Page:Comin' Thro' the Rye (1898).djvu/69

Rh rare and costly gewgaws, plentiful as the sand, with goodly store of gold and silver, rifled from the gallant ships laden with splendid store of merchandize brought from foreign lands. Oh! it must be a rich land, and might be a fair land, if that great and countless army of the dead did not claim it so urgently for its own.

We have not been in Periwinkle a week; we have not learned one-half his moods, one-half his secrets, when something happens—something that sends me shuddering away from him inland, and makes me hate the sound of his voice and the dazzle of his brow.

Jack and I are standing on the beach one morning, watching a haul of mackerel in. The men have been pulling for hours. "It is strangely heavy," they mutter: "the net will break;" but by-and-by it comes safely in, and we all gather round to where it lies on the edge of the sand, with the waves rippling gently up to it. At first I see nothing but a glittering, brilliant, opal-tinted mass of glistening fish, which sparkle and scintillate in the sun, as they leap to and fro in their restless, unknown agony; then I make out a strange, dark, shapeless mass beneath them, that is—what? A dead man, with horribly discoloured face, and wide, staring eyes, looking out with dull and awful meaning from among the quivering, leaping fish for which the net was cast, and which has brought in this. A woman thrust her way through the crowd and falls on her knees beside the net. "My lad!" she says, "my lad!" He went out alone in his boat a week ago, and did not return; but she said she knew that he would come back, and she has been watching for him night and day

"Come away," I say to Jack dizzily; and we go away, away inland, and it is many a long day before I love the treacherous sea again and can forget.

We do not see much of Alice and Milly, who prefer the town and the shingle to the rocks and the caves; and it sometimes strikes