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When the sun was sinking, the shaft through the window bathed his head and his lean neck with a quality almost barbaric, and for a moment in the gloom made by the bright pencil, the new, raw things of Urkey faded out, leaving him alone in his ancient and ordered civilization, a little wistful, I think, and perhaps a little frightened, as a child waking from a long, dreaming sleep, to find his mother gone.
Mate Snow screamed, and his curse was like the end of the world in Urkey island. "Curse you! The man's a thief, I tell you. He's stolen my property! I demand my property those collars there in his hand now. You're constable, you say. Well, I want my " He let himself down on the bench, as if the strength had left his knees. "He's going to tell you lies," he cried.
There came a third inscription in time, but of that he would not tell me, nor of Mate Snow's, nor the minister's. It was a queer library he had, those fine-written collars of Urkey village. He had been growing feebler so long and so gradually that I had made nothing of it. Once, I remember, it struck me queer that he wasn't working so hard as he had used to.
I began to prowl around the yard, feeling adventurous enough, you may believe, for no boy had ever scouted that bit of Urkey land before. And I did find a light, beneath a drawn shade in the rear. Approaching as stealthily as a red Indian, I put one large, round eye to the aperture. If I had expected a melodramatic tableau, I was disappointed.
And I had come almost to the turning into Drugstore Lane when the sound of a voice fetched me up, all eyes and ears, against the pickets of the Matheson place. It was the voice of my cousin Duncan, the only father I ever knew. He was constable of Urkey Village, and there was something in the voice as I heard it in the yard that told you why. "Drop it, Joshua! Drop it, or by heavens !"
Perhaps it was told me. There can be no question, though, that I remember the night when Minister Malden came home from the Infield Conference, a father of two days' standing. Urkey village made a festival of that homecoming to the tiny daughter he had never seen, and to Sympathy Gibbs, weak and waiting and radiant. Yes, I remember. We were all at the landing, making a racket.
Copyright, 1921, by Fleta Campbell Springer. #By# WILBUR DANIEL STEELE From The Pictorial Review Among all the memories of my boyhood in Urkey Island the story of Mary Matheson and the Blake boys comes back to me now, more than any other, with the sense of a thing seen in a glass darkly. And the darkness of the glass was my own adolescence. I know that now, and I'm sorry.
I can't say what huge, disordered purposes tumbled through my brain as I stood there trying to cough or stir or by some such infinitesimal violence let her know that I, Peter Means, was there that I understood that I was stronger than all the men in Urkey Island that over my dead body alone should any evil come to her now, forever and ever and ever.
I'm glad there is no possibility of meeting her again as she was at thirty, and so making sure: I shall wish to remember her as the boy of sixteen saw her that night waiting in the dunes above the wreck of the "India ship," with Rolldown Nickerson bleating as he fled from the small, queer casket of polished wood he had flung on the sand, and the bridegroom peering out of the church window, over the moors in Urkey Village.
He said it as plain: 'If that's love, he said, 'then I'm going off somewhere and forget it, and never come back to Urkey any more." The deadness went out of her voice, and it lifted to another note. "Joshua, he's got to come back, for I can't bear it. I gave you my word, and I'll marry you when Andrew comes back to stand at the wedding. He's got to got to!"
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