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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.
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.
There was nothing humble, however, in Nettie; the crisp French coloring positively crackled with an electric energy; her mouth was set in a rebellious red blot. Studying her, Edward Dunsack saw that she was prettier than he had first realized on his return to Salem. He speculated over the story she had told him yesterday about Gerrit Ammidon's attachment.
He was confident that, thrown together on the still rim of the water, at evening, the emotion born between his niece and the shipmaster and prematurely choked would revive. He had no means of knowing Ammidon's present exact feeling for Nettie; he was counting only on a general theory of men and nature at large.
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.
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.
His thoughts swung to the surprising fact of Ammidon's Chinese wife: if, as he had first suspected, she were a common woman of the port who had made a fool of the dull sailor he perceived the making of a very entertaining comedy. There would be the keenest irony in exposing her to himself before the complacent ignorance of her husband.
The memory of Gerrit Ammidon's crisp blue gaze, his vigorous gestures and speech, became an intolerable affront, representing the far lost point of his own departure. His contrary feelings met and grappled in his mind; but in the end the past, Salem, was always defeated, weaker, more faintly perceived. In a great many essentials, he told himself, he had become Chinese in sympathy and fiber.
"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.
There was no reason why he shouldn't call on Jeremy Ammidon's family. The latter had signified by his visit the desire to end the misunderstanding between them. He was as well born as Gerrit Ammidon; only ill chance had made them seem differently situated. Anyhow, unlike Canton, mere exterior position had comparatively little weight in Salem.
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