Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/70

62 work which had worn her hands rough, and left these sharp lines in her face. He only knew what they had been: in the long silence that followed, while the daylight broadened bluer and colder about him, he lived them over again; and he knew then, by every day of griping poverty, which it wrung the clammy drops out of his face to remember,—by all her patient tenderness,—by the happiness they had hoped for, but which never came,—by the true love they had borne to each other, and to little Tom, which knew so little comfort, he knew that the recompense would come, that the end was not yet She had shaken off the hunger and the pain, and had gone into the world where only the love endured and found its comfort and its late reward. There was such a world—somewhere. He put back the grayed hair from the forehead; little Tom had such a brow,—broad, quiet, melancholy.

I will go to them, he said, but they will not return to me!

Was it he that had been dead, and waked again? A strong hand lifting his head; a warm face and breath at his cheek; a voice calling him as sweet and cheerful as when first he heard it on the banks of the—little creek in Canada? Then out of the reeling and groping of shadows and real objects came a square bay-window opening on a sea-horizon of drifting olive-gray clouds, the crackle and glow of a great wood-fire, a cheerful breakfast-room, and some busy chatter about a night spent sleeping in drenched clothes and night-fogs.

Lufflin's round, red face was the first real grip his senses took of it all. The Captain was in his holiday suit of blue and brass, and pulled down his jacket with a complacent twinkle in his eyes.

"Faith, ye'll suffer a sea-change in short order, Mounchere, if you spend a few more nights dreaming by that window! Your very eyes look rheumy and glazed already."

Jacobus got up, stunned and dull beyond his wont,—his eyes fixed, not on the joking Captain, but on the anxious, wondering face upturned to his. He touched the cheek, a little worn and haggard, may-be, but with good, healthy blood reddening it,—felt the nervous hands,—then stooped and solemnly kissed her lips.

They trembled a little; then she laughed.

"Did the sea send you dreams of me?"—trying to jest, but with some of last night's trouble in her eyes.

"Not the sea,"—putting his hand to his head; "I think God sent them, Lotty."

Lufflin, whose instincts were quick as a woman's, glanced at the two, and then said something about its not being long enough after dawn to begin the day, and that he would turn into his bunk for an hour or two, and made his way down stairs. He turned into the kitchen instead, to give Ann and the breakfast a warning look, and, for aught we know, put his own shoulder to the wheel, so far as broiling the chops was concerned. He had been up half the night, helping "the child get ready her holiday," steadying shelves, hanging pictures, dusting books in the library, and now meant to stand aside until the great joy of the day was over: "only they two could share it together."

Yet he stepped to the kitchen-door and listened keenly, when, after a long silence, he heard the door above open, and Charlotte lead her husband into the library.

"Mounchere knows what his wife's done for him at last," he muttered;—"and there goes in the baby," as a faint cry and a rush of skirts followed,—with an amused laugh, and his eyes dim.

But when he heard Lotty coming presently for him, he hurried in, to stretch himself on his bunk, and began to snore.

"It's kind in them to think of an old fellow like me; but they're best alone. They have had a rough pull of it together, and I think this is their first glimpse of land."

He could not wait long, however, but soon went bustling up, with the eager glow of all his childish Christmases in his simple old face and mind.