only understood the three religions of China, if he were an
intellectual man, Gerrit realized, he could have grasped his wife more
fully. He was completely ignorant of Chinese history, of all the forces
that had united to form Taou Yuen. For instance: he was unable to
reconcile her elevated spirit with the "absurd superstitions" that
influenced almost her every act--the enormous number of lucky and unlucky
days, the coin hung on his bed, the yellow charm against sickness and red
against evil spirits; only yesterday she had burnt a paper form
representing thunder and drunk its ashes in a cup of tea. She was
tremendously in earnest about the evil spirits--they were, she
maintained, lurking everywhere, in all shapes and degrees of harm. Edward
Dunsack was possessed, she declared; but he had pointed out that opium
was a sufficient explanation of anything evil in him, and that it was
unnecessary to look for a more fantastic reason.

He lay awake for a comparatively long while, as he had several times
lately, divided between his consciousness and the regular breathing of
his wife. If the past had brought Nettie Vollar to depend on him in
some slight degree Taou Yuen did so absolutely: except for him she was
lost in a strange world. Yet Taou Yuen didn't seem helpless in the
manner of Nettie. He had once before thought of the former as finely
tempered metal. Her transcendent resignation, with its consequent lack
of sympathetic contact with the imperfect humanity of--well, Nettie,
gave Taou Yuen a dangerous freedom from all that bound Salem in
comparative safety.

He dressed first, as usual, in the morning, while she stirred only enough
to get her pipe and tobacco, on the floor at her side. Outside, the elms
were losing their fresh greenness in the dusty film of midsummer; the
Square held an ugly litter from the fireworks of last evening. William,
too, was about, but he was uncommunicative, his brow scored in a frown.
Their father, always down before the others, had returned from the
inspection of his trees, and was tramping back and forth in the library.
The elder seemed unrested by the night, his skin, as Rhoda had pointed
out, was baggy.

"Now that the _Nautilus_ is afloat again," Jeremy Ammidon said, "you'll
want to be at sea." Examining this natural conclusion, Gerrit was
surprised, startled, to find that it was no longer true. For the first
time in his memory he was not anxious to be under sail. This of course
was caused by a natural perplexity about Taou Yuen's comfort and
happiness.

"I don't know what the firm's plans are for me," he answered cautiously.
"There is some talk of taking me out of the China trade for the
California runs. I shouldn't like that."

Jeremy was turning at his secretary, and he stopped to pound his fist on
its narrow ledge. "It's that damned Griffiths again and his cursed
jackknife hull!" he exclaimed. The dark tide suffused his countenance.
Gerrit studied him thoughtfully: he didn't know just how much William had
yet told their father about the sweeping changes taking place in Ammidon,
Ammidon and Saltonstone. He did see, however, that it was unwise to
excite the old gentleman unduly.

"I was saying only yesterday," he put in pacifically, "that you and
myself are getting to be old models--" he broke off as William entered
the library. The latter evidently grasped at once the subject of their
discussion, for he went on in a firm voice somewhat contradicted by a
restrained but palpable anxiety:

"Now, father, this was bound to come up and you must sit down and listen
quietly." The elder, on the verge of a tempestuous reply, constrained
himself to a painful attention. "It's useless to point out to you the
beneficial changes in sea carrying, for you are certain to deny their
good and drag out the past. So I am simply forced to tell you that after
careful consideration we have decided to line the firm with the events of
the day and hold our place in the growing pressure of competition. This
may sound brutal, but it was forced on us by the attitude you have
adopted. Shortly, this is what we intend, in fact are doing:

"Orders have been placed with George Raynes at Portsmouth and Jackson up
in Boston for clippers of a thousand and twelve hundred tons and another
is almost ready to be launched from Curtis' Chelsea shipyard. It oughtn't
to be necessary to call your attention again to the fact that the _Sea
Witch_ has brought the passage from Hong Kong to something like three
months. The profits of the California trade will be enormous and depend
entirely on speed.

"I'll admit that this is a big thing, it will cut sharply into our
funds--something like a quarter of a million dollars. But, if you will be
patient for a little only, I can promise that you'll see astonishing
returns. At the same time we have no intention of giving up China and
India, but we'll limit ourselves more closely in the nature of the
cargoes, practically nothing but tea unbroken from Canton to Boston. I'll
be glad to go into all this in detail at the countinghouse, where we have
the statistics and specifications."

To Gerrit's surprise Jeremy Ammidon sat quietly at the end of William's
speech; he wasn't even looking at them, but had his gaze bent upon the
floor. There was a commanding, even impressive, quality in his silence
that forced the respect of both his sons. More--it made Gerrit
overwhelmingly conscious of his affection, his deep admiration, for his
father. He recalled the latter's memorable voyage in the little _Two
Capes_--the barque of two hundred and nine tons--into the dangers, so
imminent to a master, of uncomprehended waters and thousands of miles
with, for the most part, only the sheerest dead reckoning. Jeremy Ammidon
said finally:

"If it's done it's done. I used to think there were two Ammidons in the
firm, not to mention Gerrit; but it seems there's only one. A man who has
never been to sea." He rose and marched, slower and more ponderous than
ever before, to the cupboard where he kept the square bottle of Medford
rum; there, with trembling hands, he poured himself out a measure. He
shut the glass door, but stood for an oppressive space with his back to
the room, seeing that old vision of struggle or accomplishment.

"I suppose I've been a damned nuisance about the countinghouse for a long
time," he pronounced, turning. William rose. "You made it," he said;
"it's you. God forgive me if I have been impatient or forgetful of all we
owe you." There was a stir of skirts in the doorway, and Rhoda entered.
"Breakfast--" she stopped, and with a quick glance at her husband and
Gerrit went at once to Jeremy Ammidon. "They've been bothering you
again," she declared, and turned an expression of bright anger on the
younger men. "Ah, how hard and hateful and blind you are!" she cried.

William, with a hopeless gesture, walked from the room. Gerrit moved to a
window facing the Square; but he saw nothing of its sultry yellow-green
expanse--he was remembering how as a child, his mother already dead, a
nurse had held him up on Derby Wharf to see his father sweep into port
from the long voyage to the East. He caught again the resonant voice, as
if sounding from a hold of ribbed oak, the tremendous vigor of the arm
that swept him up to a bearded face. He couldn't bring himself to move
now and see an old haggard man clinging with tremulous emotion and tears
to the sympathy, the strength, of a woman.

Later in the morning, to his immense relief, Jeremy Ammidon regained a
surprising amount of composure. At first determined never to return to
Liberty Street, toward noon Gerrit found him in the hall with his broad
hat and wanghee. "I'll just have a slant at those specifications," he
remarked. "Like as not they've left off the hatch coamings." Gerrit
suggested, "Since it's so hot why don't you have the carriage round?" The
other voiced his customary disparagement of that vehicle. "If I see that
I'm going to be late for dinner," he added, "I'll get one of the young
men to fetch me something. I don't want to give Rhoda any trouble."

Still, on the steps, he lingered, gazing pridefully up at the bulk of the
house he had built; his eyes rested on the brass plate, engraved with the
words Java Head, on the dignified white door. "A lot of talk when I had
that done," he commented; "people said they'd never heard of it, ought to
have my name there for convenience if nothing else. They didn't know. It
would take a sailor for that. Don't forget to tell Rhoda not to wait if
I'm late. All those girls of hers get hungry. I expect William consulted
Laurel about this new move," he ended with a gleam of humor. "She's a
great hand for a clipper since she talked to Captain Waterman." He was
down the steps, starting deliberately across the street. There was a last
mutter of doubt. The bulky slow figure in yellow Chinese silk moved away
and Gerrit returned to the shadowed tranquillity of the library.

More than any other place in the house it bore the impression of his
father. He wandered about the room, lost in its associations, stopped
in front of the tall narrow walnut bookcase and took out one of the
small company of Jeremy Ammidon's logs, reading disconnectedly in the
precise script:

"Tuesday, December 24. 132 days out. All this day gentle breezes and
cloudy. Saw kelp, birds, etc.

"Tacked ship to the eastward under short sail. At daylight made all sail
to SW. Gentle breezes and clear pleasant weather. Saw huge shoals of
flying fish."

"May 19, 11 days out. Hainan in sight, bearing from W by N to NNW. At
sunset the breeze died away and hauled off the land. All night light
breezes. Made all possible sail to the SSW. At the same time set the
extremity of Hainan which bore NW by N to N. Past three Chinese
vessels steering NNE. Saw much scum on the water and at 11 A.M. lost
sight of land."

"November 14, 65 days out. These twenty-four hours commences with
variable breezes at west and smooth sea. Saw brig steering to the
Eastward. The land of Sumatra bearing SW by W to SE by S. Tied rips."

He returned the log to its resting place with a quiet smile at the last
period. It was all incredibly simple--a lost simplicity of navigation and
a lost innocent wonder at the Mare Atlanticum of old fable.

Neither William nor Jeremy Ammidon was present for dinner. They were,
Gerrit concluded, submerged in the effort to bring the changing
activities of the firm into the latter's comprehension. His foot was on
the stair leading up to his wife, when there was a violent knocking on
the front door. It sounded with a startling abruptness in the shut hall,
and Gerrit instinctively answered without waiting for a servant. The
flushed and breathless young man before him was evidently perturbed by
his appearance. He stammered:

"Captain Ammidon, you--you must come down to the countinghouse. At
once, please!"

His thoughts, directed upon his father, gathered into a chilling
certainty. "Captain Jeremy is sick?" he demanded instantly. The
hesitation of the other seemed to confirm an infinitely greater
calamity. "Dead?" he asked again, in a flooding misery of apprehension.
The clerk nodded:

"In a second, like," he continued. "All we know they were talking in Mr.
William Ammidon's room--one of the boys was out that minute getting the
old gentleman some lunch--when we heard a fall, it was quite plain, and
Mr. Saltonstone--"

"That will do," Gerrit cut him short. He turned into the house, rapidly
considering what must follow. He'd go, certainly; but first he must warn
Rhoda, she would have the girls to prepare.... Rhoda had always been
exceptionally considerate and fond of Jeremy Ammidon. He found her at the
entrance to her room, and said, "My father is dead." Her warm color sank
and tears filled her eyes.

Hurrying over Bath Street to Liberty his grief was held in check by the
pressing actualities of the moment. He had time, however, to feel glad
that he had spent the morning largely in warm thoughts of the dead man.

He passed rapidly into the entrance of the establishment of Ammidon,
Ammidon and Saltonstone. Immediately on the right there was an open
railed enclosure of desks in the center of which a group of clerks
watched him with mingled respect and curiosity as he continued to the
inner shut space. It was a large light room with windows on Charter
Street. William's expansive flat-topped desk with its inked green baize
was on the left, and, under a number of framed sere ships' letters and
privateersmen's Bonds of the War of 1812, Gerrit saw the heavy body
extended on a broad wooden bench, a familiar orange Bombay handkerchief
spread over the face.

Never in all the memory of his brother had William Ammidon been so
stricken. As he entered James Saltonstone left studying a list hastily
scribbled on a half sheet of the firm's writing paper. He nodded silently
to Gerrit, who advanced to the covered face and lifted the handkerchief.
There were still traces of congestion, but a marblelike pallor had taken
the place of the familiar ruddy color. Something of the heaviness of his
old age, the blurring thickness of long inactivity, had vanished, giving
his still countenance an expression of vigor, resolution, contradicted by
an arm trailing like the loose end of a heavy rope on the floor. William,
with a clenched hand on his desk, spoke with difficulty:

"You must know this, Gerrit; and then I'll ask you never to allude to it
again. It might be argued that--that James and I killed him, but
absolutely without intention, by accident. Gerrit, I loved him more than
I took time to know. Well, you may or may not have heard that we own two
topsail schooners in the opium trade, between India, Ningpo and Amoy, but
you do know how father detested anything to do with the drug. We said
nothing to him about this; it seemed necessary, no--permissible. But
to-day when we were coming to a peaceable understanding about the new
contracts he stumbled over one of the schooner's manifests. Mislaid, you
see--a clerk! It swept him to his feet in a rage, he couldn't speak,
and--and he had walked, it was hot...."

Gerrit Ammidon made no answer; there was nothing to be said. He was
shaken by a burning anger at the cupidity, the ugly commercial grasping,
to which his father had been sacrificed. A gulf opened between him and
his brother and James Saltonstone; he was as different from them as the
sea was from the land, as the wind-swept deck of the _Nautilus_ was from
this dry building with its stifling papers and greed. He might be in the
service of the firm--Gerrit was not incorporated in the partnership--he
might carry their cargoes for the multiplication of the profit, but his
essential service and responsibility, his life, were addressed to another
and infinitely higher and more difficult consummation than the stowed
kegs of Spanish dollars, the bills of sale. This was composed of the
struggle with the immeasurable elements of the seas and winds, the safety
of lives, the endless trying of his endurance and will and luck.

"Now," he spoke with a perceptible bitterness, "you can have your way
without interference, without his mixing up your papers or making the
blunders of a slow sort of honesty."

"I am under no obligation to your judgment or opinion," William
replied stiffly. "There are always complications you will never
penetrate nor carry. At present your assistance is more necessary than
any display of temper."

The funeral gathered and ebbed in a long procession of carriages through
a sultry noon, the services at the grave concluded by the symbolic
dropping of the earth on Jeremy Ammidon's coffin lowered into the deep
narrow clay pit. The large varied throng lingered for a breath, as if
unable to take their attention from the raw opening that had absorbed the
shipmaster, and then there was a determined and reassuring commonplace
murmur, a hurrying away into the vital warmth of the day.

The evening was the loveliest summer and the garden of Java Head could
afford: a slow moon disentangled itself from the indigo foliage at the
back of the stable and soared with an increasing brilliancy, bathing the
sod and summerhouse and poplars, the metallic box borders and spiked
flower beds, in a crystal clearness. The Ammidons sat about the willow,
Rhoda with a hand affectionately on her husband's arm, the
children--Laurel and Janet staying without remark long past their
accustomed hours for bed--still and white under the blanching moon.
Gerrit intently studied his wife, Taou Yuen, in a concentrated manner.
She, too, was in white, the Chinese mark of sorrow.

Suddenly in the face of his suffering and memories she had appeared
startlingly remote, as if, from standing close beside him, she were
moving farther and farther away. The image was made profoundly
disconcerting by the fact that they acted without their own accord; it
took the aspect of a purely arbitrary phenomenon over which they had no
control. At the same time Nettie Vollar was surprisingly near, actual--he
could see every line and shading of her vivid face; he felt the warm
impact of her instant sympathy. He had caught a glimpse of Barzil Dunsack
at the funeral; but the other was immediately hidden by the crowd, and
Gerrit had been unable to discover whether his son and daughter or Nettie
had accompanied him.

His thoughts turned in a score of associations and questions to Nettie;
but when he found himself trying to picture her exact employment at the
present moment he was angrily aroused. He had, he realized, considered
nothing else for the past hour, and his preoccupation was growing more
intense, personal. He stirred abruptly, and fixed his mind on the
imminent changes from his father's death. First the possibility would
develop of his becoming a member of the firm; but to this, he silently
declared, he would not agree. His gaze rested with a faint underlying
animosity on William, seated upright in a somber absorption, and a
disparagement of the latter's activities and scale of values. Gerrit saw
that there must be a pacific legal knot to untangle; the division of
Jeremy's estate would require time--he had somewhere heard that such
affairs often dragged on for a year; and now he was again in a fever of
impatience to be away, safe, at sea. He added the more portentous word
with the vague self-assurance that it was only the customary expression
of his notable ignorance of land; but it echoed with an ominous special
insistence in his mind.

The _Nautilus_, he recalled, was once more afloat, repaired; and a plan
occurred to him that seemed to dispose of all his difficulties, even of
the distasteful possibility of the California clipper service. He could
take the ship as part of his inheritance; and, though ostensibly sailing
her in the interest of the firm, make such voyages and ports, carry such
cargoes, as his independence dictated. The _Nautilus_, with a cargo out
of tin and dyes and cotton manufactures, and forty or fifty thousand
trade dollars, would represent a sum of nearly two hundred thousand; but
as a family they were very rich; he'd have more than that; and bank the
remainder intact to the credit of his wife.

There were many practical aspects of his marriage that he had not stopped
to weigh in its precipitant consummation. The problem, pointed out by
Rhoda, of his absence from Taou Yuen on cruise could not be solved with
the facility he had taken for granted. It was as impossible to leave her
happily here--he was aware of her growing impatience with Western
habit--as it would be for him to become a contented part of Chinese home
life; and not only was she uncomfortably cramped and sick on shipboard,
but he doubted whether he could persuade his crews to sail with her.
Superstitious able seamen balked at the presence of even a normal wife
aft; and a Chinese would be regarded as a sign of certain disaster.

He would have to establish her somewhere in the East Indies; and he
viewed with a new dislike all such tropical settings. His entire life
threatened to become an affair of damnable palm trees and Oriental
stenches. Gerrit Ammidon broke into a cold sweat at the realization of
the far more direct implication that had taken substance in his mind. The
thing was going entirely too far! He wondered irritably at the obscure
cause for such violent inner agitations.

Rhoda Ammidon with a dim smile rose, gathering her daughters about her,
and departed in a pale cloud of muslin. Taou Yuen, with her murmuring
formal politeness, moved away too, leaving the brothers together.
Whatever sympathetic intercourse they might otherwise have had, whatever
shared memories of their boyhood and their father, were made impossible
by William's admission of the immediate cause of the elder's death.

"The Saltonstones are going into Boston this fall," William said
abruptly. "It is necessary for one of us to live there; and Caroline has
always had a hankering for wider society. Rhoda, I was surprised to
learn, wishes to remain here at Java Head for a year or so anyway. She
has a very real affection for the place. But I tell her when the girls
are older Boston, or perhaps New York, will give them far greater
opportunities. Sidsall, stranger still, was in tears at the whole thing;
she seemed ridiculously upset about leaving."

The vision of Nettie Vollar persisted, bright and disturbing. Once he was
at sea, Gerrit told himself, on the circumscribed freedom of his
quarter-deck, he would lose the unsettling fever burning at that instant
in his veins. But the memory of long solitary passages with nothing to
distract his mind through week upon week after the ship took the trades,
when hour upon hour his thoughts turned inward on themselves and reviewed
every past act and feeling, made doubtful even that old release. The
trouble was that he instinctively avoided any square facing of the
difficulty that had multiplied with such amazing rapidity--like a banyan
tree--about the present and the shadowed future. This he was forced to
admit, but grimly added that there could be only one answer to whatever
he might lay bare--the adherence to the single fundamental duty of which
he never lost sight. No port was gained by changing blindly from course
to course, that way lay the reefs; a man could but keep steadily by the
compass. That, at least, was all he could see, propose, for himself,
being rather limited and lacking the resources which others of greater
knowledge so confidently explored.

After breakfast on the following morning he mounted the dignified
staircase, with the sweeping railing of red narra wood and high Palladian
window at the turn, to his wife. In their room he was bathed in a cold
sweat of dismay at a sudden detached view of Taou Yuen in her complete
Manchu mourning for his father. An unhemmed garment of coarse white hemp
hung in ravelings about slippers of sackcloth; what had been an elaborate
headdress was hidden under a binding of the bleached hemp; she wore no
paint nor flowers; her pins and earrings were pasted with dough, and her
expression was drugged with the contemplative fervor of what had
evidently been a religious ceremonial.

"For the wise old man, for your father," she said. She was exhausted and
sank onto the day bed; but almost immediately her hand reached out in the
direction of her pipe, and she smiled faintly at him. He clenched his
sinewy hands, the muscles of his jaw knotted, as he gazed steadily at the
woman, the Manchu woman, he had of his own free accord married. It
sickened him that, for the drawing of a breath, he had regarded Taou Yuen
with such appalling injustice--injustice, the evil he hated and condemned
more than any other. What, in the name of God, was he made of that he
could sink so low!

"We'll leave here soon," he declared abruptly; "the _Nautilus_ will be
ready for sea almost any time."

He could recognize, from his slight knowledge of her, that Taou Yuen
welcomed the news. "Shanghai?" she asked. He nodded. It came over him
that he was no longer young. His father had retired from the sea within a
few years of his own present age and built Java Head, the house that was
to be a final harbor of unalloyed happiness. No such prospect awaited
him; he had one of the premonitions that were more certain than the most
solid realities--as long as he lived he must sail in ships, struggling
with winds and calms, with currents and cockling and placid seas. Well,
that was natural, inevitable, what he would have chosen. At the same time
he dwelt, with a sensation of loneliness, on the green garden and
drawing-room filled in June with the scent of lilacs, on Rhoda surrounded
by her girls.

When the question of the division of Jeremy Amnudon's estate came up, he
was, as he had foreseen, urged to become a partner of the firm; and, when
that failed, told that it was his vested duty to continue in his present
capacity as a shipmaster in all their interests. He was seated with
Saltonstone and William in the countinghouse and he could tell from his
brother's ill-restrained impatience that the other considered him hardly
more than a clumsy-witted, stubborn fool before the mast of the facts of
actual life.

His gaze, above their heads, rested on the framed pass of the ship
_Mocha_, one of his father's last commands, over the bench where he had
lain dead. It was given by the President, James Monroe, in 1818, its
white paper seal embossed on the stained parchment. It had an engraving
of a lighthouse and spired town on the dark water's edge, and above, a
picture of a ship with everything drawing in a fair wind, the upper
sails torn off on a dotted wavering line for the purpose of
identification with its stub.

"No," he told them quietly, "I'll go my own way as I said; with the
_Nautilus_, if that can be arranged." He rose with a nod of finality, and
James Saltonstone remarked, "Jeremy to the life." Gerrit replied, "I'd
not ask anything better."

Through the evening he heard little but the discussion of Mr. Folk's
approaching visit to Salem. The President was to leave the train at the
Beverly Depot at three P.M. and be fetched with Secretary Buchanan and
Marshal Barnes in a barouche with six horses and met at the outskirts of
Salem by the city authorities.

There would be a Beverly cavalcade, the city guard was ordered to muster
at the armory; while an evening parade at five o'clock and the military
ball in Franklin Hall were to follow.

But when the day and occasion actually arrived it was spoiled by a
succession of unforeseen mishaps. The train was late and the presidential
party in a fever of haste--the procession, hurrying through the massed
public-school children and throngs of Chestnut Street, gave a perfunctory
attention to the salutes and short address of the mayor. The President's
reply, hardly more than a few introductory phrases, cut short, the
barouche was sent plunging over its route with the Secretary crying,
"Drive on! Drive on!" and Marshal Barnes swearing and expectorating in
callous profusion.

Some of the crowd, the Ammidons heard, had been knocked down and injured
in the pell-mell of the rush. Gerrit's countenance showed his contempt of
what he held to be a characteristically ludicrous farce. After all, his
wishes in regard to the _Nautilus_ had been easy of execution, the ship
was now his; he was already contracting for a cargo. He had been to see
Mr. Broadrick, his first mate, and the latter was assembling the chief
members of the crew. As always at the prospect of sailing he was
unsettled, concerned with countless details of departure--like a vessel
straining at her last anchor.

Seated in the library with Taou Yuen--he had called her aside from her
fixed passage to their room from the garden--he was recounting his main
plans for the near future, when he became aware of an arrival on the
steps outside. He heard a servant's voice, and, immediately after, the
woman appeared in the doorway; but she was forced aside by Edward
Dunsack. Gerrit's quick resentment flared at such an unmannered
intrusion, and he moved ungraciously forward. The servant explained
impotently, "I told him I would see--"

"Yes?" Gerrit Ammidon demanded.

Dunsack bowed ceremoniously to Taou Yuen, then he faced the other. On the
verge of speech he hesitated, as if an unexpected development made
inadequate whatever he had been prepared to say; then, with a sudden
decision, he hurried into an emotional jumble of words. "I can tell you
in a breath--Nettie was badly hurt in that cursed rabble yesterday. It
looks as if she was actually struck by one of the horses. She was
unconscious, and then delirious; now she is in her right mind but very
weak; and, since she wished to see you, I volunteered to put our pride in
my pocket and carry her message."

An instant numbing pain compressed Gerrit's heart; he felt that, in an
involuntary exclamation, he had clearly shown the depth of his dismay.
Damn the fellow, why had he burst out in this public indecent manner! The
situation he had plausibly created, the thing he managed to insinuate,
was an insult to them all--to his wife, Taou Yuen, coldly composed
beyond, himself and to Nettie. He stood with his level gaze fixed in an
enraged perplexity on Edward Dunsack's sallow countenance, deep sunk on
its bony structure, conscious that there was no possibility of a
satisfactory or even coherent reply.

"Something was said about this afternoon," the other added. That period,
Gerrit realized, was nearly over. But above every other consideration
rose the knowledge that he would have to see Nettie Vollar, badly
injured, as she desired. The common humanity of that necessity left him
no choice.

He turned to Taou Yuen with a brief formal explanation. A friend, their
families had been associated for years, had been hurt and sent for
him.... Return immediately. He paused, in the act of leaving, at the door
of the library, waiting for Edward Dunsack to join him; but the other had
resolutely turned his back upon Gerrit. He showed no indication of
departure. Gerrit Ammidon was at the point of an exasperated direction;
but that, in the light of Dunsack's purpose there, appeared ridiculously
abrupt; and confident of his wife's supreme ability to control any
situation he continued without further hesitation to the street, hurrying
in a mounting anxiety toward the Dunsacks'.

Dwelling on his conduct in the library, at the sudden announcement of
Nettie's accident, he felt that he had acted in a precipitant if not
actually confused way. As a fact, it had all been largely mechanical; his
oppression, his dread for Nettie, had made everything else dim to see and
faint to hear. Dunsack's grimacing face, the immobile figure of his wife,
the familiar sweep of the room, had been things of no more substance than
a cloud between him and the only other reality existing. He had no
memory, for instance, of having stopped to secure his hat, but he found
it swinging characteristically in a hand. And now even the semblance of
reasonable speech and conduct he had managed to command vanished before a
panic that all but forced him into a run.

The main door of Barzil Dunsack's house was open on the narrow somber
region within; he knocked sharply against the wood at the side and was
immediately answered by the appearance of Kate Vollar.

"This is a great kindness, Captain Ammidon," she told him in her negative
voice; "come in here, please." He looked hastily about the formal space
into which she led him, expecting to see Nettie prostrate, but she was
not there. "How is she?" he demanded impatiently.

"Nettie?" her mother turned as if surprised by an unexpected twist of the
situation. "Oh, why she'll mend all right, the doctor says; but it will
be slow. Her arm had an ugly slithering break, and she suffers with it
all the time." A pause followed, in which she met his interrogation with
a growing mystification. "I suppose Edward told you," she ventured
finally. The sense of being at a loss was swiftly communicated to him.

"Your brother said Nettie wanted to see me," he returned bluntly.

"Now, however could Edward do a thing like that!" she cried in deep
distress. "Why, there's no truth to it. I asked him myself to see if
you'd kindly stop and give me some advice. What put it in my head was
that once your father offered--he told Nettie to let him know if there
was anything to be done. Edward Dunsack isn't just right in his head."

Gerrit was filled with a mingling sense of disappointment, relief that
Nettie was no worse, and the uncomfortable conviction that he had behaved
like an hysterical fool. He, too, but angrily, wondered why Dunsack had
invented such an apparently pointless lie. Probably Kate Vollar was
right, and her brother's wits, soaked in opium, had wandered into a realm
of insane fabrications. He composed himself--the first feeling blotting
out his other emotions--to meet the deprecating interrogation before him.

"I should be glad to do what I could in my father's place."

"In a way," she continued, "it's about Edward. When he came back from
China and decided to stay in Salem his father turned all the books over
to him; he was to tend to everything in the way of accounts and
shipments; and, he said, he would make us all rich in a year or so. But,
instead, he has neglected the clerking until we can't tell what's going
or coming. Edward hasn't--hasn't quite been himself lately," she paused
and Gerrit nodded shortly. "Now we're not wealthy, Captain Ammidon, we
never got more than just enough from our West India trade; but in the
last couple of months, with Edward like he is and father too old for
columns of figuring--he's dreadful forgetful now--not a dollar was made.
The schooners are slow, behind the times I guess, we've had to scrape;
yet it's been something.... They're both awful hard to do with," she
stopped hopelessly.

"You must get a reliable man in charge. Some one who knows the West India
shipping should go over your entire property, decide what is necessary,
then borrow the money. We can find that without trouble. I'll make only
one condition: That is the complete restraint of your brother. It is
known that he has the opium habit, he is a dangerous--"

He stopped at the echo of a thin persistent tapping from above. "That's
Nettie," Kate Vollar said; "the way she calls me. I'll ask you to excuse
me for a minute." When she returned her face bore an unaccustomed flush.
"Nettie heard you in the hall or through the stovepipe." She spoke
doubtfully: "She'd like to see you, but I don't know if it would be right
with her in bed. Still, I promised I'd tell you."

He rose promptly. The woman stood aside at the upper door and he at once
saw Nettie lying with her vigorous black hair sprawling in a thick twist
across the pillow. Her face was pinched, it seemed thin, and the
brilliancy and size of her eyes were exaggerated. One arm, clumsy and
inanimate in splints, was extended over the cotton spread; but with the
other hand she was feverishly busy with her appearance. She smiled, a wan
tremulous movement that again shut the pain like a leaden casket about
his heart.

"Do go away, mother!" Nettie directed Kate Vollar hovering behind them.
"Your fidgeting will make me scream." With an incoherent murmur she
vanished from the room. The girl motioned toward a chair, and Gerrit drew
it forward to a table that bore water and a small glass bowl partly
covered by a sheet of paper, holding a number of symmetrical
reddish-black pills. "Opium," Nettie told him, following his gaze; "I
cried dreadfully with the hurt at first. It's dear, and Edward made those
from some he had. You know, I watched him roll them right here; it was
wonderful how quickly he did it, each exactly alike, two grains." She
told him the circumstances of her accident while he sat with his eyes
steadily on her face, his hands folded.

He was quiet, without visible emotion or speech; but there was an utter
tumult, a tumult like the spiral of a hurricane, within him. Rebellious
feelings, tyrannical desires and thoughts, swept through him in waves of
heat and cold. Nettie's voice grew weak, the shadows deepened under her
eyes, for a little they closed; and but for the faint stir of the
coverlet over her heart she was so pallid, so still, that she might have
been dead. Moved by an uncontrollable fear he bent toward her and touched
her hand. Her gaze slowly widened, and, turning over her palm, she weakly
grasped his fingers. A great sigh of contentment fluttered from her dry
lips. "Gerrit," she whispered, barely audible. He leaned forward, blinded
by his passion for her.

He admitted this in an honest self-knowledge that he had refused
recognition until now. Tender and reassuring words, wild declarations and
plans for the future, crowded for expression; nothing else before the
immensity of desire that possessed him was of the slightest concern; but
not a syllable was spoken. A sharp line was ploughed between his brows;
his breath came in short choked gusts, he was utterly the vessel of his
longing, and yet an ultimate basic consideration, lost in the pounding of
his veins, still restrained him.

"I love you, Gerrit," Nettie said; "I'll never stop till I die." Her face
and voice were almost tranquil; she seemed to speak from a plane above
the ordinary necessities of common existence, as if her pain, burning out
her color and vigor and emotions, had given her the privilege of truth.
Curiously enough when it seemed to him that she had expressed what should
have sent him into a single consuming flame he grew at once completely
calm. He, too, for the moment, reached her state of freedom from earth
and flesh.

"I love you, Nettie," he replied simply.

However, he speedily dropped back into the sphere of actual
responsibilities. He saw all the difficulties and hovering insidious
shadows in which they might be lost. This, in turn, was pushed aside by
the incredulous realization that Nettie's life and his had been spoiled
by a thing no more important than a momentary flare of temper. If, as
might have happened, he had overlooked Barzil Dunsack's ridiculous
tirade, if he had turned into the yard where Nettie was standing instead
of tramping away up Hardy Street, everything would have been well.

It was unjust, he cried inwardly, for such infinite consequences to
proceed from unthinking anger! A great or tragic result should spring
from great or tragic causes, the suffering and price measured by the
error. He could see that Nettie was patiently waiting for him to solve
the whole miserable problem of their future; she had an expression of
relief which seemed to take a happy issue for granted. None was possible.
A baffled rage cut his speech into quick brutal words flung like shot
against her hope.

"I love you," he repeated, "yes. But what can that do for us now? I had
my chance and I let it go. To-day I'm married, I'll be married to-morrow,
probably till I die. Perhaps that wouldn't stop a man more
intelligent--it might be just that--than I am; perhaps he'd go right
after his love or happiness wherever or however it offered. There are
men, too, who have the habit of a number of women. That is understood to
be a custom with sailors. It has never been with me; as I say, maybe I am
too stupid.

"What in the name of all the heavens would I do with Taou Yuen?" he
demanded. "I can't desert her here, in America, leave her with William. I
brought her thousands of miles away from her home, from all she knows and
is. If I took her back and dropped her in China it would be murder."

An expression of unalloyed dreariness overspread Nettie's features. "I
wish I had been killed right out," she said. The starkness of the words,
of the reality they spoke, flowed over him like icy water; he felt that
he was sinking, strangling, in a sea grimmer than any about Cape Horn. He
was continually appalled by the realization that there was no escape, no
smallest glimmer, leading from the pit into which they had stumbled. He
had the sensation of wanting enormously to go with Nettie but was fast in
chains that were locked on him by a power greater than his will.

"It's no good," his voice was flat.

"I don't believe I'll see you again," Nettie articulated; "now the
_Nautilus_ is near ready to sail. I can't stand it," she sobbed; "that
last time you went out the harbor just about ended me, but this is worse,
worse, worse. I'll--I'll take all the opium."

"No, you won't," he asserted, standing, confident that her spirit was too
normal, too vitally healthy, for that. His gaze wandered about the room:
her clothes were neatly piled and covered by a skirt on a chair; the
mirror on her chest of drawers was broken, a corner missing; there was a
total absence of the delicate toilet adjuncts of Rhoda and Taou
Yuen--only a small paper of powder, a comb and brush, and the washstand
with a couple of coarse towels. What dresses she had were hung behind a
ridiculously inadequate drapery. She had so little with which to
accomplish what, for a girl, was so much.

His emotion had retreated, leaving him dull-eyed, heavy of movement. The
moment had come for his departure. Gerrit stood by the bed. Nettie turned
away from him, her face was buried in the pillow, the uppermost free
shoulder shook. "Good-by," he said. There was no answer and he patiently
repeated the short tragic phrase. Still there was no sound from Nettie.
There would be none. Even the impulse to touch her had died--died, he
thought, with a great many feelings and hopes he once had. A fleet
surprise invaded him at the absence of any impulse now to protest or
indulge in wild passionate terms; he was surprised, too, at the fact that
he was about to leave Nettie. The whole termination of the affair was
bathed in an atmosphere of stale calm, like the air in a ship's hold.

Gerrit Ammidon gazed steadily at her averted head, at the generous line
of her body under the coverlet; then, neither hasty nor hesitating in his
walk, he left the room. Kate Vollar met him at the foot of the stair.
"You understood," she said, "that I only bothered you because your
father... because I was so put on?"

"You were quite right," he replied in a measured voice; "it will all be
attended to. With the agreement I mentioned."

"How they'll take it I don't know."

"In some positions," he told her, "certain persons are without any
choice. The facts are too great for them. I said nothing to Nettie of
Edward Dunsack's reason for my coming," he added significantly. Out in
the street he stopped, facing toward Java Head and evening; but, with a
quiver of his lips, the vertical bitter line between his drawn brows,
he turned and marched slowly, his head sunk, to where the _Nautilus_
was berthed.

IX

Seated in the library, placidly waiting for Edward Dunsack to go, Taou
Yuen studied him briefly. A long or thoughtful survey was unnecessary:
the opium was rapidly mastering him. That fact absorbed all the rest. She
had an immeasurable contempt for such physical and moral weakness; all
the three religions fused in her overwhelmingly condemned
self-indulgence; her philosophy, the practical side of Lao-tze's
teaching, emphasized the utter futility of surrender to the five senses.
At the same time he was the subject of some interest: he was an American
who had lived in China, and not only on the fringe of the treaty
ports--he had penetrated to some extent into the spirit, the life, of
things Chinese; while she, Taou Yuen, was amazingly married to Gerrit
Ammidon, was a Manchu here, in America.

Absolutely immobile, her hands folded in her lap, she considered these
facts, each in relation to the other: there was wisdom hidden in them for
her. If Mr. Dunsack had retained the ordinary blustering Western
commercial mind, his knowledge of China confined to the tea houses and
streets, he would probably be prosperous and strong to-day. The wisdom
lay in this--that here she must remain Manchu, Chinese; any attempt to
become a part of this incomprehensible country, any effort to involve
herself in its mysterious acts or thought, would be disastrous. She must
remain calm, unassertive, let the eternal Tao take its way.

Edward Dunsack looked actually comic: he was staring rudely, with a
foolish air of flattery, and breathing in labored gasps--like a coolie
who had run miles with a heavy palanquin. Then her mind, hardly reacting
from immediate objects, returned to the contemplation of the deeper
significance of her presence here. Bent in on itself her thought twisted
like a moonflower vine about the solid fact of Gerrit. She realized, of
course, that he must have had the past of any healthy honorable man of
his age, and that it would have included at least one woman. However,
when even the present was an almost complete puzzle his past had been so
lost to her that she had not considered it until now.

"You must overlook my unceremonious speech," Edward Dunsack proceeded in
creditable Chinese. "It was clumsy, but I was deeply affected. It is my
niece, you see, who was hurt, and who has a very sad history. Then there
are some special circumstances. I'd have to explain a great deal before
you could understand why she sent for your husband and why he left so
hurriedly."

"There is nothing you need tell me," Taou Yuen replied in her slow
careful English. "Manchu eyes can see as well as American."

"A thousand times better." He, too, returned to his native speech. "It is
delightful to talk to a truly civilized being. All that would have to be
shouted at the women of Salem is unnecessary now. You see--you understand
the heart of a man."

"I understand you," she said impersonally.

"I wonder if you do," he speculated. "You ought to see what--how much--I
think of you. My brain holds nothing else," he declared in a low intense
voice, drawing nearer to her.

She had a momentary, purely feminine shrinking from his emaciated shaking
frame, the burning eyes in a face dead like a citron; then her placidity
returned, the assurance that it was all ordained, that his gestures, the
pumping of his diseased heart, had no more individual significance than
the movements of a mechanical figure operated by strings, here the
strings of supreme Fate. She even smiled slightly, a smile not the mark
of approval or humor, but an expression of absolute composure. It drove
him at once into febrile excitement.

"At least I understand you," he cried; "far more than you suppose! You
can't impress me with your air of a Gautama. I know the freedom of your
country. It doesn't shock you to realize that your husband has gone to
see a woman he loved, perhaps loves still, and you are not disturbed at
my speaking like this."

Here, she knew, regarding him no more than a shrilling locust, was the
center about which for a moment blindly her thoughts of Gerrit and
herself had revolved. His past--"a woman he loved." But it didn't in the
least upset her present peace of mind, her confidence in Gerrit. There
was a sharp distinction between the eternal, the divine, Tao, that which
is and must prevail, and the personal Tao, subject to rebellion and all
the evil of Yin; and she felt that her husband's Tao was good. Out of
this she remarked negligently:

"After all, you are more ignorant of China than I thought. But, of
course, you saw only the common and low side. You have not heard of the
books girls are taught from--'The Sacred Edict' and 'Mirror of the
Heart.' You don't know even the first rule of 'The Book of Rites,' 'Let
your face and attitude be grave and thoughtful,' and the second, 'Let
your steps be deliberate and regular.'" She paused, conveying by her
manner that he was already vanishing and that she was relieved.

"That would do well enough if you were a scholar, or a bonze," he
retorted; "but such innocence in a fashionable woman is a pretense. If
you are so pure how can you explain your gold and bracelets and pins,
all the marks of your worldly rank? Lao-tze taught, 'Rich and high but
proud brings about its own misfortune.'" He was so close to her now that
she caught a faint sickly reek from his body. It seemed to her that she
could see his identity, his reason, vanish, replaced by madness in his
staring eyes.

"I worship you," he murmured.

"Opium," she spoke disdainfully.

"Your own tobacco is drugged," he asserted. "But that's not important. I
tell you I worship you, the most beautiful person in the world. These
fools in Salem, even your husband, can't realize one-tenth of your
perfection; they can't venerate you as I do. And now that Ammidon has
gone back to the first, we are free too."

"You are a liar," she said with an unexpected colloquial ease.

A darker color stained his dry cheeks. "You saw him," he replied. "Did
he get pale or didn't he? And did he or not rush from the room like a
man in a fever? I tell you it's no use pretending with me; say what you
please I know how delicate your senses are. I'll tell you this too: It's
written in our progression that we should meet here, yes, and be a great
deal to each other. It was written in the beginning, and we had been
drawing together through a million cycles before Gerrit Ammidon stumbled
across you."

Taou Yuen was surprised by a sudden conviction that a part of this, at
least, was so. No living thing, however minute, escaped from the
weariness of movement, either ending in final and blessed suspension or
condemned to struggle on and on through countless lives of tormenting
passion. All had this dignity of hope or despair; all she encountered
were humble, impressive or debased in the working of the mighty law. She
had been guilty, as this American had pointed out, of dangerous and wrong
pride, and she accepted her lesson willingly. There was, however, an
annoying conflict between Edward Dunsack, the example, the impersonal,
and Edward Dunsack making violent profession of his unspeakable desire
for her. Even the word seemed to soil her; but there was no other. He
went recklessly on, trying to increase his advantage:

"We're made to be together."

"If we are it is because of some great wickedness of mine. If we are,
then perhaps I am lost. But it is allowed to resist evil, at least, as
far as staying out of its touch is resistance."

"Nothing can keep you from me," he declared. Another short step and his
knees would be brushing her gown. A stronger wave of dislike, shrinking,
anger, drowned her logical and higher resignation. "It is time for you to
go," she said, her voice still even.

"Never."

It seemed to her that she could feel his hot quivering touch and, all her
philosophy dropping from her, she rose quickly. "If this were China," she
told him, in a cold fury, "you'd be cut up with knives, in the court-yard
where I could look on. But even here I can ring for a servant; and when
Captain Ammidon comes back he'll know what to say to you."

She could see that the last affected him; he hesitated, drew back, his
hanging fingers clasping and unclasping. That, she thought, relieved,
would dispose of him. Then it was clear that his insanity persisted
even in the face of the considerable threat of Gerrit's hot pride and
violent tempers.

"It's our destiny," he repeated firmly in his borrowed faith, at once a
little terrifying and a little ridiculous in the alien mold. His lips
twitched and his bony forehead glistened in a fine sweat. Now, thoroughly
roused, she laughed at him in open contempt.

"Diseased," she cried, "take your sores away! Dog licked by dogs. Bowl
of filth," she was speaking in Chinese, in words of one syllable like
the biting of a hair whip. Edward Dunsack gasped, as if actual blows
cut him; he stood with one hand half raised, appalled at the sudden
vicious rush of her anger. A leaden pallor took the place of his normal
sallow coloring, and it was evident that he had difficulty in
withstanding the pressure of his laboring heart. He stood between her
and the door and she had a premonition that it would be useless to
attempt to avoid him or escape. She could, however, call, and some one,
there were a score of people about the house, must certainly appear. At
that moment she saw a deep change sweep over his countenance, taking
place in his every fiber. There was an inner wrenching of Edward
Dunsack's being, a blurring and infusion of blood in his eyes, a breath
longer and more agonized than any before, and she was looking closely
into the face of an overwhelming hatred.

For a moment, she realized, he had even considered killing her with his
flickering hands. Then that impulse subsided before a sidelong expression
of cunning. "With all your Manchu attitudes," he mocked her, "yes, your
aristocratic pretense of mourning and marks of rank, you are no different
from the little pleasure girls. Your vocabulary and mind are the same. I
was a fool for a while; I saw nothing but your satins and painted face. I
forgot you were yellow, I had forgotten that all China's yellow. It's
yellow, yellow, yellow and never can be white. I shut my eyes to it and
it dragged me down into its slime." His voice was hysterical with an
agony of rending spiritual torment and hopeless grief. "It poisoned me
little by little, with the smell of its rivers and the cursed smell of
its pleasures. Then the opium. A year after I had lost my position,
everything; and when I came over here it followed me ... in my own blood.
Even then I might have broken away, I almost had, when Gerrit Ammidon
brought you to Salem. You came at a time when I was fighting hardest to
throw it all off. You see--you fascinated me. You were all that was most
alluring of China, and I wanted you so badly, it all came back so, that I
went to the opium to find you."

"Progression," she said ironically.

"Perhaps," he muttered. "Who knows? I'm finished for this life anyhow.
You did that. I can't even keep the books for my father's penny trade."

His hands crept rigidly toward her. If they touched her she would be
degraded for ever. Yet she was incapable of flight, her throat refused
the cry which she had been debating; alternate waves of revulsion and
stoical resignation passed over her with chills of acute terror. Yet she
managed to preserve an unstirred exterior; and that, she observed, began
to influence him. His loathing was as great as ever; but his vision, that
had been fixed in a blaze of fury, broke, avoided her direct scrutiny,
her appearance of statue-like unconcern.

There was a sound of quick light feet in the hall, the bright voice of
one of Gerrit's nieces. Edward Dunsack fell into a profound abstraction:
he turned and walked away from her, standing with his back to the room at
a window that opened upon the broad green park. He was so weak that he
was forced to support himself with a hand on the wall.

Taou Yuen was motionless for a perceptible space, and then moved toward
the door in a dignified composure. All this had come from the utter
impropriety of the life in America. Dunsack glanced at her as she
withdrew, and for a moment she saw his fine profile sharp and dark
against the light-flooded window. His lips stirred but she heard no
sound. Then she was on the stair mounting to her room.

There mechanically she filled her pipe; but doing this she noticed that
her hands were trembling. How lamentably she had failed in the
preservation, the assertion, of her superiority, not as a Manchu, but in
the deeper, the only true sense of the word--in submission.

"Requite hatred with virtue."

She spoke Lao-tze's admonition aloud and, in the customary devious
channel of her mental processes, her thoughts returned to her early life,
her girlhood, so marred by sickness that the Emperor had surrendered his
customary proprietary right in the daughters of Manchu nobles.

Surrounding the fact of her early suffering, which had kept her out of
the active gayety of brothers and sisters, she remembered in the clearest
detail her father's house in the north; the later residences in Canton
and Shanghai, even the delightful river gardens of the summer place at
Soochow, were less vivid. Inside the massive tiled stone wall the
rooms--there were a hundred at least--faced in squares on the inner
courtyard, and were connected by glass enclosed verandas. The reception
houses of the front court, the deeply carved wooden platform with its
scarlet covering, were of the greatest elegance; they were always astir
with the numerous secretaries, the Chinese writers and messengers, the
_mafoos_ and chair coolies, the servants and blind musicians with the old
songs, _The Millet's in Flower_ and _Kuan Kuan Go to the Ospreys_. The
side door to the women's apartments, however, opened into a retreat,
where her father's concubine, he had but one, trailed like a bird of
paradise, and there was the constant musical drip of a fountain in an old
granite basin. There, during the years when she was lame, Taou Yuen
mostly stayed.

She had been dropped from a palanquin in her sixth year; sharp
pains soon after burned in her hip, and the corresponding leg had
perceptibly shortened. A great many remedies were tried in vain--burning
with charcoal, the application of black plasters, sweating,
acupuncture--sticking long needles into the afflicted part. The doctors
declared that the five elements of her body--the metal, wood, water, fire
and earth, were hopelessly out of equilibrium. Her mother had then called
necromancers and devil charmers; lucky and unlucky days were explored;
strange rites were conducted before her terrified eyes screwed into the
determination to show no alarm.

A year, perhaps, after they had become resigned to her injury, her
father, always a man of the most liberal ideas, had suddenly brought into
the garden to see her an English doctor passing through China. Against
the wailing protests of the women the Englishman had been given authority
to treat her; and he had caused to be made a thin steel brace, clasping
Taou Yuen's waist and extending in a rigid band down the length of her
injured leg. After putting a high shoe on her other foot he had commanded
them to keep the brace on her for two years.

It was through that period of comparative inactivity that she acquired a
habit of reading and thought, a certain grasp of philosophical attitude,
common to the higher masculine Chinese mind but rare among their women.
She had, for instance, later, read Laotze's Tao-teh-king, and been
impressed by his tranquil elevation above the petty ills and concerns of
life and the flesh. Her father, like all the ruling class, regarded
Taoism--which had, indeed, degenerated into a mass of nonsense about the
transmutation of base metals into gold and the elixir of life--with
contempt. But this seemed to her no depreciation of the Greatly Eminent
One or his philosophy of the two Taoes.

The household, or at least the family, worshipped in the form of
Confucius; his precepts and admonitions, the sacred _hiao_ or filial
submission, the tablets and ancestral piety, were a part of her blood; as
was the infinitely fainter infusion of Buddhism; yet in her intellectual
brooding it was to the Tao-teh-king that she returned. She paused to
recall that, the brace at last removed, she was practically completely
recovered; but the bent, the bracing, given her mind had remained.

The colorful pageant of her first marriage, the smaller but splendidly
appointed house of her husband--he was extremely intelligent and had
honorably passed the examination for licentiate, one of only two hundred
successful bachelors out of twenty thousand--and the period following his
accidental drowning wheeled quickly through her brain....

Only Gerrit Ammidon was left.

She loved him, Taou Yuen realized, for a quality entirely independent of
race: he had more than anyone else she knew the virtues of simplicity and
purity announced by Chwang-Tze as the marks of the True Man. "We must
become like little children," the Old Master had written. She had seen
this at once in the amazing interview sanctioned by her father-in-law.
Most women of her class, even widows, would have perished with shame at
being exposed to a foreigner. But Lu Kikwang had expressed her difference
from them in the terms of his proposal. His words had been "finely
better" although the truth was that her curiosity had always mastered the
other and more prudent instincts. Yet that alone would not have
prostrated her before Gerrit Ammidon--death was not unthinkable--nor
carried her into his strange terrifying ship and stranger life. The love
had been born almost simultaneously with her first recognition of his
character. Now her passion for him was close and jealous. A constant
shifting between such humanity and the calm detachment which prefigured
heaven was what most convinced her of the truths of Lao-tze.

All this took body at the announcement of Edward Dunsack about Gerrit and
his niece. Certainly he might have had an affair; that she dismissed; but
the insinuated permanence of this other affection was serious. She would
not have believed Mr. Dunsack for an instant, but, as he had pointed out,
Gerrit had undoubtedly been upset; he had turned pale and hurried away
impolitely. It was by such apparently slight indications that the great
inner currents of life were discovered. The fact that Chinese officials
had more than one wife, or, to speak correctly, concubines in addition,
had no bearing with Gerrit; such was not the custom with American men. It
represented for him, yes--dishonor.

She laboriously recalled his every attitude since they had landed in
America, and was obliged to admit that he had changed--he was less gay
and though his manner was always considerate she recognized a growing
impatience beneath his darker calm. Her philosophy was again torn in
shreds by sharp feminine emotions. She was filled with jealousy and
hatred and hurt pride. The clearest expression of his possible discontent
had marked his face when he had suddenly come into their room and saw her
rising from a prayer for his father. Gerrit's lips had been compressed,
almost disdainful; at that moment, she knew unerringly, he found her
ugly. Of course it had been the hideous garments of mourning.

She must wear the unhemmed sackcloth and dull slippers, bind her
headdress and cover her pins with paste, for a hundred days; and then
a second mourning of black or dark blue, and no flowers, for three
years. It might well be that by then Gerrit, blind to these
proprieties, would find her unendurable. Suddenly, in the tremendous
difficulty of holding him against an entire world, his own and of
which she was supremely ignorant, it seemed to her that she needed
every possible means, every coral blossom and gold filament and finger
of paint, the cunning intoxication of subtle dress and color and
perfume. With a leaden sense of guilt, but in a fever of impatience,
of haste, she stripped off the coarse hemp for her most elaborate
satins, her santal and clover and carmine.

When Gerrit came in it had grown dark with night, and he explained that
he had been busy inspecting the _Nautilus'_ spars. She lighted a lamp,
then another, all she could find, and studied him unobtrusively. She was
shocked at the worn expression of his face; it seemed as if he had aged
in the few hours since he had left the library. He was uneasy, silent;
and, secretly dismayed, she saw that he was indifferent to her changed
appearance, too. Taou Yuen debated the wisdom of telling him about the
painful scene with Edward Dunsack; against her original intent she
decided in the negative. She informed herself that the reason for this
was a wish to preserve him, now that they were practically at the day of
departure, from an unpleasant duty. But there was an underlying dimly
apprehended and far different motive: she was afraid that it would blow
into flame a situation that might otherwise be avoided, bring to life a
past naturally dying or dead.

She saw that he was scarcely aware of her presence in the room, perhaps
in his life. A period of resentment followed. "You are dull," she
declared, "and I am going down to the garden for entertainment." Gerrit
nodded. He would, he told her, be along shortly. Below she found Roger
Brevard, with the oldest Ammidon girl and her mother.

Roger Brevard, she had discovered, was in love with Sidsall. The latter,
it developed, was to leave shortly for a party; Mr. Brevard was not
going; and, when Gerrit's sister-in-law walked across the grass with her
daughter the man dropped into an easy conversation with Taou Yuen. She
had a feeling, which she had tried in vain to lose, of the vulgarity, the
impropriety of this. Yet she recognized that there was none of the former
in Roger Brevard; he resembled quite a little her dead husband,
Sié-Ngan-kwán; and for that reason she was more at ease with him--in
spite of such unaccustomed familiarity--than with anyone else in Salem
but Gerrit.

He was, she admitted condescendingly, almost as cultivated as the
ordinary Chinese gentleman. Many of his thoughts, where she could
understand their expression, might have come from a study of the sacred
kings. At the same time her feminine perception realized that he had a
genuine liking for her.

"You'll be delighted to leave Salem," he said, leaning forward and
studying her.

"That would not be polite," she answered formally. "You have been so
good. But it will give me pleasure to see Shanghai again. Anyone is
happier with customs he understands."

"And prefers," he added. "Indeed, I'd choose some of your manners rather
than ours. You see, you have been at the business of civilization so much
longer than the rest of us."

"Our history begins two thousand years before your Christ," she told him;
"our language has been spoken without change for thirty-three centuries,
as you call them. But such facts are nothing. I would rather hear your
non--nonsense," she stumbled over the word.

"Do you mean that what we call nonsense is really the most important?"

"Perhaps," she replied. "Devotion to the old and dead is greatly
necessary yet you smile at it. I didn't mean that, but moons and lovers
and music." He cried in protest, "We're terribly serious about those!"

"I hear nothing but talk about cargoes and sales and money."

"We keep the other under our hats," he instructed her. She was completely
mystified, and he explained.

"In China," she remarked tentatively, "it is possible for a man to love
two women at once, maybe one a little more than the other, but he can be
kind and just and affectionate to them both. Tell me, is--is that
possible with an American?"

"No!" he spoke emphatically. "We can love, in the way you mean, only one,
perhaps only once. I wouldn't swear to that, but there are simply no
exceptions to the first. Men are unfaithful, yes; but at a cost to
themselves, or because they are incapable of restraint. To be unfaithful
in anything is to fail, isn't it? You can lie to yourself as effectively
as to anybody else."

She fixed a painful attention upon him, but lost at least a half of his
meaning. However, one fact was clearer than ever--that Edward Dunsack had
said an evil thing about her husband. "It seems," he went on, "that even
spiritual concerns can be the result of long custom." If he was trying to
find an excuse for Chinese habit she immediately disposed of it. "No,"
she said, "you are upside down. The spirit is first, the eternal Tao,
everywhere alike, but the personal spirit is different in you and in us."

A sudden dejection seized her--now the difference seemed vaster than
anything she had in common with Gerrit. A wave of oppressive nostalgia,
of confusion and dread, submerged her in a faintly thunderous darkness.
She felt everywhere about her the presence of evil and threatening
shades. The approach of her husband, his heavy settling into a chair, did
nothing to lighten her apprehension.

"How soon do we go?" she asked faintly.

"In two weeks, with nothing unexpected," he responded without interest or
pleasure. It flashed through her mind that he was depressed at leaving
Salem, that other woman. His present indifference was very far from the
manner in which he had first discussed their leaving. Yet, even that, she
recalled in the light of her present sensitiveness, had been unnaturally
abrupt and clothed in a great many loud-sounding words. She told herself
arbitrarily that Edward Dunsack had lied--for the purpose which his
conduct afterward made clear--but her very feeling was proof that she
believed he had spoken the truth.

She was a victim of an uneasy curiosity to see... she made a violent
mental effort and recaptured the name--Nettie Vollar. Of course the
latter had been the deliberate cause of whatever wickedness had
threatened at the return of Gerrit with her, Taou Yuen. She had however
no doubt of the extent of this: Gerrit was upright, faithful to the
necessity Roger Brevard had explained; all that assaulted her happiness
was on an incorporate plane, or, anyhow, in a procession of consequences
extending far back and forward of their present lives.

But, she recognized, she had no excuse nor opportunity to see Nettie
Vollar. Mrs. Ammidon, when she heard of the accident, had at once
declared her intention of going to the Dunsacks' house; still that
promised no chance of satisfying her own desire. The least politeness in
the world prohibited her from going baldly in and demanding to see the
woman. She couldn't, all at once, make convincing a sympathy or
impersonal interest entirely contradictory to her insistent indifference.
The best she could hope was for them to sail away as quickly as possible;
when on the other side of the seas Gerrit would probably return to the
simplicity of being she had adored.

Then a trivial and yet serious fear occurred to her--perhaps here, among
all these dead-white women, he no longer held her beautiful. The word was
his own, or it had been his; he had not repeated it, she realized, twice
since they had been in Salem. Personally, she found the American women
entirely undistinguished and dressed in grotesquely ugly and cheap
clothes--not unlike paper lanterns bobbing along the ground. Their faces
were shamelessly bare of paint and their manners would have disgraced the
lowest servant in a Chinese courtyard. This was natural, from any
consideration of the hideous or inappropriate things that surrounded
them, and from the complete lack of what she could distinguish as either
discipline or reverence. Yet Gerrit, a part of this, would be unable to
share her attitude; she had heard him praise the appearance of women so
insipid that she had turned expecting vainly an ironic smile.

Roger Brevard rose and made his bow, the only satisfactory approach to a
courteous gesture she had met outside Gerrit's occasional half-humorous
effort since leaving Shanghai. He stirred, muttered a perfunctory phrase,
and sank back into obscurity.

Little quirks of unfamiliar disturbing feeling ran through Taou Yuen; her
mind, it seemed, had become a thing of no importance; all that at one
time had so largely ordered her life was superseded by these illogical
emotions spreading apparently from her heart. The truth was, she told
herself, that--with all her reading and philosophy--she had had little or
no experience of actuality: the injury to her hip and quiet life in the
gray garden at Canton, her protected existence in the women's apartments,
whatever she might have learned from them neglected because of the
general silliness of their chatter, the formal early marriage, had all
combined for the preservation of her ignorance.

She regarded herself now with distrust; nothing could have been more
unpleasant than the failure of her will, this swamping of her equanimity.
She never lost for a moment the image of superiority that should be her
perfect example, the non-assertion that was the way of heaven; but her
comprehension was like a figure ruthlessly dragged about by an
overpowering unreflective force. A sharp hatred of Nettie Vollar seared
her mind and perished in a miserable sense of weakness.

Against the dark, charged with a confusion of the ten thousand things,
she stared wearily and wakeful. She reminded herself again that Gerrit
would soon be gone from Salem, alone with her on the long voyage to
China; but he'd return to America, come back to Salem; and she knew that
he would never bring her westward again. A period of depression followed
which seemed to have no immediate connection with Gerrit; she had an
indefinable feeling of struggling in vain against adversity, of
opposition to an implacable power.

For a short while after she rose in the morning it appeared that she had
regained her self-control, her reason; and a consequent happy relief
irradiated her. But when Gerrit came up after she had finished her toilet
and she saw, from his haggard face, that he too must have been awake,
tormented, through the night, a passion of bitterness enveloped her at
which all that had gone before turned pale. She could scarcely restrain
herself from a noisy wailing accusation, and stood regarding him with a
tense unnatural grimace, the result of her effort to preserve propriety.
She told herself, at the tempest of vulgar phrases storming through her
consciousness, that what Edward Dunsack had said about her being no
better than the tea house girls was true, and she was aghast at the inner
treachery capable of such self-betrayal. Not a quivering word, however,
escaped; she managed a commonplace phrase and turned aside in a trivial
pretext of occupation.

"I am going into Boston with Captain Dunsack on business connected with
his schooners." The girl's grandfather! "Very well." She spoke placidly,
and with a tempestuous heart watched him stride quickly about the park.

She settled herself in a long motionless contemplation, fastening her
mind upon the most elevated and revered ideas conceivable. She saw the
eternal Tao flowing like a great green river of souls, smooth and mighty
and resistless; and she willed that she too might become a part of that
desirable self-effacement, safe in surrender. Men striving to create a
Tao for personal ends beat out their lives in vain. It was the figure of
the river developing, like floating on a deliberate all-powerful tide or
struggling impotently against it.

Later a message came up from Mrs. Ammidon--she hoped that Taou Yuen would
drive with her that afternoon. She dressed with the most particular care,
in blue and dark greens, her shoulders thick with embroidered garlands
and silver _shou_, her piled hair ornamented in glittering silver leaves
and garnets.

She went down when she heard the horses on the street below but the
barouche was empty except for the coachman. "Mrs. Ammidon left a half
hour ago," a servant told her; "and sent the carriage back for you." They
moved forward, going, she saw, into a part of the town where they seldom
drove--the narrow crowded way by the wharves--and, turning shortly into a
street that ended abruptly at the water, drew up before a dingy house on
her right.

The door was open, and they waited, confident that Mrs. Ammidon would
hear the clatter of hoofs and come out; but a far different appeared. She
gazed for a silent space at Taou Yuen seated above her, as if confused by
the glittering magnificence. It was probable that Gerrit's brother's wife
had come there on an errand of charity for the woman was poor, dingy like
the house, with a face drawn by suffering and material struggle.

"Of course you're Captain Ammidon's wife," she said; "and you are here
after Mrs. William Ammidon. Well, she's gone; but she left a message for
you. She will be at Henry Whipple's, the bookseller. After she saw Nettie
she went right off to send her some things; wouldn't wait for the
carriage. A kind-hearted determined body."

Taou Yuen leaned out to command the coachman to drive on; but the other,
plainly bent on making the most of a rare opportunity for such a
conversation, continued talking in her low resigned way.

"I was glad to have her too; Nettie gets pretty fretful up there with
nobody but me, really. She hasn't been so well, either, since--" here she
stopped abruptly, recommenced. "I like to see a person myself of Mrs.
Ammidon's kind. I've been alone all day; father's gone to Boston and
Edward away I don't know where."

Taou Yuen's curiosity to see Nettie Vollar returned infinitely
multiplied; here, miraculously, was an opportunity for her to study the
woman who was beyond any doubt an important part of Gerrit's past,
present--it might be, his future. The men were gone. ... She got
resolutely down from the barouche. "Take me up to your daughter," she
directed quietly.

"Why, that's very kind, but I don't know--Yes, certainly. Mind
these stairs with your satin skirt; I don't always get around to
the whole house."

Taou Yuen saw at once that Nettie Vollar was far sicker than she had
realized: her head lay on the pillow absolutely spent, her brow damply
plastered with hair and her eyes enlarged and dull. Taou Yuen drew a
chair forward and sat beside a table with a glass bowl of small dark
pills which from a just perceptible odor she recognized as opium. She
looked intently, coldly, at the prostrate figure. A flush like match
flames burned in Nettie Vollar's cheeks, and she said in a voice at once
weak and sharp:

"You're her!"

Taou Yuen nodded slowly, disdainfully.

"Oh, how could he!" the other exclaimed in what sounded like the thin
echo of a passionate cry. "I knew you were Chinese, but I never realized
it till this minute."

As Gerrit Ammidon's wife had feared she was totally unable to judge a
single quality or feature of the girl before her. She looked exactly like
all the others she had seen in Salem: in order to realize her she needed
Gerrit's eyes, Gerrit's birth. Then one fact crept insidiously into her
consciousness--here, in a way, was another being who had Gerrit Ammidon's
childlike simplicity. That was the most terrifying discovery she could
have made. Taou Yuen felt the return of the hateful irresistible emotions
which had destroyed her self-control. She wanted to hurt Nettie Vollar in
every possible way, to mock her with the fact that she had lost Gerrit
perhaps never to see him again; she wanted to tell her that she, Taou
Yuen, entirely understood her hopes, efforts, and that they were vain.

An utter self-loathing possessed her at the same time, a feeling of
imminent danger as if she were walking with willfully shut eyes on the
edge of a precipice above a black fatal void. Not a trace of this
appeared on her schooled countenance; and once more she completely
restrained any defiling speech. She deliberately shifted her point of
view to another possible aspect of all that confronted her--it might be
that this woman was a specter, a _kwei_, bent on Gerrit's destruction.
Such a thing often happened. How much better if Nettie Vollar had been
killed! She studied her with a renewed interest--a fresh question.
Perhaps the other would die as it was. She was extremely weak; her
spirit, Taou Yuen saw, lay listlessly in a listless body. Nettie Vollar
slightly moved her injured arm, and that little effort exhausted her for
a moment; her eyes closed, her face was as white as salt.

A further, almost philosophical, consideration engaged Taou Yuen's
mind--this extraordinary occasion, her being with the other alone, Nettie
Vollar's fragility, were, it might be, all a part of the working of the
righteous _Yang_. In the light of this, then, she had been brought here
for a purpose ... the ending of a menace to her husband. She hesitated
for a breath--if it were the opposite malignant _Yin_ there was no bottom
to the infamy into which she might fall. It was a tremendous question.

The actual execution of the practical suggestion, from either source, was
extremely easy; she had but to lean forward, draw her heavy sleeve across
the strained face, hold it there for a little, and Nettie Vollar would
have died of--of any one of a number of reasonable causes. She, Taou
Yuen, would call, politely distressed, for the mother ... very
regrettable.

Gerrit free--

Perhaps.

She had no shrinking from the act itself, nothing that might have been
called pity, a few more or less years in a single life were beneath
serious consideration; it was the lives to come, the lingering doubt of
which power led her on, which restrained and filled her mind. A flicker
of rage darted through her calm questioning; her mental processes again
faded. With her right arm across the supine body and enveloping the face
in her left sleeve a single twist and Nettie Vollar would choke in a
cloud of thick satin made gay with unfading flowers and the embroidered
symbol of long life. She felt her body grow rigid with purpose when the
sound of a footfall below held her motionless in an unreasoning dread.

It was not heavy, yet she was certain that it was not the woman's. A blur
of voices drifted up to her, the dejected feminine tone and a thin
querulous demand, surprise. Taou Yuen turned cold as stone: the sensation
of oppressive danger increased until it seemed as if she, and not Nettie
Vollar, were strangling. There was a profound stillness, then a shuffling
tread on the stair, and Edward Dunsack entered, entered but stood without
advancing, his back against a closed door.

Even since yesterday he had noticeably wasted, there were muscles of his
face that twitched continuously; his hands, it seemed to her, writhed
like worms. He said nothing, but stared at her with a fixed glittering
vision; all his one time worship--it had been so much--was devoured in
the hatred born in the Ammidon library. Frozen with apprehension she sat
without movement; her face, she felt, as still as a lacquered mask.

To her astonishment--she had forgotten Nettie Vollar's existence--a
shaken voice from the bed demanded:

"Uncle Edward, what's come over you! Don't you see Mrs. Ammidon! Oh--"
her speech rose in a choked exclamation. Edward Dunsack had turned the
key and was crossing the room with a dark twisted face, his eyes stark
and demented. Taou Yuen, swung round toward the advancing figure, heard a
long fluttering breath behind her. Perhaps Nettie Vollar had died of
fright. The terror in her own brain dried up before an overwhelming
realization--she had betrayed herself to the principle of evil. She was
lost. Her thoughts were at once incredibly rapid and entirely vivid,
logical: Edward Dunsack, ruined, in China; herself blinded, confused,
destroyed in America. Yesterday she had held him powerless with the mere
potency of her righteousness; but now she had no strength.

There was a loathsome murmur from his dusty lips. He intended to kill
her, to mar and spoil her throat, a degradation forbidden by Confucius,
an eternal disfigurement. This filled her with a renewed energy of
horror.... Here there was none but a feeble woman to hear her if she
called. She rose mechanically, a hand on the table; Taou Yuen saw Nettie
Vollar's deathly pallid face rolled awkwardly from the pillow, and the
bowl of opium. There were twenty or more pills. Without hesitation, even
with a sense of relief, she swept the contents of the bowl into her palm.
The effort of swallowing so many hard particles was almost convulsive and
followed with a nauseous spasm.

Exhausted by mental effort she sank into a chair and a dullness like
smoke settled over her. The figure of Edward Dunsack retreated to an
infinite distance. The smoke moved in a great steady volume--the eternal
and changeless Tao, without labor or desires, without.... Hatred requited
with virtue ... attracting all honor--mounting higher and higher from the
consuming passions, the seething black lives of her immeasurable fall.

X

Although the late afternoon was at an hour when Derby Street should have
been filled by a half-idle throng in the slackening of the day's
waterside employments Roger Brevard found it noticeably empty. In this he
suddenly recognized that the street was like the countingroom of the
Mongolian Marine Insurance Company, the heart of Salem's greatness--they
were weaker, stilled in a decline that yet was not evident in the
impressive body of the town.

When he had first taken charge of this branch both Salem and it had been
of sufficient moment to attract him from New York; the company was
insuring Boston and New York vessels; the captains had thronged its broad
window commanding St. Peters and Essex Streets. Now only an occasional
shipmaster, holding the old traditions and habits or else retired, sat in
the comfortable armchairs with leather cushions drawn up at the coal
hearth or expansive in white through the summer.

His mind shifted to a consideration of these facts in relation to
himself--whether the same thing overtaking the place and marine insurance
had not settled upon him too--as he made his way from Central Wharf,
where he had vainly gone for prospective business. His inquiry was
reaching a depressing certainty when, passing and gazing down Hardy
Street, he saw the Ammidon barouche standing in front of the Dunsacks'.

Roger Brevard stopped: the Ammidon men, he knew, seldom drove about
Salem. He had heard of Nettie Vollar's accident and came to the
conclusion that Rhoda was within. If this were so, her visit, limited to
a charitable impulse, would be short; and thinking of the pleasure of
driving with her he turned into the side way. As he approached, the
coachman met him with an evident impatience.

"No, sir," he replied to Brevard's inquiry. "But we were to get Mrs.
Ammidon at the bookstore. Mrs. Captain Gerrit called here for her, but
she went inside unexpected. All of an hour ago. I don't like to ask for
the lady, but what may be said later I can't think."

He had scarcely finished speaking when a woman whom Brevard recognized
as Kate Vollar appeared at the door. "Oh, Mr. Brevard!" she exclaimed
with an unnaturally pallid and apprehensive face. "I'm glad to find
you. Please come upstairs with me. Why I don't know but I'm all in a
tremble. Mrs. Ammidon went to see Nettie, then Edward came in, and when
he heard who was there he acted as if he were struck dumb and went up
like a person afflicted. I waited the longest while and then followed
them and knocked. Why the door was shut I'd never tell you. But they
didn't answer, any of them," she declared with clasped straining hands.
"Three in the room and not a sound. Please--" her voice was suddenly
suffocated by dread.

"Certainly. Quarles," he addressed the coachman, "I'll get you to come
along. If there is a lock to break it will need a heavier shoulder
than mine."

Mounting the narrow somber stair, followed by the man and Kate Vollar, he
wondered vainly what might have happened. Obscurely some of the woman's
fear was communicated to him. Brevard knocked abruptly on the door
indicated but there was no answering voice or movement. He tried the
latch: as Nettie's mother had found, it was fastened.

"Quarles," Roger Brevard said curtly.

The coachman stepped forward, braced himself for the shove he directed
against the wooden barrier, and the door swept splintering inward. Roger
advanced first and a grim confusion touched him with cold horror. Taou
Yuen was half seated and half lying across a table beside the bed; he
couldn't see her face, but her body was utterly lax. Nettie Vollar, too,
was in a dreadful waxen similitude of death, with lead colored lips and
fixed sightless eyes. A slight extraordinary sound rose behind him, and
whirling, Brevard discovered that it was Edward Dunsack giggling. He was
silent immediately under the other's scrutiny, and an expression of
stubborn and malicious caution pinched his wasted sardonic countenance.

Brevard turned to the greater necessity of the women, and moved Taou Yuen
so that he could see her features. It was evident that she was not, as he
had first thought, dead; her breathing was slow and deep and harsh, her
pulse deliberate and full; she was warm, too, but her face was suffused
by an unnatural blueness and the pupils of her inert eyes were barely
discernible. He shook her with an unceremonious vigor, but there was no
answering energy; she fell across his arm in a sheer weight of
satin-covered body. He moved back in a momentary uncontrollable repulsion
when Kate Vollar threw herself past him onto the bed. "Nettie!" she
cried, "Nettie! Nettie!" Brevard was chilled by the possibility of an
unutterable tragedy, when with a faint suffusion of color the girl gave a
gasping sigh. Her voice stirred in a terror shaken whisper:

"Uncle Edward, don't! Why--don't. Oh!" She pressed her face with a long
shudder into the pillow. "Whatever was it--?" her mother began wildly.
Brevard caught her shoulder. "Not now," he directed; "you'll come
downstairs with me. We must have help at once and your daughter quiet."

However he was in a quandary--he couldn't trust the woman here, he would
have to go immediately for assistance, and yet it was impossible to leave
Nettie Vollar and Gerrit's wife alone. "You will have to wait in the
room," he decided, turning to Quarles.

Edward Dunsack was wavering against a wall; Brevard went swiftly up to
him. "We'll need you," he said shortly. Dunsack maintained his silence
and air of stubborn cunning; but, when the other man clasped his
incredibly thin arm, he went willingly followed by Kate Vollar below.
There he sat obediently, his judicious detachment broken by a repetition
of the thin shocking snigger.

"You must be responsible for your brother," Roger Brevard told the
quivering woman. "I'll be back immediately. Now that you know Nettie's
safe you must control yourself. No one should go up--keep everybody
out--till you hear from me or the doctor or Captain Ammidon."

What an inexplicable accident or crime, he thought, hurriedly approaching
the countinghouse of Ammidon, Ammidon and Saltonstone, the first and
nearest of the places to which he must go. He could remember no mark of
what had overcome Taou Yuen. How was Dunsack, who was now clearly
demented, implicated? What racking thing had Nettie Vollar seen?

In the subsequent exclamatory rush, even on the following morning when
Roger Brevard learned that--poisoned by opium undoubtedly taken by
herself--Gerrit Ammidon's wife had died without regaining consciousness,
the greater part of the tragedy became little clearer. No statement could
be had from Edward Dunsack other than a meaningless array of
precautionary phrases; and returning in a sliding gait toward Hardy
Street he was put under a temporary restraint.

Nettie Vollar, Brevard heard, had relapsed from her injury into a second
critical collapse. Yet, he told himself, entering the room that was his
home in Mrs. Cane's large square house on Chestnut Street, that the
Manchu still absorbed his speculations.

It was a pleasant room and a pleasant house with a dignified portico; and
his tall windows, back on the right of the second floor, opened on the
length of the Napiers' garden. Brevard sat looking out over a dim
leafiness of evening and tried to discipline his thoughts into order and
coherence. Any dignity of death had been soiled by the ugly mystery of
the aspects surrounding the end of Taou Yuen.

He had liked her extremely well, agreeing with Rhoda Ammidon that,
probably, they had never been permitted to know a more aristocratic
breeding or greater degrees of purely worldly and mental and personal
charm than those of Gerrit's wife.

His mind grew more philosophical and a perception, yet without base in
facts, convinced him that Taou Yuen had been killed by America. It was a
fantastic thought, and he attempted to dismiss it, waiting for more
secure knowledge, but it persisted. She had been killed by unfamiliar
circumstances, tradition, emotions. In some manner, but how he was unable
to disentangle from the pressures of mere curiosity and conjecture,
Nettie Vollar--or rather Gerrit's old passing affair with Nettie--had
entered into the unhappy occurrence. After an hour's vain search he gave
up all effort to pierce the darkness until he had actual knowledge--if he
ever had, he was forced to add silently. It was possible that the secret
might be entirely guarded from the public, even from the closer part he
had played and his familiarity with the Ammidon family.

He was an inmate of their inner garden with its lilac trees and hedged
roses in season, the pungent beds of flowers and box, the moonshade of
the poplars. Roger Brevard turned from the consideration of Taou Yuen to
the even more insistent claim of his increasing affection for Sidsall. He
stopped again both to lament and delight in her youth--another year and
he would have unhesitatingly announced his feeling as love to them all.
It was that, he admitted to himself almost shyly. The obvious thing was
for him to wait through the year or more until the Ammidons would hear of
a proposal and then urge his desire.... He could see her quite often
meanwhile.

Yes, that was the sensible course, even in the face of his own
multiplying years. They were twenty-five more than Sidsall's; yet, he
added in self-extenuation, he was not definitely snared in middle age; he
was still elastic in body and youthful, but for graying hair, in
appearance. His birth was eligible from every social consideration; and,
though he was not rich, he had enough independently to assure the safety
of his wife's future. This did not come entirely, or now even in the
larger part, from the Mongolian Marine Insurance Company, but took the
form of a comparatively small but secure private income.

He paused to wonder if it had not been that latter fact which had
prevented his being successful--successful, that was, in William
Ammidon's meaning of the word. He had not made money nor a position of
importance among men of affairs. Such safety, he decided, was a dangerous
possession judged by the standards he was now considering. A few thousand
a year for life struck at the root of activity. It induced a critical
detached attitude toward life, overemphasized the importance of the cut
of a trouser and the validity of pedigree. It was a mistake to dance
noticeably well.

Drifting, together with almost everyone else, he had reached his
present position, past forty, by imperceptible degrees, obscurely
influenced by the play of what he intrinsically was on circumstances or
accident or fate.

Although he had never done so before, he compared himself with Gerrit
Ammidon. The other's refusal to accept a partnership in the family firm
or command a California clipper was known. Gerrit and himself were
alike in that they apprehended the values of life more clearly than did
the ordinary mind or heart. But, in retaliation, the world they
differed from curtly brushed them aside. Roger Brevard could not see
that they had made the least mark on the callous normal cruelty or the
aesthetic and spiritual blindness of the existence they shared. But it
was always possible that something bigger than their grasp of justice
or beauty was afoot.

He turned from the darkened prospect of the window and his thoughts to
the room. Without a light he removed his formal street clothes, hanging
the coat and waistcoat, folding the trousers in a drawer, with exact
care; changing his light boots for fiber slippers he set the former in
the row of footgear drawn up like a military review against the wall.
Though it was quite obscure now, and no one would see him, he paused to
brush his slightly disarranged hair, before--tying the cord of his
chamber robe--he resumed his seat.

The year, he reverted to Sidsall, would pass; but, try as he might, he
had no feeling of security in the future, however near. It was the
present, this Sidsall, that filled him with a tyrannical and bitter
longing. She was unbelievably beautiful now. Against the faintness of his
hope, his patience, he saw the whole slow process of the disintegration
of marine insurance, and with it his own fatuous insensibility to the
decline: that decline with its exact counterpart in himself. Salem and he
were getting dusty together.

He straightened up vigorously in his chair--this would never do. He must
wind up his affairs here and return to New York. The tranquil backwater
had overpowered him for a time; but, again awake, he would strike out
strongly... with Sidsall. Endless doubt and hope fluctuated within him.
Voices rose from the Napier garden, and from a tree sounded the whirring
of the first locust he had noticed that summer.

On a noon following he saw the passage of the three or four carriages
that constituted the funeral cortège of Taou Yuen's entirely private
interment. She would be buried of course by Christian service: here were
none of the elaborate Confucian rites and ceremonial; yet--from what Taou
Yuen had occasionally indicated--Confucius, Lao-tze, the Buddha, were all
more alike than different; they all vainly preached humility, purity, the
subjugation of the flesh. He stopped later in the Charter Street cemetery
and found her grave, the headstone marked:

TAOU YUEN
A MANCHURIAN LADY
THE WIFE
OF
GERRIT AMMIDON, ESQ.
and the dates.

He saw, naturally, but little of the Ammidons--a glimpse of Rhoda in the
carriage and William on Charter Street; the _Nautilus_, ready for sea,
continued in her berth at Phillips' Wharf. Fragments of news came to him
quoted and re-quoted, grotesquely exaggerated and even malicious reports
of the tragedy at the Dunsacks'. Standing at his high desk in the
countingroom of the Mongolian Marine Insurance Company, Taou Yuen's
glittering passage through Salem already seemed to him a fable, a dream.
Even Sidsall, robustly near by, had an aspect of unreality in the tender
fabric of his visions. Captain Rendell, his spade beard at the verge of
filmed old eyes, who was seated at the window, rose with difficulty. For
a moment he swayed on insecure legs, then, barely gathering the necessary
power, moved out into the street.

Later, when Roger Brevard was turning the key on the insurance company
for the day, Lacy Saltonstone stopped to speak in her charming slow
manner: "Mother of course is in a whirl, with Captain Ammidon about to
marry that Nettie Vollar, since she is recovering after all, and our
moving to Boston.... You see I'm there so often it will make really very
little difference to me. Sidsall is the lucky one, though you'd never
know it from seeing her.... I thought you'd have heard--why, to Lausanne,
a tremendously impressive school for a year. They have promised her
London afterward. I would call that a promise, but actually, Sidsall--."

"Doesn't she want to go?" he asked mechanically, all the emotions that
had chimed through his being suddenly clashing in a discordant misery. He
bowed absently, and hastening to his room softly closed the door and sat
without supper, late into the evening, lost in a bitterness that
continually poisoned the resolutions formed out of his overwhelming need.
He was aghast at the inner violence that destroyed the long tranquility
of his existence, the clenched hands and spoken words lost in the shadows
over the Napiers' garden. He wanted Sidsall with a breathless tyranny
infinitely sharper than any pang of youth: she was life itself.

She didn't want to go, Lacy had made that clear; and he told himself that
her reluctance could only, must, proceed from one cause--that she cared
for him. As he dwelt on this, the one alleviating possibility, he became
certain of its truth. He would find her at once and in spite of Rhoda and
William Ammidon explain that his whole hope lay in marrying her. With an
utter contempt at all the small orderly habits which, he now saw, were
the expression of a confirmed dry preciseness, he left his clothes in a
disorderly heap. Such a feeling as Sidsall's and his, he repeated from
the oppressive expanse of his black walnut bed, was above ordinary
precautions and observance. Then, unable to dismiss the thought of how
crumpled his trousers would be in the morning, oppressed by the picture
of the tumbled garments, he finally rose and, in the dark, relaid them in
the familiar smooth array.

In the morning his disturbance resolved into what seemed a very decided
and reasonable attitude: He would see Rhoda that day and explain his
feeling and establish what rights and agreement he could. He was willing
to admit that Sidsall was, perhaps, too young for an immediate decision
so wide in results. The ache, the hunger for happiness sharpened by vague
premonitions of mischance, began again to pound in his heart.

At the Ammidons' it was clear immediately that Rhoda's manner toward him
had changed: it had become more social, even voluble, and restrained. She
conversed brightly about trivial happenings, while he sat listening,
gravely silent. But it was evident that she soon became aware of his
difference, and her voice grew sharper, almost antagonistic. They were in
the formal parlor, a significant detail in itself, and Roger Brevard saw
William pass the door. Well, he would soon have to go, he must speak
about Sidsall now. It promised to be unexpectedly difficult; but the
words were forming when she came into the room.

There were faint shadows under her eyes, the unmistakable marks of tears.
An overwhelming passion for her choked at his throat. She came directly
up to him, ignoring her mother. "Did you hear that they want me to go
away?" she asked. He nodded, "It's that I came to see your mother about."

"They know I don't want to," she continued; "I've explained it to them
very carefully."

"My dear Sidsall," Rhoda Ammidon cut in; "we can't have this. What Roger
has to say must be for me and your father." The girl smiled at her and
turned again to Roger Brevard. "Do you want me to go?"

"No!" he cried, all his planning lost in uncontrollable rebellion.

"Then I don't think I shall."

William entered and stood at his wife's shoulder. "You won't insist,"
Sidsall faced them quietly. "Ridiculous," her father replied. Brevard
realized that he must support the girl's bravery of spirit. How
adorable she was! But, before the overwhelming superior position of the
elder Ammidons, their weight of propriety and authority, his
determination wavered.

"To be quite frank," the other man proceeded, "since it has been forced
on us, Sidsall imagines herself in love with you, Brevard. I don't need
to remind you how unsuitable and preposterous that is. She's too young to
know the meaning of love. Besides, my dear fellow, you're a quarter
century her elder. We want Sidsall to go to London like her mother, have
her cotillions, before she settles into marriage."

"They can't understand, Roger," Sidsall touched his hand. "We're sorry to
disappoint them--"

"You ought to be made to leave the room," William fumed.

"That isn't necessary," Rhoda told him. "I am sure Roger understands
perfectly how impossible it is. You mustn't be hurt," she turned to him,
"if I admit that we have very different plans... at least a man nearer
Sidsall's age."

The girl lifted a confident face to him. "You want to marry me, don't
you?" she asked. More than any other conceivable joy. But he said this
silently. His courage slowly ebbed before the parental displeasure
viewing him coldly. "Then--" Sidsall paused expectantly, a touch of
impatience even invaded her manner. "Please tell them, Roger."

"Why I have to put up with this is beyond me," William Ammidon
expostulated with his wife. "It's shameless."

Roger Brevard winced. He tried to say something about hope and the
future, but it was so weak, a palpable retreat, leaving Sidsall alone and
unsupported, that the words perished unfinished. The girl studied him,
suddenly startled, and her confidence ebbed. He turned away, crushed by
convention, filled with shame and a sense of self-betrayal.

A stillness followed of unendurable length, in which he found his
attention resting on the diversified shapes of the East India money in a
corner cabinet. It was Sidsall who finally spoke, slowly and clearly:

"Forgive me."

He recognized that she was addressing her mother and father. From a
whisper of skirts he realized that she was leaving the room. Without the
will necessary for a last glimpse he stood with his head bowed by an
appalling sensation of weariness and years.

In a flash of self-comprehension, Roger Brevard knew that he would never,
as he had hoped, leave Salem. He was an abstemious man, one of a family
of long lives, and he would linger here, increasingly unimportant, for a
great while, an old man in new epochs, isolated among strange people and
prejudices. Whatever the cause--the small safety or an inward flaw--he
had never been part of the corporate sweating humanity where, in the war
of spirit and flesh, the vital rewards and accomplishments were found.

Soon after he passed Gerrit and Nettie Vollar driving in the direction of
the harbor; she was lying back wanly in the Ammidon barouche, but her
companion's face was set directly ahead, his expression of general
disdain strongly marked. A vigorous hand, Roger noted, was clasped about
Nettie's supine palm. She saw him standing on the sidewalk and bowed
slightly, but the shipmaster plainly overlooked him together with the
rest of Salem.

The end of summer was imminent in a whirl of yellow leaves and chill gray
wind. There was a ringing of bugles through the morning, the strains of
military quicksteps, rhythmic tramping feet and the irregular fulmination
of salutes. That it was already the day of the annual Fall Review seemed
incredible to Roger Brevard. He was indifferent to the activities of the
Common; but when he heard that the _Nautilus_ was sailing in the middle
of the afternoon he left his inconsequential affairs for Phillips' Wharf.

A small number were waiting on the solid rock-filled reach, the
wharfinger's office at its head and a stone warehouse blocking the end,
where the _Nautilus_ lay with her high-steeved bowsprit pointing outward.
The harbor was slaty, cold, and there was a continuous slapping of small
waves on the shore. Darkening clouds hung low in the west, out of which
the wind cut in flaws across the open. The town, so lately folded in lush
greenery, showed a dun lift of roofs and stripping branches tossing
against an ashy sky.

Close beside Roger stood Barzil Dunsack, his beard blowing, with Kate
Vollar in a bright red shawl, her skirts whipping uneasily against her
father's legs. Beyond were the Ammidons--William, and Rhoda in a deep
furred wrap, and their daughters. Rhoda waved for him to join them, but
he declined with a gesture of acknowledgment.

The deck of the _Nautilus_ was above his vision but he could see most of
the stir of departure. The peremptory voice of the mate rose from the
bow, minor directions were issued by the second mate aft, a seaman was
aloft on the main-royal yard and another stood at the stage rising
sharply from the wharf. Gerrit and his wife had not yet arrived, and the
pilot, making a leisurely appearance, stopped to exchange remarks with
the Ammidons. He climbed on board the ship and Roger could see his head
and shoulders moving toward the poop and mounting the ladder.

The wind grew higher, shriller, every moment; it was thrashing among the
stays and braces; the man aloft, a small movement against the clouds,
swayed in its force. There was a faint clatter of hoofs from Derby
Street, Brevard had a fleeting glimpse of an arriving carriage, and
Gerrit, supporting Nettie Ammidon, advanced over the wharf. The
shipmaster walked slowly, the woman clinging, almost dragging, at his
erect strength. They went close by Roger: Nettie's pale face, her large
shining dark eyes, were filled with placid surrender. Her companion spoke
in a low grave tone, and she looked up at him in a tired and happy
acquiescence.

The two families joined, and there was a confused determined gayety of
farewell and good wishes. Out of it finally emerged the captain of the
_Nautilus_ and the slight figure upon his arm. He wore a beaver hat, and,
as they mounted the stage, he was forced to hold it on with his free
hand. When the quarter-deck was reached they disappeared into the cabin.

"Mr. Broadrick," the pilot called, "you can get in those bow fasts. Send
a hawser to the end of the wharf; I'm going to warp out." There was a
harsh answering clatter as the mooring chain that held the bow of the
_Nautilus_ was secured, and a group of sailors went smartly forward with
a hemp cable to the end of the wharf's seaward thrust. The _Nautilus_ lay
on the eastern side, with the wind beating over the starboard quarter,
and there was little difficulty in getting under way. Strain was kept on
the stern and breast fasts while the mate directed:

"Ship your capstan bars."

The capstan turned and the _Nautilus_ moved forward to the beat of song.

"Low lands, low lands, hurrah, my John,
I thought I heard the old man say.
Low lands, low lands, hurrah, my John,
We'll get some rum ...
... Hurrah, my John.
Then shake her--"

"Vast heaving," Mr. Broadrick shouted.

The intimate spectators on Phillips' Wharf moved
out with the ship. Gerrit Ammidon was now visible on the quarter-deck
with the pilot. He walked to the port railing aft and stood gazing
somberly back at Salem. The stovepipe hat was not yet discarded, and the
hand firmly holding its brim resembled a final gesture of contempt. The
pilot approached him, there was a brief exchange of words, and the former
sharply ordered:

"Stand by to run up your jib and fore-topmast staysail, Mr. Broadrick.
Put two good men at the sheets and see that those sails don't slat to
pieces.

"On the wharf there--take that stern fast out to the last ringbolt. Mr.
Second Mate... get your fenders aboard." The wind increased in a violence
tipped with stinging rain. "Give her the jib and stay-sail." She heeled
slightly and gathered steerage way. Roger Brevard involuntarily waved a
parting salutation. An extraordinary emotion swept over him: a ship bound
to the East always stirred his imagination and sense of beauty, but the
departure of the _Nautilus_ had a special significance. It was the
beginning, yes, and the end, of almost the whole sweep of human suffering
and despair, of longing and hope and passion, and a reward.

"Let go the stern fast. Steady your helm there."

"Steady, sir."