all day seth upham had scarcely said a word. from dawn until dark he had paced the hut, apparently buried deep in thought. only his gaunt, pitiful face revealed the extent to which he shared our tortures.
now for the first time in all that day, to our surprise, he spoke; and his first words confirmed every fear we had felt for him.
"the boys ought not to make so much noise," he said. "i must speak to the constable about it."
matterson softly swore and shifted the bandage on his face. gleazen significantly looked over at me. abe guptil stood with his mouth open and stared at seth upham.
never boys of a new england town made such an uproar as was going on outside. those wails and yells and hideous drummings and trumpetings were african in every weird cadence and boisterous hoot and clang.
then, as if the first words had broken a way through his silence, seth upham began to talk in a low, hurried voice; and however reluctant we had hitherto been to believe that he was mad, there was no longer any hope for him at all. the man had lost his mind completely under the terrific strain that he had endured.
small wonder when you think of all that had happened: of how, for cornelius gleazen's mad project, he had thrown away a place of honor and assured comfort back in topham;
of how he had been driven deeper and still deeper
into gleazen's nefarious schemes by blackmail for we knew not what crimes that he had committed in his[pg 262] young-manhood; of how, even in that alliance of thieves, he had fallen from a place of authority to such a place that he got not even civil treatment; of how he had lost reputation, livelihood, money, and now even his vessel.
"i declare, we must put in another constable," he muttered. "johnson can't even keep the boys in order—in order, did you say? who else should keep the place in order?—o sim, if only you had wits to match your good intentions! how can you expect to keep books if you can't keep the stock in order?—" he stopped suddenly and faced the door. "hark! who called? i declare, i thought i was a lad again."
moment by moment, as he paced the hut, we watched his expression change with the mood of his delirium,—sometimes i have wondered if the fever of the tropics did not precipitate his strange frenzy,—and moment by moment his emotions seemed to become more intense.
now, pursuing that latest fancy, he talked about his boyhood and told how deeply he repented of the wicked life he had led as a young man; told us, all unwittingly, of unsuspected ambitions that had led him from wild ways into sober ones, and of his youthful determination to win a creditable place in the community; told us of the hard honest work that he had given to accomplish it. now he revealed the pride he had taken in all that he had succeeded in doing and building, and—which touched me more than i can tell you—how he had counted on me, his only kinsman, to take his place and carry on his work. all this, you understand, not as if he were talking to us or to anyone else, but as if he were thinking out loud,—as indeed he was,—merely running over in his own mind the story of his life.
now he reverted again to his repentance for the wicked youth that he had lived. and now, suddenly, his manner[pg 263] of speaking changed, and from merely thinking aloud he burst out into wild accusation.
"the dice are loaded," he cried,—his voice was hoarse and strained with the agonies that he, like all of us, had endured and was still enduring,—"the dice are loaded. i'll not play with loaded dice, neil gleazen!"
at that gleazen gasped out a queer whisper.
but already seth upham's mind was racing away on another tack.
"aye, loaded with the blessed weight of salvation. didn't my old mother, god bless her, teach me at her knee that a man's soul can never die? our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name—"
staring at him in horror, we saw that he was not blasphemous. the words came reverently from his weak lips. he simply was mad.
suddenly in a high-pitched voice, he began to sing,
"low at thy gracious feet i bend,
my god, my everlasting friend."
he sang three stanzas of the hymn in a way that appalled every one of those three men who of us all, i think, were least easily appalled—indeed, i think that for once they were more appalled than the rest of us; certainly none of them had arnold's composure or abe's obvious, almost overpowering sympathy for poor seth upham. then he stopped and faced about with eyes strangely aflame. in his manner now there was all his old imperiousness and something more, an almost noble dignity, a commanding enthusiasm, which, whether it came from madness alone or whether it had always been in him, got respect even from matterson and o'hara.
"i am going to meet my god face to face at the throne of judgment," he cried.
[pg 264]
it was the first time in days that he had addressed us directly, and he spoke with a fierce intensity that amazed us; then, before we guessed what was in his disordered mind, before a man of us could stop him, he stepped outside the door and flung his arms straight out like a cross, and with his head thrown back marched, singing, into the darkness.
"by heaven!" gleazen gasped, "he has set sail now for the port of kingdom come!"
we who remained in the hut, where a spell of silence had fallen, could hear him strongly and clearly singing as he strode down the long, dark vista toward the spring:—
"lo what a glorious sight appears
to our believing eyes!
the earth and seas are past away,
and the old rolling skies!"
it may seem strange to one who reads of that fearful night that we did not rush after him and drag him back. but at the time we were taken completely by surprise, literally stupefied by the extraordinary climax of our days and nights of suffering and anxiety; and even then, i think,—certainly i have later come to believe it,—we felt in our inmost hearts that it was kinder to let him go.
he went down the hill, singing like an innocent child. his voice, which but a moment before had been pathetically weak, had now become all at once as clear as silver. and still the words came back from the tall grass by the spring, where creatures ten thousand times worse than any crawling son of the serpent of eden lay in wait for him:—
"attending angels shout for joy,
and the bright armies sing,
mortals, behold the sacred feet;
of your descending king."
[pg 265]
then the song quavered and died away, and there came back to us a queer choking cry; then the silence of the jungle, enigmatic, ominous, unfathomable, enfolded us all, and we sat for a long time with never a word between us.
the wailing and drumming over the body of the dead wizard had suddenly and completely ceased. at what was coming next, not a man of us ventured to guess.
gleazen was first to break that ghastly silence. "they got him," he whispered. for once the man was awed.
"no," said arnold lamont, very quietly, "they have not got him. unless i am mistaken, his madness purged his soul of its black stains, and he went straight to the god whose name was on his lips when he died."
of that we never spoke again. some thought one thing; some, another. we had no heart to argue it.
poor uncle seth! what he had done in his youth that brought him at last to that bitterly tragic end, perhaps no other besides cornelius gleazen really knew, and cornelius gleazen, be it said to his everlasting credit, never told. but for all that, i was to learn a certain story long afterward and far away. not one man in hundreds of thousands pays such a penalty for blasphemous sins of his mature years; and whatever seth upham had done, however dark the memory, it had been a boy's fault, which he had so well lived down that, when cornelius gleazen came back to topham, no one in the whole world, except those two, would have believed it of him.
in that grim, threatening silence, which enfolded us like a thick, new blanket, we forgot our own quarrel; we almost forgot the very cause for which we had risked, and now bade fair to lose, our lives.
we were six men, two of us wounded, three of us arrant desperadoes, but all of us at least white of skin, surrounded by a black horde that was able, if ever it knew its own[pg 266] power, to wipe us at one blow clean off the face of the earth. now that the terrible thing which had just happened had broken down and done away with every thought of those trivial enmities that fed on such unworthy motives as desire for riches, our common danger bound us, in spite of every antagonism, closer together than brothers. by some strange power that cry which had come back to us when seth upham's song ended not only enforced a truce between our two parties, but so brought out the naked sincerity of each one of us, that we knew, each and all, without a spoken word, that for the time being we could trust one another.
gleazen, always reckless, was the first to break the silence. from the wall he took down a pewter mug, which the dead man they called bull had hung there. pretending to pour into it wine from an imaginary bottle, he looked across it at arnold.
"this is not the vintage i should choose for my toast," he said with a wry mouth, "but it must serve. yes, lamont, it must serve." he raised the mug high. "in half an hour we'll be six dead men. i drink—to the next one to go."
arnold coolly smiled. pretending to raise a glass and clink it against the mug, he, too, went through the pantomime of drinking.
i was not surprised that abe guptil was staring at them, his lips parted, or that his face was pale. although drunk only in make-believe, it was a toast to make a man think twice. i drew a deep breath; i could only admire the coolness of the two.
yet now and then there flashed in arnold's eye a hint of resourceful determination such as gleazen probably never dreamed of, a hint of scorn for such theatrical trickery.
we were all on our feet now, standing together in our[pg 267] silent truce, when we heard for the last time that sound, so unhappily familiar, the long-drawn wailing cry that, whenever the wizard spoke, had preceded and followed his harangue. coming from the dark forest beyond the clearing, it brought home to us more vividly than ever the ominous silence that had ensued since seth upham fell by the spring. then that familiar, accursed voice, faint but penetrating, came from the wall of vines:—
"white man, him go dead land!
"white man, him go dead land!
"white man, him go dead land!"
