Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/80

72 lost him only to find him doubly, to find him dearer, and loving her as no boy could; and he should take her in his arms and kiss her when he said it. She walked along the beach, but she never saw the breakers; gossips dropped in for quiet chat, but she never knew what they talked about; she went to church, but she heard no sermon. The burden of her bearing was her boy, day and night; no thought, no action, but her boy. So blithe was she, that she was a pleasure to people; they shared the satisfaction with her as if by an enchantment, and all the eyes of all the houses along the old sea-wall were wide and watchful Christmas week, and looking for the good ship Falconer.

The cracked earth had longed for snow to cover it, but none had come until this week; when the sky began to veil itself and a hesitating shower of flakes fell downward, paused and fell again, then seemed to think the sky a better lodgment after all, and clung midway between heaven and earth, till all the still air was frozen. With that a low wind soughed up out of the eastern ocean, a portentous kind of wind that the waves of the broad bay recognized and grew white before, that came in long and longer sobs, tore through the black sky, by nightfall, and drove the snow before it in blinding gusts and falls, and slapped the icy sea-foam against Elisabetta's windows. Elisabetta never heeded it. Sometimes, when the Falconer was as far away as Africa, and a Summer storm had shivered through the sky, she had waked and quaked all night with fear and tribulation, but here when it might be that not a hundred miles of angry water rushed between the Falconer and its destruction, she felt positive that Sebastian would never have taken passage with a ship-master who had not sagacity enough to keep off the coast in any such stress as this; and so she hummed above her work, and at ten o'clock went up stairs, said her prayer for her boy, and, despite the hurly-burly of sleet and wind and sea, slept all night like a baby.

There was not much snow on the ground next morning, after all, Elisabetta thought on looking out; not so much of a storm as Nora would have had it, though the sleet still fled before the wind, and the angry sea boiled white. She came down to breakfast, Nora declared, as composed as a clock. It was the day of Christmas Eve. "I think I will see if everything is right in the pantry," said Elisabetta. "I don't know how it is—I am sure the Falconer will never think of making harbor in such falling weather—but something tells me—yes, something tells me, that I shall see my boy to-night."

"An' its a carpse ye'd be looking at, if ye did," cried Nora when the door had closed behind her mistress. "Falling weather bedad! an' it a fall that the cats thimselves is buried under." And if it had not been for the sake of viewing the pantry's contents with an appreciator, Nora would have been cross enough the rest