Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/66

58 come first to me, with his old trick of hiding and calling for 'Mother, mother!'—he'll not forget I liked that name the best; and he'll have the same laugh in his eyes, just the same,—he'd find no better look in heaven than that was. I knew, when I closed his eyes that night, it was but for a little while." Yet she stopped suddenly, putting her hand to her throat to choke back a cry of pain, "A little while," she repeated, firmly.

Her husband listened, the smile growing more bitter: she had never seemed more silly or more dear to him than then.

"I am not a child," she said, quickly. "It is not fancy. The dead are in Christ's kingdom; and He is alive, not dead, yonder. It was a real man, Jerome, that ascended from the mountain, loving his friend, censuring Peter, taking care of his mother. Mary found no spirit there, when she died, but the son whose baby-head rested on her breast; and I shall find my boy."

He soothed her, for she had grown nervous and trembling; let her cling to his neck and cry away her trouble, after the fashion of women who have brought their hearts out to argue for them.

"Let us forget that far-away country," he said, after a while, "and go to rest, Lotty. The moans of this storm will wear your strength out,"—leading her to the foot of the chamber-stairway.

She went up, pausing at the top to look back, a smile on her flushed cheeks and swollen eyes.

"It will be a quiet morning," she said, waving a good-night.

There was some meaning in her words which he could not penetrate, but it touched and startled him.

"A quiet morning?"

The words haunted the simple old man, sitting alone to watch the night wear away. He had never been more utterly alone. The new home was strange; the very wood-fire had burned out on the hearth; unfamiliar, cold lines met his eye, wherever he turned; the heavy mist crept in from the sea through every cranny, like vapors from a charnel-house. He had a dull, superstitious dread of what lay beyond that sullen beach of mist,—the undefined. There, whence these low rumblings, and sharp, inarticulate cries reached him: he stood up, looking into it, shivering. A bat swooped past the open window, and struck its clammy wing against his face; the moon had gone down, and the mist that saturated his clothes, so present and close at hand was it, stretched up and possessed the very sky as well as the shore,—yellowed thickened the air he breathed, hid the line where the breakers struck the coast, driven in with a subdued, persistent fury he had never known before. The shore-mist had its bounds: it did not touch that clear darkness beyond, into which Jacobus looked, drawing down his grizzled brows, trying to jeer his cowardice away.

"By daylight," he said, "it is but a bulk of water, full enough of danger and death; but now it might be hell itself yonder, that has 'made the clouds its swaddling-band.

He was not sure how long a portion of the night crept by. Sometime in it, however, he saw flashes of light moving through the fog among the rocks: Lufflin and the fishermen keeping watch,—"uneasy ghosts that could not pass over into Hades," he laughed, with the same miserable attempt at a joke; but the laugh died away feebly in the empty room, and it was with a grave face the Professor made his way down the dark staircase, and, finding the Captain's dread-nought coat, put it on before he ventured out into the storm. "To please Lotty," he muttered. His heart was strangely tender to-night to the only friend he had known for years.

There was a dead quiet in the fog as he came out and waited on the flagging before the house. Lufflin and George Cathcart came by, presently, carrying lanterns and ropes, their faces looking ghastly in the greenish light; their voices, too, were thin and far off as in a dream, though the Captain tried to be hearty and gruff as usual.