_ PART SEVEN. IN WHICH THE RIVER LEAPS A SUDDEN CLIFF AND BECOMES A CATARACT
CHAPTER XXV. THE ISLAND TOMB
But to go back to Miss Jencks and Caliban. It was Harriet Buxton who had suggested that the boy was not so deaf as we had thought, only stupid, and that his dumbness might yield to the methods then being so successfully used with that afflicted child who has since triumphed so brilliantly over more than human obstacles. Although, as Harriet pointed out, I have always felt that too much credit was given in that case to the pupil and too little to the teacher. The distance between English words of one syllable and Greek tragedy is only a matter of time: the distance between blank chaos and those one-syllabled words might well have seemed eternal!
Not that Miss Jencks had quite such a task ahead of her. Caliban had been trained into habits of relentless cleanliness, and an almost mechanical regularity of routine work. It was his clumsy hands that had arranged the flaming nasturtiums in the silver bowl under the Henner etching, his rude pantomime that purchased the bi-weekly bone for the mysteriously named Rosy, his weather wisdom that was sought when it was a question of an extended sailing party. In fact, I am inclined to think, in view of his subsequent progress, that some of his ignorance was feigned, as is often the case in these instances of arrested mental development. However that may have been, on the occasion of this visit I found him marvellously improved, his hair cut, his nondescript garments evolved into a modest sort of livery, his vocabulary no longer a series of grunts, his very pantomime more elastic. Margarita never changed her old methods of communication with him, but the rest of us, at Miss Jencks's earnest entreaty, fatigued ourselves amiably in order to elicit the guttural "yes" and "no" and "do not know" she had so laboriously taught him.
Best of all, his disposition had altered to a very considerable extent, and this improvement on his old surliness was of the greatest assistance to us on the occasion I must now narrate.
It was I--strangely fated to discover so many of the links in this wonderfully twined chain of Margarita's life--who stumbled by the merest chance on the last one really needed to complete the story. Zealous for the perfection of our Island, I selected a deep gully, filled with heavy boughs and loose unsightly rocks, as the next point for improvement, and bespoke the services of Caliban for the purpose. Greatly to my surprise, for he was attached to me, and always showed pleasure at rowing me over for my visits, he refused point blank to help me and even tried, in a series of clumsy ruses, to start me at work elsewhere. Vexed, but quite unsuspicious, I set to work by myself at pulling off the upper boughs, trusting to shame him into helping me with the stones, which seemed to have been tossed there in a sort of midden. When he found that I was persistent in my plan, he sat down at the edge of the gully, buried his face in his clumsy hands and wept silently, shuddering at every bough I lifted. Greatly interested now, I called Roger, and we worked together, assisted by the good-natured Italian retained now as gardener and assistant boatman (his name was Rafaello, and he was a not-too-unhappy bachelor, for, as he said, a girl who would run off with a man's rival a week before the wedding would have made but a doubtful wife for the most patient of husbands!)
As we neared the bottom of the gully Caliban grew more and more excited: now he would peer in fearfully, now run off a few yards, but he could never get very far away, for great as was his terror and sorrow, curiosity was stronger and he must be near, it seemed, at all costs.
Suddenly, as the last rotting bough was lifted from one end of the gully, my eye was caught by a series of stones wonderfully matched in size, eight or ten of them arranged in a sort of rough cross, and when with a quick thrill of apprehension I pushed aside the withered pine tree that covered the rest of the stones, the foot of the cross elongated, and the symbol of Calvary was seen to extend over a slightly raised oblong mound of earth. There was no mistaking that shape nor those dimensions; whoever has heard the rattle of that last remorseless handful and struggled with that almost nauseating rebellion at the sight of the raw clods, so unsightly in the smooth, peaceful green, knows that mound for what it is, and we knew this. Silently we cleared away the rest, and then the grave I had discerned fell into its true and illuminating relation to two other and evidently older crosses--at the feet of both and at right angles to them. In her death as in her life that gaunt, austere Hester was faithful, and like the stone hound at the ancient knight's bier she guarded her master's last sleep.
We took off our caps reverently; we needed no monument, no epitaph to name for us those exiled, unblessed graves. Prynne had made the first cross, we knew, twenty-seven years ago; Hester had made the second a few days before Roger visited the island. And the third? Ah, faithful Caliban, what hours of terrible tuition made thy task clear to thee? I shudder at the picture of that indefatigable New England woman illustrating in terrible pantomime the duties that would devolve upon her loutish servant at her death. But the lesson had been learned, the third coffin taken from the boat-house, the body laid within it at the graveside, carried swiftly from the house wrapped in a sheet, the lid nailed down, the earth filled in.
Gaspingly he verified my quiet questions and surmises--I have enough New England blood to know what ghastly forethought we are capable of!--and slowly he calmed himself, seeing that we were neither frightened nor angry ...
One end of the island repeats on a tiny scale the formation of the original peninsula. Three quaint red cedars stand pointed and forever green, more like the cypresses of Italy than anything in America; around its rocky beach the waves beat incessantly, but its grass is fresh and green, for there is a little spring there. Under the cypresses lie three flat graves, two side by side, one across their feet, and over each lies a flat carved table of marble--rich carvings that once stretched under three heavy mullioned windows over the back doors of an old Italian palace. There are only initials on these tables, initials and the numerals of years, but they are not utterly unblest. Good Parson Elder read the most beautiful burial service in the world over them, broken by the tears of a trusty servant; the children and the children's children of the crumbling bodies under two of those tables stood over them hand in hand; and Nature, who bears no grudge nor ever excommunicates the fruitful, brings to the sunlight every year the yellow daffodils and white narcissus, the wild rose and beach bayberry, the marigold and asters that love has planted there.
It may be that further clues, more detailed accounts of that secret island life, were hidden in those coffins; we never tried if it was so. Unknown and lonely they lived, unknown and lonely they had wished to lie in death, and so we left them, safe even from ourselves, who loved them for the wonderful child they had given us. And I like to think that God is no less forgiving than the Nature through which he tries to lead us to him. _