The Blue Man | Page 3

during your American Civil War. A passing boat put
in to leave a young girl who had cholera. I saw her hair floating out of
the litter."
"Oh!" I exclaimed; "that is an island story." The blue man was actually
presenting credentials when he spoke of the cholera story. "She was
taken care of on the island until she recovered; and she was the
beautiful daughter of a wealthy Southern family trying to get home
from her convent in France, but unable to run the blockade. The nun
who brought her died on shipboard before she landed at Montreal, and
she hoped to get through the lines by venturing down the lakes. Yes,
indeed! Madame Clementine has told me that story."
He listened, turning his head attentively and keeping his eyes half
closed, and again worked his lips.
"Yes, yes. You know where she was taken care of?"
"It was at Madame Clementine's."
"I myself took her there." "And have you been there ever since?" He
passed over the trivial question, and when his voice arrived it gushed
without a stammer.
"I had a month of happiness. I have had thirty-five years of waiting.
When this island binds you to any one you remain bound. Since that
month with her I can do nothing but wait until she comes. I lost her, I
don't know how. We were in this cove together. She sat on this rock
and waited while I went up-the cliff to gather ferns for her. When I
returned she was gone. I searched the island for her. It kept on smiling

as if there never had been such a person! Something happened which I
do not understand, for she did not want to leave me. She disappeared as
if the earth had swallowed her!" I felt a rill of cold down my back like
the jetting of the spring that spouted from its ferny tunnel farther
eastward. Had he been thirty-five years on the island without ever
hearing the Old Mission story about bones found in the cliff above us?
Those who reached them by venturing down a pit as deep as a well,
uncovered by winter storms, declared they were the remains of a
woman's skeleton. I never saw the people who found them. It was an
oft-repeated Mission story which had come down to me. An Indian girl
was missed from the Mission school and never traced. It was believed
she met her fate in this rock crevasse. The bones were blue, tinged by a
clay in which they had lain. I tried to remember what became of the
Southern girl who was put ashore, her hair flying from a litter. Distinct
as her tradition remained, it ended abruptly. Even Madame Clementine
forgot when and how she left the island after she ceased to be an object
of solicitude, for many comers and goers trample the memory as well
as the island.
Had his love followed him up the green tangled height and sunk so
swiftly to her death that it was accomplished without noise or outcry?
To this hour only a few inhabitants locate the treacherous spot. He
could not hide, even at Madame Clementine's, from all the talk of a
community. This unreasonable tryst of thirty-five years raised for the
first time doubts of his sanity. A woman might have kept such a tryst;
but a man consoles himself.
Passers had been less frequent than usual, but again there was a crunch
of approaching feet. Again he leaned forward, and the sparks in his
eyes enlarged, and faded, as two fat women wobbled over the unsteady
stones, exclaiming and balancing themselves, oblivious to the blue man
and me.
"It is four o'clock," said one, pausing to look at her watch. "This air
gives one such an appetite I shall never be able to wait for dinner."
"When the girls come in from golf at five we will have some tea," said
the other.

Retarding beach gadders passed us. Some of them noticed me with a
start, but the blue man, wrapped in rigid privacy, with his head sunk on
his breast, still evaded curious eyes.
I began to see that his clothes were by no means new, though they
suited the wearer with a kind of masculine elegance. The blue man's
head had so entirely dominated my attention that the cut of his coat and
his pointed collar and neckerchief seemed to appear for the first time.
He turned his face to me once more, but before our brief talk could be
resumed another woman came around the jut of cliff, so light-footed
that she did not make as much noise on the stones as the fat women
could still be heard making while they floundered eastward, their backs
towards us. The blue man