"I'll think of you all the time. That's what I'd do anyway."
Never having officially left the colony, Maisie had not officially returned. Smuggled out, she had been smuggled back in. The same legal restraints remained upon her. These were complicated, having to do with a multitude of unpaid debts, and Adam did not essay to understand them; but he did know that money would cause them to evaporate, and he hoped to have money soon. He had borrowed enough to buy a full cargo for Goodwill, getting this at twelve per cent on the security of Maisie's expected inheritance—for it was known that she was one of her cousin's heirs—from Maisie's lawyer, Mr. Cartwright, "the jew who isn't a Jew," as he liked to call himself. Mr. Cartwright, too, was to handle the Quatre Moulins matter, though nothing could be done there until either a true unquestioned governor was commissioned and confirmed and sworn in, or Admiral Benbow came back. In addition, Maisie had recently had still another paper served on her, this one forbidding her to leave the colony until such time as she had appeared before a yet-to-be-appointed court of inquiry into the death of the late Horace Treadway. That inquiry would be an intense one. The massacre on the other side of the island had shaken the colony, and while three or four parties were still out, with bloodhounds, beating for the fugitives, traders and officials alike realized that in spite of the war and the confused condition of the local government, something had to be done about the present slave system—a general study and overhaul was in order. Though it might be embarrassing to explain why she was not at the Treadway plantation when the blow fell, Maisie did not greatly fear this court of inquiry; and she reasoned that if she avoided it she might hold up still longer the settlement of the estate and conceivably even jeopardize her own share. This was why they had rented the house out on the road to Constant Spring.
Yet Adam Long couldn't Hve there with her indefinitely. He had business in Newport, business in England, too.
"And when Benbow comes back, you play every trick you know to persuade him to clear that prize. Don't forget one single wile."
"I'll enthrall him, my chick. I'll seduce him."
"Well, no need to go's far's that. If he's taken du Casse I reckon he'd clear the whole thing for a smile. If not, maybe not."
"Will he take du Casse?"
She often asked him questions like this, as though he owned the ocean.
"Well now, that's something only God and Admiral Benbow know— and maybe only God. Be a great thing if he did. Come close to ending the war right then and there."
"Why?"
"Du Casse is convoying this year's Spanish treasure to Europe. They do say he's got six million eight-pieces in that fleet. Even Spain couldn't take a loss like that—and stay in the war. And if Spain drops away, France will, too."
"Won't du Casse fight?"
"Oh, he'll wriggle and run, but if he's trapped he'll fight, yes. If Benbow attacks him. And from what I hear tell of Benbow, he will."
"He seemed like such a quiet little man."
"From what I hear tell of him, he'll attack all right."
Her forehead rested on his chest as she leaned toward him, and she poked tentatively, teasingly, with a finger.
"Let's not talk about Admiral Benbow. Or, in fact, about anything."
"Darling!"
It could have been the moonlight, or the fragrance of the jasmine, or conceivably even the tilt of the garden away from the house, the zig-zagginess of the path, but anyway Adam Long felt plain outright drunk as he made for the gate half an hour later. Positively he staggered—though he'd had no more than two or three noggins of rum since supper.
He turned in the gateway.
Maisie still stood on the veranda, the light of a hurricane lamp silhouetting her. It made him want to run back up there. He could not see her face. She lifted her right hand a little when she saw him turn, but she dropped it quickly, as though afraid otherwise to move, afraid of tears.
"I'll be back," Adam muttered as he went out, "sooner'n you expect."
PART SIX. Home Is the Sailor
It was raining, a chill irascible rain that seemed to hurl itself diagonally at you no matter which way you faced, when they raised Montauk, and, immediately afterward—for though it's further to larboard it's higher—Block Island. These looked cold.
The place Captain Long called Home and had always thought of as Home, a land he'd never seen, was England. All the same, he decided not to stay on deck while they raised Judy. His eyes did not water easily, no matter what the wind, and the hands, seeing him the way he was, might think that there was something the matter with him. He turned over to Resolved Forbes.
"The east passage, sir?"
"Aye. And don't have me up till we're in."
His tiredness—he'd been on watch a good part of the night, an ear constantly cocked for breakers—did not bring him sleep. Yet he didn't toss, only lay there and stared with a flat dry-eyeballed disbelief at the deck planks above, or sometimes rolled his eyes to take in the rest of the cabin, while his muscles without prompting accommodated themselves to the movement of the schooner. There was no port, so he couldn't look out. He didn't need to anyway. He knew every foot of the way. As for the cabin, on this return passage he had for the first time been struck by its smallness. Resolved Forbes, that neat man, was as admirable a cabin mate as he was an officer: he had few possessions, and what he did have, like the coverings of his bunk, always were shaken out, folded, snugged away. This was as it should be, at sea. Dresses and laces and scarves and stockings scattered everywhere, so high sometimes, and so thick, that you had a hard time finding the ladder—that was not the way it should be. All the same, Adam was lonesome.
Resolved Forbes was a crackerjack mate; but he didn't do much to help pass the time away.
Was Maisie a witch? He doubted it. A witch, he reasoned, being surcharged with evil would show this overload exactly when her mind was least upon it. Actually employed in weaving a spell or concocting some philtre, he supposed, a witch might well dissimulate, holding back all outward sign of malice, the ability to do this being one of the gifts the Old One had granted her; but it might show when she least expected it —when she was thinking about something else or was asleep. The girl Maisie standing at the taffrail gazing upon the emptiness of the sea, or asleep over there in that bunk which now held only Forbes' tucked-in blankets and his Book—that person was all innocence, he knew.
If he'd become entoiled, he told himself, it was willingly; and he was not sorry.
Adam indeed would have been utterly sure of his position if the accuser had been anybody else but Seth Selden; for though in most matters he had little respect and no fondness for the uncle of Deborah Selden, he did esteem Seth expert in all that appertains to the Devil. Coarse, jocose, Seth nevertheless had much about him that was feline, suggesting less a witch than a witch's familiar. His eyes gleamed with an agate iridescence sometimes, and probably would shine like that in the dark as well. His nose twitched.
Adam sat up, bumping his head. Was it possible that Seth was a witchi' He might have caused his niece to act as she had simply in order to get Adam into trouble, to clinch the captaincy for himself. For after all, Deborah, to give her her due, didn't seem like that kind of female. Seth, if he was possessed, naturally would do battle to Maisie Treadway, too; he would be obliged by the nature of his contract to try to discredit any person who brought out so much goodness in others. And when he'd been foiled, and had fallen back cursing, hadn't Seth Selden seized the first chance he got to desert?
But—no. Adam lay back, good sense reasserting itself. In the first place, it was known that the Devil seldom struck hands or exchanged the sealing kiss with men, for obvious reasons preferring to work through the weaker sex. In the second place, if any such forces had been seething in Seth the fact would long ago have been discovered by certain of his fellow townsmen. For there were men in Newport who knew a great deal about the Devil, a personage who there, too, because of the multiplicity of faiths, could scarcely be expected to escape detection, being viewed, as it were, from every angle; for whereas in a one-church community, or one with only two or three organized beliefs, Satan, notoriously cunning, might so accommodate himself outwardly to local opinion as to conceal his true purpose and power, in Adam Long's town somebody was sure to sniff the brimstone, to expose the hoof. (This was in a manner of mental speaking, for Adam did not believe that the Prince of Darkness any longer had a cloven hoof, but would certainly by this time have used some magical means to change this, as he would also in some manner counteract the distinctive odor associated with him.) No, the Devil would never rampage around Newport as only a few years ago, for instance, he had done in Salem, a town up in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Newport was safe.