Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/57

1866.] and loud foreboding surf might have some meaning of which he knew nothing.

"Nature's voices, eh?" coming to her side.

Some expression that had held her face suddenly escaped it.

"I am watching for Jerome. Yonder he comes with your fisherman, by the inlet,"—pointing to two dark figures in the mist crossing the sands below.

The house stood on a ledge, facing the sea: ramparts of rock, gray and threatening in this light, running down on either side, and shutting out all outlook but that of the dull, obstinate stretch of sand on which the sea had beaten and fallen back for centuries, with the same baffled, melancholy cry. Behind the house were clumps of pines and cedars. Nature had done all she could in wringing out whatever green and lusty life was left in rocks and sand to make the place home-like and cheerful. Beside the trees, there was a patch of kitchen-garden back of the house, a grape-vine or two on the walls, trailing moss hanging to its eaves,—the delicate web-like moss that grows along this coast out of dead wood; even the beach rocks glowed into colors,—dark browns, purples, and reds.

But for all these it needed summer and sunshine. On this, the day before Christmas, the house and the land about it were smothered in a cold mist: only the shivering sea beyond had voice or motion.

"It's a dull, uncanny place, Mrs. Jacobus," said Lufflin, anxiously. "It looks like a prison to me to-day. What if we've made a mistake?"

"We have made no mistake," calmly.

"Indoors," he persisted, "the house is cheerful enough. But it's a rough coast, and the oyster-dredgers and wrackers hint that the house be n't above highest water-mark. They're a wild pack, them wrackers. I doubt it's a gloomy home I've picked for M. Jacobus, after all his"

Something in her face silenced him.

"You did right, Uncle George," she answered, cheerfully.

But the pleasant eyes he had liked so much last night he noticed were turned to the sea now with a hard look, new to him, begotten both of great pain and obstinate endurance.

"Of course you know, Charlotte,—of course. God knows I want to do what's for the best."

He hesitated, then went on briskly, taking courage.

"See now, Lotty, I'm an old fellow. I've walked you to sleep many's the night, being your father's chum, and living in his house till the day of his death. I'd like you to know I'm a true friend. If so be as you're in trouble, you must tell me. If this house is a sort of hiding, as I've thought once or twice, speak the word, and there's nobody shall get below Barnegat, to disturb it, or"—

Mrs. Jacobus faced him suddenly,—the nerves in her body seeming to stiffen, her half-shut eyes fixed on his. The Captain's quailed.

"You mean Jerome?" in a low voice.

He did not answer. She waited a moment, and then turned again to the window,—holding forcibly down whatever resistance his touch had roused in her.

"You mean well," she said, quietly, after a pause. "But you do not know my husband. I was a fool to expect that; yet I did expect it,"—remembering bitterly how, when she brought her husband here, she had counted surely on a real justice for him from the single-minded old Captain, which shrewd, sensible men had not given.

"How could I know him? You talk like a woman, Lotty," stammered the Captain. "I never saw M. Jacobus till last night. It was a vague whisper, or rather an old man's whim, that there might be something gone which both you and he wished forgotten."

She had her face pressed against the pane, but Lufflin fancied that it lost color, and that the delicate jaws closed with the firmness of a steel spring.

"There was no crime," she said, in a moment or two.

The old man came close to her after