Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/79

Rh with Summer stars, and seemed to see, instead, the shadow of purple heavens under which it sailed—great heavens that soared to dark and deep infinitude with flashing of a million diamond dew-drops on their mighty wings. Now, she said, the Falconer doubled the Cape of Good Hope—and with every morning Elisabetta herself doubled it, too.

When at last Elisabetta felt certain that the Falconer was shooting up the Atlantic, every day nearer and nearer, you would have said her body could no longer contain her spirit, so did that spirit spring and leap like a fountain sending up shafts of bubbles in the sun. She could not dance about the house, but she limped about it restlessly, setting it to rights where it had never been at wrongs, and giving it a thorough burnishing so long beforehand that it had to be burnished all over again. She nearly killed the crow with loaf-sugar, and the hound with cream; she felt that their measure was doled out so stintingly since they had no son Sebastian coming home, and she so wanted everything to be as happy as herself. She would just as nearly have killed Bessie with the maps on which the paths of Indian ships were traced, had not Bessie felt a bashful pleasure in the things almost equal to Elisabetta's own. Nearer, every day nearer; so much less of the round side of the world between them, so much less of the long stretch of still air—nearer, every day nearer—she dared not believe it. Then, as if, in expecting the man, she vaguely felt herself doing injustice to the child whose childhood she had lost, his shadow again filled every nook of the house. When the smell of afternoon smoke fell on the air, and, under a blushing sunset, the boys went driving the cattle home, she looked among those boys for him, she was perpetually seeing him coming in and throwing down his cap, swinging on the gate with his gingersnap in hand, rocking on the shallow shore of the cove with little Bessie in the float. She forgot, indeed, for a while, that Sebastian was a man—forgot that Bessie was a woman of more than twenty Summers. It had been a plan of hers that they should marry one another. It had occurred to her that he could never fail to come home with all this bloom and beauty waiting to be his wife, as long before he went they had promised; but just now she could remember nothing but two children, in the flush of tender years, tirelessly playing together; when the soft Indian Summer breeze dallied by her it seemed her boy's sweet breath upon her cheek; when the later Autumn wind rustled among the crisp and fallen leaves, she believed she heard his footsteps scuffling through the garden paths; sometimes, across her dreams, the lapping of the tide before her door-stone seemed the deep refreshing breath that she used to listen for when breathed from his tiny bed. She plotted to tell him how that tiny bed belonged to a little boy that she had lost, and how he would tell her that she had