Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/61

1866.] but Tom is not here; he's dust and ashes, yonder in Salem graveyard,—a heap of yellow dust, nothing more,"—a laugh, which the foulest of French skeptics would have envied, crossing his grim face at this fancy of the child's being yet alive and near to him.

But the creed having asserted itself thus, the simple face grew suddenly blank, and the gray eyes looked out of their dark hollows as if the world were empty and he alone lived to tell the tale.

M. Jacobus had a watchful keeper; she was never far off; she put her hand on his shoulder now with,—

"What do you look for at sea, Jerome?"—speaking cheerfully, and in his own tongue.

He did not turn his head until he thought he had put all his trouble out of sight.

"I pursue your Captain's fancy," he said. "I find in the sea but muddy water, with power to bring rage and destruction for no cause. I find great treasures lying useless below, starving men sailing above,—great pain, death every day,—the baby washed from its mother's arms, the husband from the wife. The good Captain sees a loving God behind all these: my eyes are not so clear."

She pushed the lattice farther open.

"It is a strong sea for December," was all she said. "The tides run higher later, usually."

"Everyman makes his own God and heaven," maundered on the Professor, in a set, monotonous voice, "out of his individual animal or mental needs. The Southern European surrounds Him with virgins, paradise, and music; and the cold Scotchman gives us a magnified shadow of his own grim face, gracious and merciful only to his own petty clan."

Mrs. Jacobus did not reply. It was an old tale to her ears, perhaps; she remembered it croaked by his father with a venomous zest; but Jerome repeated it with a stolid apathy, like one who asked for bread in life, and they gave him but this stone.

"Come down on the beach," she said. "There are curious bits of wreck washed ashore to-day, they tell me: broken sea-weeds from far-off coasts, unknown here; and small shell-fish coming into shoal water for safety, that never ventured so far inland in the memory of any of the wreckers. Come look at this sky, Jerome: how rapidly it has changed!"

M. Jacobus thrust out his head with an assumption of sagacity.

"It was there that Captain Lufflin warned me the danger lay," said his wife, pointing to a mere fleck of quiet and black in the northeast, which remained immovably solid while the whole heaven around was broken into drifting frightened masses. Beneath, (yet not far beneath, for ocean and sky to-day seemed like gray, fast-approaching planes,) the angry roar of the waves and the tossing of yellow frothy caps had been suddenly quelled into the vast silence which rose and fell in slowly darkening, awful pulsations. Jacobus and his wife looked on anxiously.

"These are peculiar features of a storm," he said, "if they forebode a storm. The tide should be at its lowest ebb now. I will go and consult our friend George. Come down! come down!"

As he hurried out of the door, however, he stopped, and put his hand on her shoulder with a deprecating smile.

"I ought not to let those old thoughts strike the life out of the day for me, ought I?"

"No, Jerome, no!" She caught his hand and kissed it as a mother might a child's.

"I had almost ceased to make holiday," he added, gravely, putting his foot up, retying the leather strings of his heavy shoes, and looking down on his fisherman's rig with secret complacency.

"Shall we go down? There are foreboding signs in the sea, that I would wish to study."

Late in the afternoon of that day, Captain Lufflin, coming up the rocks from the beach, (for he had spent the