Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/60

52 ,—say shoes,"—with a deprecating glance at his wife.

"Yes, Jerome," her eyes fixed, hungrily, on the childish delight in his face.

Lufflin began to perceive now for what she had worked; he chafed his whiskers, and entered into the spirit of the thing with zest.

"You'd call me a happy man, now, Mounchere, to be the owner of this bit of ground, eh?"

"I can conceive," said the Professor, gravely, catching his squirming prey, and tying them up in a handkerchief,—"I can conceive no better abode than this for a man of esprit,—of what you call stamina in mind. His wants are little; he rests, he works, he studies books, Nature. She is greatly good to him in this place; she opens her most delicate secrets; she gives to him grandeur, beauty, from full hands."

"She fills his stomach, too," said the Captain, hastily. "No better fishing on the coast, not to mention clams and oysters. Yes, Mounchere," after a pause, as they rose from table, "Nature's grand here, as you say,—or God, which is the same thing. If a man don't come nearer to Him by a day's outlook on yon sea than by years of town-life, it's because his eyes aren't worth the having."

M. Jacobus stretched his long neck to look out at the dull, creeping, moaning waste without, his warm Gallic blood shivering with a vague idea that the relentless, inexorable Thing was no bad symbol of the Puritan's God.

"Ah, le bon Dieu!" he muttered. "All that is best in men's nature has been given to make up that image,—and all that is most cruel."

"Eh? yes," said the Captain, not understanding, but wagging his bald head wisely.

"I will go now and preserve my specimens," said the Professor, "and then join our friend George below,—with your permission, Madame? He is but a fisher for the oyster, but I find in him a man of many facts."

When he had mounted to his chamber and secured his prey in a jar, however, he did not return to George Cathcart, but stood irresolute, his hands clasped behind his back, the shiny boatman's hat he wore pulled over his eyes.

Twelve years ago the poor Frenchman and his son had planned this coming to the sea: the boy used to get into his father's bed by dawn to talk it over snugly. It came to be their grand scheme and hope for the future; for neither the father nor little Tom had intellects of a high achieving order. Jacobus had never, I suppose, considered whether his son had genius or not, or what he was to do in the world: to get the boy out of the poisonous city, to see his first look at the ocean, to watch the sturdy little rogue fight the breakers, fish, swim, net for crabs, was about the highest pleasure which the simple old man had ever pictured for them. Now the holiday had come for him; and Tom

He walked about the room, glancing unsteadily from side to side, as if in search of something lost. The sick, intolerable loneliness of those first days after Tom died came back to him.

"Mon fils! mon fils!" he muttered once, holding his hand to his side.

It gave him actual pain to breathe just then; but his eyes were dry. He never had cried for Tom as his mother did,—never named him to her; she thought he had forgotten. The fancy seized him, that, now that he was here, if Tom cared for him, and for coming there, as he did once, he was not far off at that moment. His sallow jaws colored at the boyish notion, and then he laughed at it,—in a strange saturnine fashion. It was as if another man than the simple Professor suddenly looked out through his eyes,—a man older, more untrustworthy, weak through a life-long doubt,—not his natural self, in a word, but the man which years of life in dirty ways, and the creed which his father gave him, had made of him. He looked out of the window, his fingers knitted behind him.

"There is the sea, and I am here,