Ben could remember how some such thought had stirred in his own mind there in the moonless shadow--not altogether moonless, since the white goddess had taken starlight to her face and was delicately shining, aloof, indifferent, as Ben leaned out and cut the rope and gave the spent body to the sea, and the sea accepted it with the careless whisper of an enfolding wave. He had gone back then to the quarterdeck, where the Captain had waked in a remission of the fever, and told him of it. "She's taken better men," said Captain Jenks, and shrugged and groaned. "All the same I never thought he had it in him." That was all Captain Jenks ever said of Matthew Ledyard. Ben in the undemanding hours of the days that followed could yet inquire: Where is the way where light dwelleth? And where does the self end and the universe begin? But it was plain--more than ever plain in this calm place where land and ocean met and the war between them was only the joyful-tragic music of breakers on firm sand--plain that he must ask those questions again and many times again: of Reuben, of Charity, of others not yet known, most often of himself, and would discover many answers, until the unimaginable time when all questions arrived at silence as they had for John Kenny. Answers bearing illumination seemed closer in this place than ever before--"My garden," said Charity when they first came here, and held up to him a pebble of many colors, flowerlike, worn smooth and round with the sea's many thousand years. "Storm never continues, I notice. The sky itself can't maintain it, nor can we. Always the calm afterward--here, Ben, or in the Spice Islands." "There are storms then in the Spice Islands?" "Of course, Ben...." "Did my father have--have aught to say of poor Ledyard?" "Oh, he.... Why, he prayed God deal kindly with him. And he said not a word against him when we'd entered the harbor and the men who came aboard were questioning us. True, he had little time for words, Charity, since death was on him while he spoke, and it took him, his head on my arm, before the men were ready to lower him into the boat that should have brought him ashore.... Yesterday when I went into Boston I sought out Ledyard's widow, and told her how he aided us, and then I--a white lie, I said he was washed overboard. Your father would have approved this deception, I'm sure of it. I wish he could have lived to see you again, Charity--still it's a marvel he could even live out the homeward voyage, he was that wasted and worn out with the sickness from his wound. But he did, and his word stood like a shield for me, so that when I gave mine own account they believed me. Charity, when he'd done speaking I asked him if I might not bring him something to drink. He laughed at me a little, saying he had not the craving. He said: 'Do you drink to me as well as pray for me if you're a-mind.' That was the last he spoke.... Are you dreaming, Charity?" "She's human too, you know."