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

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

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

Singsong voices swelled to a wild chatter, and p. 224the steering sweep was swung hard over.  But the old junk, clumsy and slow to obey her helm, remained in the center of the channel.  For a moment, collision was imminent.  Then from the deck of that Chinese vessel on the Chu Kiang, one of thousands as like as their yellow masters, came the sharp call:

“Ahoy there!  Bear off!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You are Amos Widmer!”

And Amos Widmer it was.

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

p. 225There was a suggestion of irony in his tone.  He stood there for a time, smiling queerly in the dusk, and looking past the other, who faced him with folded arms.  His was not a pleasant smile.

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

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

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

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

It seemed to Hastings that he could hear again his own reply, faint and far off: “There were light winds that night.  But she’s an able craft in coarse weather.”  Training his glass at the tall figure on p. 226the deck of the outgoing vessel, he had muttered, “Grin, damn ye, grin!” and flung back his head with an air of elation.  Not in ships alone were Donald Hastings and Amos Widmer rivals.

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

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

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

And the boy vanished, flinching in the door.

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

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

p. 227Hastings fingered the stem of his own glass.  Young and hot-headed, versed in rough courtesies and frank enmities, he was placed at a singular disadvantage by this quiet man with the eyes of a devil.  “I did not expect this honor, sir,” he repeated, “or this pleasure.  Your—” his pause was almost imperceptible—“wife?”

“She is ailing.”

Of the two, Hastings was the less mature, although perhaps physically the stronger.  Certainly his face, frank, impetuous, fearless, was the more wholesome.  But lacking the easy grace and the calm assurance that characterized the other, he realized a certain want in his own hard schooling that left him almost powerless in the duel of wits, baffled by a bewildering subtlety, like a young fencer drilled in the rudiments, blade to blade, meeting for the first time an opponent who refuses contact.  There was the same sense of helplessness, the same mental groping for possible parries and thrusts, without the comforting rasp of steel on steel, that to the trained hand and wrist reveals more than sight itself of an antagonist’s intent.  Once an enemy always an enemy, unless there were reason otherwise, he had supposed.  He breathed deeply.

“I am sorry,” he replied.

Self-possessed, yet watching his uninvited guest between almost imperceptibly narrowed eyelids, Widmer continued casually, “Yes, she is ailing.  But of yourself?  How came you here?”

“Our masts were carried away in a typhoon.  The natives came out, apparently to plunder the waterlogged hull, but, by the grace of God, human compassion was stirred in their yellow bellies.  The p. 228Helen of Troy was an able ship—” Hastings eyed Widmer with a touch of patronage that passed apparently unnoticed “—and a rich cargo was under her hatches, but there was no way to save her.”

“I see.”

Hastings fingered the stem of his glass.  Silence filled the cabin.  Then the boy appeared with a great tray.

“For some reason,” Widmer began after a time, “I am reminded of a garden, a garden with honeysuckle in bloom.  There’s a white house by the garden, three stories high and square as a cube.  Do you remember the house?  A door with oval-paned side lights?  And the little pillars?”

Hastings’ face whitened, except for a red spot on each cheek.  Shoving back his chair, he half rose.  “If you—” he cried.

“Ha! ha!  I see you remember the garden.  Surely you would not resent a mere pleasantry.  That garden!  How many times we have avoided meeting there, you and I.  Well, it’s all over now.  Don’t hold ill will toward me, even though I carried off the queen of the garden.  Men have loved and lost and laid resentment aside before now.  It is a bond between us that we have loved Christine Duncan.  If only she were stronger, how gladly she would join me in welcoming you.  It is long since she has been able to receive guests.”  Widmer’s voice fell, perhaps a trifle more than was natural.  Certainly his eyes never left the flush on Hastings’ face.  But his voice rose again, lightly, as he resumed.  “Allow me!”  And he proffered the decanter.

Again the adversary had withdrawn his blade.  Again that baffling sense of nothing to contend with.

p. 229When, late, Hastings returned to his quarters, he heard, in the still watches of the night, a woman laughing faintly.

Already in the far interior of China the cold fingers of winter were reaching toward the south, and the northeast monsoon had settled on the sea.  But where now innumerable steamships are to be met,—tramps, their iron flanks streaked with rust; trim liners of Japan, the almost untranslatable Maru coupled with their names; dingy coasters, slattern traders, and men of war from half the navies of the world, a hundred years ago there were only the slow junks and the white-sailed ships of the Occident, with now and then a high-sided, square-sterned Dutchman.

The next evening Hastings came on deck and, standing by the taffrail, gazed long toward Hainan and the sunset.  No boat was in sight.  Save for a small island that lay a point abaft the beam, the Winnemere was running before the wind through an unbroken expanse of water.  Hearing steps, he turned.

It was Widmer.  “A fine evening,” he remarked in his singularly restrained voice.

“It is, indeed.”

Silence followed.  Since the seven survivors of the Helen of Troy had come tumbling over the bulwarks of the Winnemere there had been many such silent moments.  Always the words exchanged by the two captains were like those tentative thrusts with which the fencer tries the mettle of his opponent.

“It is a pleasure to be able to bring home the crew of the Helen of Troy,” Widmer said, slowly, covertly watching the other’s face.  “I remember p. 230when you left us in Macassar Strait.  The Winnemere was always a slow craft in light winds.  Your men like to tell the story of that race.”

Hastings, red of face, made no reply.

“Yes, there was much talk of that race.  You beat us on the run up from the Horn another time—that story, too, became well known.  Remarkably well known.”

Looking off at the single island, a dark blot on the shining sea, Widmer laughed softly.

“There was another race, however: a race by land.  There was a prize for that race, such a prize!”  Facing about at Hastings, he bit his mustache angrily.  “Well, though the prize was rotten at the heart, I won it, by God!” he whispered.

Hastings turned, his fists clenched, but Widmer, the tension of his face departing like a shadow, raised his hand and stepped two paces back.  “Be careful, Captain Hastings.  A single blow, and you would find yourself in the lazarette.  You have the freedom of the ship, but—merely a hint, Captain Hastings, as from friend to friend—guests on this ship have found it unwholesome to leave the straight path from their stateroom to the deck.  Ships have many eyes.”  Widmer paused.  “It will be a rare pleasure to bring home the captain of the Helen of Troy, but if necessary—”  Leaving the sentence unfinished, he smiled and strolled away.

And that night, when he should have been asleep, again Hastings heard the woman laughing.

The breath of the monsoon stirred the sea from Hie-che-chin to Vanguard Bank, and leagues and leagues beyond.  In the moonlight the waves came rolling up in mountains of silver, vanishing again p. 231into the farther darkness, in never-ending succession.  They swept past the Winnemere as, with all sail set, she bore down the China Sea, past her and away into the distance like shoals of fish tumbling in the water, and when they had gone a long journey they came to a derelict hull, and tossed it and turned it, and bore it on.

When Widmer had gone on deck, Hastings emerged from his narrow quarters and made his way swiftly through the now familiar cabin, through the captain’s own stateroom, to the single door beyond.  He heard, indistinctly from behind the closed door, only a confusion of small sounds, the rustle of skirts, the faint noise of some wooden object pushed along the floor, then the murmur of a voice.  “Hush,” it said, very softly, “little one, . . . little one . . . ”  Then it broke and rose suddenly to a small, plaintive cry.  “He isn’t here, . . . where can he be? . . . little one! . . . little one!”

With shaking hand Hastings fumbled for the latch, found it, and pushed, then pulled, but the oaken door did not yield.

Then from within came that low, strange laughter, and the voice, singularly restrained now, “little one . . . little one!”

Startled by footsteps on deck just outside the companionway, Hastings turned back through the darkness to his stateroom, and closed the door very gently as the companionway was shadowed by the form of some one descending.

Almost stifled by the confinement of the room, he went on deck, when the way was clear, and leaned over the weather rail, with the wind and the flying spray beating hard against his face.  p. 232But even so, he felt, strangely, that the air was close and that he was restricted by something at once vague, yet paradoxically definite.  By and by, wandering amidships, he found the second mate, late promoted from the forecastle, smoking comfortably by the mainmast, and glad of a chance to beguile the watch with friendly conversation.

So foreign to Hastings’ blunt directness was the finesse of intrigue that even the unsuspecting mate was not drawn off his guard.  Coming, as he thought, adroitly to the subject that filled his mind, Hastings was surprised by the sudden change in the second officer’s attitude.

“I suppose,” he had remarked, in a voice carefully casual, “Captain Widmer has no children.”

The officer’s attitude seemed all at once a little less friendly.  Raising his eyes to the dark heavens, he remarked, “It’s a raw night, for all there’s no great of a wind.”

“I suppose,” Hastings repeated, more loudly, “Captain Widmer—”

“It’s al’ays seemed hard lines to me that the Lord didn’t put monsoons in the north Atlantic.  Think o’ the good they’d do thereabouts!  To be sure, typhoons is a curse.  But there’s the trades, say.  Now, if the Lord had only seed fit—”

“Damn the trades, I say.  Did Captain Widmer ever have a child?&rdqu............