“I’ve only a little time left,” he told me. “I must make my last plans at once. My will must be changed. Except for a few legacies and my wife’s dower portion, all must go to Brock, who has been like a good and loyal son to me. You and he must have sons of your own to assure the future of Bascomb ships upon the seas.”
Behind him Brock McLean leaned forward and put a hand upon the old man’s shoulder. I saw a compassion in his face I had not glimpsed before, and it came to me that this hard, cold man loved the rascally, still heroic captain.
“But first,” the old man went on, gathering a last strength into his voice, “I must have your promise, Miranda. As Carrie’s daughter you are already dear to me. This way you will be cared for always. Give me your word that you will marry Brock so that I can change the will.”
I looked helplessly from one to another of those in the room. From her far corner Sybil McLean watched me with antipathy. Still her son did not meet my eyes. Only Lien was trying to tell me something from the place where she knelt at the captain’s right hand. Her slanted, foreign eyes held my own with insistence and now I remembered what she had said to me in my room. If I gave my promise it would ease the captain’s dying—yet it would not matter. There was no time for will changing now. There was only time to give him some peace of mind in his last moments.
Yet still I could not speak. Afterwards no one would hold me to such a promise, I knew. Least of all Brock. It was already too late for the will to be changed in his favor. Yet somehow I could not give lightly a promise I did not mean to keep. I did not want to betray this dying old man with a lie.
He was quick as before to sense my resistance and turned his head feebly. “Help me with the girl,” he said to Brock.
For the first time Brock looked at me, a challenge in his eyes. I could only shake my head, holding out against them both. Brock McLean leaned past the captain and grasped my hand in his strong, fierce clasp. There was a cold fire in the look he bent upon me—a fire that seared, yet had no warmth. At the grip of his fingers about my own, a shock seemed to run through my body.
“Give the captain your promise,” he commanded.
All strength drained from me. I could hold out against them no longer. I could not, after all, deny this old man what little comfort my words might give him. Numbly I bowed my head.
“I will marry him if you wish it, Captain Obadiah,” I said.
At once there was sound and movement in the room. Brock withdrew his hand from mine with a quick, sharp gesture, almost as if, having imposed his will, he flung me from him. Mrs. McLean made a sound of outrage, quickly suppressed, and moved to the center of the room. Lien stirred slightly in her kneeling place on the floor, her breath escaping in a long sigh. Even the fire contributed sound as a red log fell with a thud that sent sparks aloft in the grate.
I saw that the captain’s eyes were brighter now and a flush bloomed in his cheeks. He was looking at me with an expression of gleeful triumph that made me wonder if I had been tricked, and if he was far from dying after all. If that was the case, I would not keep my promise. I would fight them all every inch of the way.
“Get Joseph,” the captain told Lien, his voice stronger now. “Send him at once to summon both Dr. Price and Mr. Osgood. He is to bring them here as quickly as he can. I’ll do no dying until my wishes are executed.”
“Joseph is waiting,” Lien said. “The carriage is ready, as you ordered. I will tell him.”
She ran from the room, moving swiftly, yet quietly in her soft-soled slippers. I could feel the trap closing about me and I started to speak, to protest, but Brock uttered two words, silencing me.
“Be quiet,” he said.
Again his look set his will above my own and I was still. I thought helplessly of Ian Pryott, too far away to help me—the only person to whom I could have turned for aid.
The captain’s hand seemed feverishly hot and dry about my own. Its pressure had weakened, but he did not let me go. Without hope of escape, I sat upon my hassock, waiting for whatever was to come.
FIVE
The wedding ceremony was brief. Dr. Price, the minister, arrived first. In a daze I stood beside Brock, aware that the room was too hot and that hatred toward me burned beneath the surface. Even while Brock and his mother conceded to the captain’s wishes, I knew how greatly they despised me. I was the price of inheritance for Brock. A price he could not escape paying. I wished he could know that my distaste for him was equally strong.
As the minister looked at him inquiringly, Brock drew a ring from his little finger—a gold ring set with a jade stone that I had noted before on his hand—and put it upon my own fourth finger. It slipped on loosely, and in that dazed moment the fact that the ring was too big for me seemed a more vexatious detail than anything else.
There were other inconsequential distractions—as if I must give my attention to anything except what was happening to me. Once I heard the black dog howl in the distance and the sound seemed prophetically menacing. Wind rattled dry leaves on a nearby tree and a bough scraped against the window. The night was a black entity outside, pressing against the house, and the voice of the sea spoke again and again, sounding its own mournful counterpoint to the events in that room.
Sybil had come forward to stand at her son’s elbow. Firelight gleamed in the fading auburn of her hair, and her bosom moved with the deep anger of her breathing. Lien remained beside the captain, her eyes downcast as if she would hide her thoughts from all in that room.
Captain Obadiah waited impatiently until the last words of the ceremony were spoken. Then he asked testily for Mr. Osgood, the lawyer. Where had the man got to? Why wasn’t he here? Joseph came in to say that he had gone first to Mr. Osgood’s house and the lawyer had promised to come as quickly as he was able. He would ride his own horse, so Joseph had not waited for him.
If there had been trickery on the captain’s part, it had not lasted long. He was truly fading now. The will to wait, to hold onto the parting threads of his life was weakening before our eyes.
“Ian!” he gasped to Lien. “Bring him here at once. Tell him—paper, pen—!”
Lien fled. The captain’s hand tightened briefly about my own. “Lean closer, girl. For … your ears … only.” He flashed his old look of command at Brock. “Stand back, the rest of you. I’ll speak to her alone.”
Dr. Price stood apart uneasily with Brock and Mrs. McLean. I bent toward the captain and his hot dry breath brushed my cheek as he spoke softly in my ear.
“Watch for storm signals, girl. Reefs ahead. You can weather … a good little craft. The whale stamp … follow the whale stamp. On the China run.”
He was trying to tell me something and I did not understand.
“What do you mean?” I whispered, leaning to catch his least whisper.
His words came spaced between the gasps of his breathing. “Only half … the story … find … the whole. I always meant to … meant to …”
Even as I tried desperately to catch his words, his meaning, the clutching fingers loosened about mine and he lay back and closed his eyes as if he had gone to sleep. Ian came into the room with Lien upon his heels, but they were already too late. Dr. Price bent over the old man, then straightened to look at Brock.
“The captain has made his last landfall,” he said.
I glanced at Ian and saw his eyes upon Brock’s jade ring on my wedding finger, saw the sardonic smile touch his lips. I knew what he was thinking—that I had been bought by the captain after all. Everyone would now think that was why I had agreed to this mad plan.
For the moment, however, no one paid any attention to me. Lien was wailing aloud, a strange foreign keening that had no place in this New England room, and seemed more a rite than an expression of grief. Brock gathered the old man up in his arms, a frail burden, and carried him into the adjoining bedroom.
Again I saw the difficulty with which Brock moved his right leg, as though the trouble might reach all the way to his hip. Yet
there was no lack of physical strength in the man and he carried the captain in his arms with ease.
Joseph was sent off again, this time to fetch the doctor. No one needed me. I had served my single purpose—futile now, since Brock would not receive his inheritance after all. In me there mingled pity for the captain, stunned recognition of my own position as well as fear of what was to come—all stirred into a turmoil of confusion. I could not bear to remain in the captain’s rooms, and I slipped away to the newer house. If any noted my leaving, I was not called back or pursued.
Once more I shot home the bolt of my door with a ringing of metal. I lighted a candle and faced the cold, strange room. It seemed new to me now, like a place I had never seen before. But it was I who was changed, I who had become even more a stranger to the room. The ring burned my finger, loose as it was. I took it off and laid it on the dresser where Laurel’s pebbles had rested so innocently earlier in the day. There was no innocence about the jade ring. It was an indication of barter, of purchase, of contract made and sealed.
Lien had left Laurel’s door open when she came to bring me to the captain and it remained ajar. I went to draw the key from the other side where the child must have placed it, and stood for a moment looking about a room that was smaller than my own. Candlelight from my own doorway reached through and faintly illumined the child lying asleep on her pillow. There were streakings of tears that had dried upon her cheeks and when I bent closer I saw that her pillow was damp. She turned restlessly under the light, but did not waken, and I stood looking at her, thinking in disbelief that I was now the stepmother of this pitiful and unfriendly little girl. But though the word repeated itself in my mind, I could not accept or believe in my new identity. I moved as if in a dream from which I must surely waken.
When I returned to my room, I closed the door between, though I did not, after all, lock it. My head had begun to throb and my body ached with renewed weariness as I got into bed again. Yet I could not at once fall asleep. I lay tensely awake, listening to the house. At times the sound of distant voices came to me. There were occasional hurrying steps on the stairs, or in the hallway outside my door. Yet no one came to summon me on this incredible wedding night.
Now and again in past daydreaming I had thought of what such a night would be like, warming myself with undefined visions of tenderness and love. Never had I expected to lie cold and alone on my wedding night, as forgotten—once I had done the captain’s bidding—as though I did not exist.
Not that I wanted anything else after that hasty, unreal ceremony. All I asked under such circumstances was to be forgotten. Yet the captain’s passing left a lonely void. In spite of what he had asked, he had championed me. Now I was wholly alone and without a defender.
The events of the night began to run ceaselessly through my mind and I could not stop the wheel from turning, or blank out the pictures. In every detail I lived again what had happened. I recalled the very feeling of Brock’s hand upon my own when he had forced me to his will. How much he must have coveted the captain’s legacy that he would accept a bargain he so plainly abhorred. As details multiplied I even found myself wondering for the first time about the wife who had died five years ago. “Rose,” the captain had called her, and he had dismissed her as too gentle and “namby-pamby.” Yet Brock must have loved her deeply. Did his bleak, harsh qualities stem from despair suffered after her death? If so, how bitterly he must resent this unwished-for marriage that had been forced upon him by Captain Obadiah.
Not even the thought that I might have had a friend in Ian Pryott could comfort me now. He, at least, might have helped me to escape, but now it was too late. I did not want to remember the way he had looked at me in the captain’s room when he saw that the marriage words had been spoken and that I had accepted this bondage.
Tossing in my bed, trying to find some respite for my throbbing temples, I gave myself to thinking of the captain. At least I had tendered something there. I had eased his dying. The Captain Obadiah of my meeting tonight was not at all the hero I had pictured, yet I had begun to realize that the essence of the man he had once been still burned within his frail being. He was still capable of command, of ruthless action, yet of affection and tenderness too. Once he had loved my mother deeply. Perhaps she had fled from his approach as I had fled from Brock McLean’s. Fled? I questioned my own thoughts, startling myself. I had not fled at all, really. “I am Mrs. Brock McLean,” I repeated to myself, but the words meant nothing.
If the captain had lived, I might have learned to be fond of him, as he seemed so quickly ready to be fond of me. In the end he had tried to tell me something, to warn me of some danger ahead. But his voice had wavered and the words had faltered too soon. What had he meant by that hurried reference to a whale stamp? To follow a whale stamp? What had he meant about half a story? The words were meaningless gibberish, a part of the nightmare.
It was a long while before I fell asleep. Then, although my dreams were disturbed and sometimes frightening, I could not remember them in the morning when I wakened. I opened my eyes only to a sense of apprehension. Beyond my curtains the sun was high and I knew the hour must be late. For a moment I lay dazed and drugged with heavy sleep. It was the thought of my marriage to Brock McLean that wakened me fully. I rolled out of bed and ran barefoot to the dresser. The cool green of jade in a gold ring told me that this particular thing had not been a dream.
All the frightening implications of my situation swept back to envelop me. Last night I had been too stunned and weary to believe, or even to fear. Now I began to face my desperate situation, to turn and twist in its confines, seeking some answer, some escape. The fact of my marriage to Brock McLean could not be set lightly aside, yet somewhere there must be an avenue of escape. I knew he could not want me for his wife any more than I wanted him for husband. Ian Pryott, I thought—I must find Ian. When I explained, he would understand how my hand had been forced, how helpless I had been with all of them against me in that room last night. Somehow, somehow, he would know a way out.
I had sensed in Ian a quiet purpose that I had found in no one else in this house. Perhaps because he had long had to struggle with adversity, he was the stronger for it and would not easily be brought to despair. At the moment, I was overwhelmed by the events that had overtaken me. Yet at the same time there was an unyielding core of stubbornness in me that would not give up, a budding of strength that was new to my experience, since it had never been needed before.
I dressed hurriedly and went into the upper hall. All the doors were closed to shut what warmth there was into the rooms. No one was in sight. As I moved toward the stairs an oriental scent drifted up to me from the floor below. Somewhere down there incense was burning, and at once I knew why.
There was a sudden rush of sound behind me and a woman gowned in bustled black went past me down the stairs with a great rustling of skirts. It was Sybil McLean and she gave me not so much as a glance, let alone a greeting, but simply passed me by as though I did not exist. I followed the scent of incense and arrived just behind Mrs. McLean at the open door of the front parlor.
Within I glimpsed a coffin and Lien kneeling beside it. She was already dressed in what I knew was the white coat of a widow, as though she must have had such apparel long prepared. At each end of the coffin had been set a brass container of sand in which sticks of incense were burning.
I was close enough to see what happened. Mrs. McLean stalked into the room and snatched up three incense sticks, to break them off and bury the smoking heads in sand.
“I will not have such heathenish practices indulged beneath this roof!” she cried. “You have no business in this part of the house at all!”
For an instant something flared in Lien’s eyes as though she might give vent to indignation toward the other woman. But if she was so moved, she controlled the impulse and rose calmly, gracefully from her knees to face the American woman, who was so much larger and taller than herself.
“I am the c
aptain’s wife,” she said with dignity. “What is proper will be done.”
I heard Mrs. McLean gasp and I could sense the very pulsing of her rage. For a moment I thought she might strike out at the slight figure in white coat and trousers. Instead, she managed to regain her self-control and wheeled to stalk past me from the room—again as though I were invisible.
Lien saw me and bowed courteously. “Good morning, Mrs. McLean. I hope you have had good dreams.”
I barely returned her greeting, for there was a reproach with which I must confront her. “You told me my promise to the captain would not matter. But it did matter. So what am I to do now?”
She observed me with mild interest. “I wished to see him at peace before he died. You are of marriageable age and more. It is better for a woman to have a husband. You will be well cared for now, as the captain wished. He had great concern for—” she hesitated, perhaps in faint mockery, “—the daughter of his old friend, Captain Heath.”
I saw that it would be useless to offer further reproach. Her concern now appeared to be for the earthly remains of Captain Obadiah. I stepped closer to the coffin and looked down upon his face. The lines of struggle had been wiped away and he looked younger than when I had seen him last night. This morning I gazed upon him without feeling of any kind. I bore him no love, yet I could not hate him either, this man who had so trapped me and changed my life.
Lien murmured sadly in her careful, though strangely accented speech. “All is wrong within this house. When the hungry spirits of the flesh depart from the body there is danger to the living. It is necessary for a priest to perform the proper rites so that such spirits do no harm to those who remain. This has not been done. Now the evil spirits of the body have invaded all this house. Because of uncivilized and unenlightened ways, misfortune lies ahead.”
“We believe differently,” I protested, but she appeared not to hear me. She lighted the broken sticks of incense from those already burning and replaced them upright in the sand.
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